Back. I wanted to draw perimeters around Your question, regarding the will, as it’s development in history is concerned. This in it’self points to meaning , which usually derives through meaning per se, and precludes the developmental depth of how it got there.
In the case of will, Schpenhauers is instrumental, he tried to objectify will, to account for it’s absolute sense as striving toward an absolute will, as an objective leading to it’s object : it’s representation. This object is to overcome the vanity of existence, an existence which has denigrated the object of the will’s representation of it’s object. It’s a recovery effort of the romantic notion, which can not be recovered definitionally.
The romantic notion depends on the ideal object, the ideal is a complex notion supported by religious, aesthetic, and conventional attributes. The last of these, are products of established authoritarian stratified social systems of aristocratic governance.
The German disassociation from the conventional religious hierarchy, with the Protestant Revolution, started this process. The actual demise of aristocratic values did not happen overnight, but acute individuals saw it coming, far in advance.
The will, as the motive behind the power to sustain the status quo, was under attack. The will, lost it’s central absolute position, hence Schpenhauer’s critique of the existential sorrow, inline with Goethe’s sorrow. Romantic notions were under attack, a very painfully realized process, invading all forms of belief, art, religion, vested interests, and so on.
The absolute will lost it’s bearing, to effect the conventional status quo, and the will became bound to change. Nietzche saw this clearly, and his solution was the overcoming of Appolonian idolatry of the will,
And connected it with the earliest motivator, the Dionysian power of the preconceived myths of primordial gods, who played tragically in a theatre of literal interaction between man and God, between between the symbolic and the literal. Here, the interaction created symbiosis of God-men, one foot in the heavens, the other on earth. This primordial consciousness nihilized the difficulty of the objective view of the will, the will became a power , because it effected the representation through direct involvement with it. The myth became the object of the meaning of reality, through which it gained it’s power.
This should strike a familiar chord, with the utilization of the erotic aesthetic replacing the one of sadness over the maintaining an absolute and objective will, devoid of sentiment. It is to the Greek ideal, that He returned, where the erotic aesthetic was resurfaced. The power of the will arose from a re-association with the underworld.
The will, with Nietzche did not depend on the will’s existential connection, it freed it from it’s containment, and became it’s own master. It’s representation became irrelevant, the aristocratic value of the will guaranteed it’s absolut existence as an idea(l). it pre-existed in a series of recurrences, guaranteeing it’s ontological certainty.
After the defeat of the Axis powers, such philosophy was ‘proved’ to be nihilistic, unsupportable. existentialism replaced the meaning behind the archaic power of the myth, by relegating it to the nihilistic nothingness, and brought to center stage the democratic, anti monarchical system of the French, those who in essence defeated them.
The existential reduction was supposed to raise the will to be represented in societal terms, hence the needed a social foundation , based on a new social contract. Communism was seen as such a venue, but after long last, the Hungarian Revolution disaffected Sartre from seeing it as a solid foundation.
what followed was the predictable conflicts between post modernists, and positivists, sign and meaning theories conflicted with heuristic and hermetically approaches to regain the representation of the meaning of the will’s representation, as a form of assurance of it’s freedom to act.
Thus we get to the point we are today, with the coming of technocracy , and social engineering of societal model of control. The will can no longer be a representation, the myths surrounding it have been declawed by progressive deconstructions. The will has become liberated from it’s mythic power, even relatively speaking. Nietzche didn’t want to kill it, he just wanted to set the stage where his warnings would be heeded. It was almost a foregone conclusion that he was not heeded. I believe that He really knew, what was coming. To me, he is more of a soothsayer, then a problem fixer. He unveiled the Birth of the tragedy.
I see nothing but pure determination, which is not of the self. Self determination has become a myth.