Phenomenology of Will by Tom Amarque (Thoughts)

Our World Has Become Increasingly Complex and Differentiated, and Yet Our Notion of the Will Has Hardly Budged

‘A new philosophical examination of one of the most human of all characteristics, the will, initially seems anachronistic’ (pg 7)—so Tom opens his book, and then proceeds to make a compelling case for why considering the will isn’t anachronistic at all but necessary. ‘Even today, will is defend as the intensity and duration of investment in a final state or goal’ (7), which is an outdated concept that ignores advances in systems thinking, biology, and other fields. We are behind the times and don’t know there is a time of which we are behind, locked in our old model—such is a price of old thinking: it lacks the resources needed to think of itself as old.

‘[O]ur world has become increasingly complex and differentiated’ (8), and yet our notion of the will has hardly budged. This is consequential, and ‘[i]t would not be surprising if such a mal-adapted conception of will were at least partly responsible for our inability to adequately address the manifold crises’ (10). To address this mistake, ‘the question of the relationship(s) between the acting subject, the will and the world must be posed anew’ (12)—an effort Tom Amarque is leading.

Tom works to help us associate will with possibilities for ‘autopoiesis, Greek for ‘self-creation,’ ’ (18), which is a much more robust notion than “will as doing something wanted.” We cannot in this life do everything we want to do, which could lead us to conclude we have no freedom or will, but through Tom’s work, where we can associate “will with self-creation,” we find a way to locate freedom ‘in a constant interaction between language and society, which [could] also lead[] to a fundamental openness toward new thoughts and words’ (19). More must be said, but what we see here is a place to locate will that elevates it above simply desire and want. Will plays a distinct role in a space opened by interacting forces that can negate one another—individual society, public and private, etc.—and in that negation, precisely when it can feel like will has no role, is where will can play a distinctly creative role, according to and empowered by our ‘severely underestimated’ ‘capacity for imagination’ (27).

To offer some of my takes and understandings of the book (though there is far more to be covered, said, and elaborated on): will affords us autopoietic possibilities without which we could not so readily hope ‘to keep the whole process going’ (34). Will can step in where systems, interactions, and relationships break or leave openings, and because of the will, no break must be final. A break could be final, but it doesn’t have to be, but where we fail to advance our concept of the will (as Tom is stressing is needed), it is more likely we will not see breaks as opportunities for will to create. ‘Autopoiesis is simply a process consisting of generating the elements necessary to keep the underlying process running’ (64), and will could play a critical role in being at the heart of the autopoiesis. No, will is not free from limits, an environment, or a system, but it seems to emerge precisely at points where the limits, environment, and system fail to assure they do not fail entirely, and that they might “come back” new and with greater creative potential. Will seems not to matter, often indistinguishable from the seemingly “determined” operations of the whole, but ultimately the whole “falls back” onto the will at critical times. Will might seem not to exist because it is in the heart, and the heart can’t be opened without killing it and the will inside.

‘If being human means anything, it is the domestication of the future that we invented at some point. This, and nothing else, is the function of consciousness and will’ (197). This is an imaginative function, but it is not non-existent: imagination proves autopoietic. In imagination is our capacity to reflect on ourselves and to use that reflection for new possibility: ‘it is the reflexive, post-egoic will that comes to terms with the circularity of its being’ (206). We are stuck in this circle, yes, but if we can identify with and will it, it becomes a locus of our freedom. ‘[W]e [must] strive for coherence’ (208), but in this necessity we can find reason for thinking, and in seeing will as critical in “breaks” for self-creation so that not finale is final, we can find our limits as definitions. We can know ourselves. We can know we are not what we are and be created in it.

‘Even the apex of a pyramid or a tower implies and thus paradoxically demonstrates humility toward the absolute’ (242), and I would associate Tom’s book with a pyramid, elevating the discourse on will, as badly needed for us today, unable to think clearly with the wrong framework. The book is humble like the pyramid, but in that humility, it invites the reader up to soar.

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For more of Tom’s work, please visit Parallax: