Barking up the wrong tree.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I have an idea that is being ignored on another thread, so I thought I’d give it a thread of it’s own.

I thought that perhaps we have been barking up the wrong tree by believing man is the source of will.

Firstly I’ll make the point that we all have the same basic drive within us, ie, we all want to do the right thing…though we may be wrong about what constitutes the right thing.Nonetheless “I want to do the right thing” can be seen as our basic programme at the heart of our being.

Faust raised a thought that Nietzsche had expressed…“This gets tricky when we think of Nietzsche ascribing will to rocks and flowers and stars.”, and I thought ,what if Nietzsche was right?

What if “will” is something that is not actually part of us, what if it is a form of energy that courses through everything.So , for instance, gravity could be seen as a form of will, admittedly will without conscious control (unless you believe in God) , but will nonetheless.Will is an energy/force that seems to convert potential into reality…at least that is the case with the traditional concept of will.

What if ,in order to do something, I have to take conscious control of the will that passes through me and direct it towards my aim.So an analogy might be that my mind uses two reins ,belief and knowledge , to control the will that passes through me.In a sense the will can be seen as a horse that I control to do what I am programmed to do.

As an aside, all my innate (genetic) drives can be lumped under “beliefs”, and those things (all beliefs) are what give us our individual characters. The more knowledge we have, the more we can control our impulses (for instance) with the aim of serving our main aim , “doing the right thing”.*

*this is where our freedom lies, freedom to do the right thing…which is the only freedom worth having anyway.

:-"

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So, Chester -

You are clearly casting will as moral will. And freedom is rendered in terms of moral right.

This is, by the way, the usual reason philosophers have for discussing will. It’s not Nietzsche’s reason. It has nothing to do with Nietzsche (or with me, for the record). So I’m not sure if it should matter to you that Nietzsche was right.

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This was a concept that Neitzsche borrowed from Schopenhauer, and it is Schoppy’s tour de force in The World as Will and Representation.

But, this is Will - a ubiquitous drving force in the Universe, that they are talking about here. Individual willing is just a small part of the greater stream of Will. And the greater ‘Will’ does not move towards something specific (such as ‘the right thing’), because it has nothing to move from, and nothing to move towards. It is primordial - it superceeds everything.[*]

This Will is by no means a happy thing. In Schopenhauer, Will is suffering - an endless stream of insatiable sexual desire, a blind and reckless energy that controls us and imprisons us. The Will was evil. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the ultimate goal was ascetism - denial of the Will which bought freedom in nothingness.

It’s not just Schopenhauer, either. Much of this line of thought can be in Buddhism, especially Therevada Buddhism. Dukkha - the concept of constant suffering caused by endless change, and Nirodha - the denial of and escsape from Dukkha, are very similar concepts.

[*]This is Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will, not Nietzsche’s. I am not claiming that N lifted the entire concept, just that when N talks about Will he is doing so with reference to and knowledge of this paticular meaning of the word.

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besides what he is preaching is to be a liar, get along with wills on your existing conditions to breed from as a free conscious one
what he is saying is what a lot of politicians reached to become and hitler too for sure

as if the right thing is wills forces and not something already that is everywhere asserting existance source being always all what is
to have a minimum sense of truth is to know that a true point is never a source of wills or end in wills and is always source without meaning it by being a positive certainty absolutely as always that cant then but generate positive as a result of its constance always

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No, I think will is a neutral force, but we have a basic programme within us that tells us to do what we think is the right thing with it. We use knowledge and beliefs to decide what to do with the will that passes through us, so often times we direct will at bad/wrong things (in terms of what is actually good for us in the long term etc).Access to knowledge is freedom to do the right thing for mutual benefit.

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Well I’d say consciously controlled willing is potentially more potent than the mindless (?) Will from whence it comes.The intellect can master it.

Sounds like Schopenhauer was depressed , I only have to look back at past events to know that joy thrives as much as misery.Will is neutral, though I guess generally people are happy that they have been born, so that kind of puts a positive spin on the blind (?)Will that led to us.

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I don’t believe in “Triumph of the will.”, I believe in subjugating will to the intellect and useful beliefs.

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Schopie wasn’t depressed. He was a spoiled trust fund kid.

The unsatisfied will is, well, unsatisfied. “Unhappy”, is you…will. Of course, he had to reify and universalise will - neoplatonically really, and then exgaggerate the “unsatisfaction” into suffering to get to his thesis, but that’s okay - it’s philosophy.

He was a crybaby.

Nietzsche was a particularist, and didn’t believe in the literal existence of a universal will.

Some PM Sauwelious.

So, Chester - what is this within us that desires to do right? It’s not the will. Is it reason? A soul? Love? What?

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I don’t know, but maybe a love programme is a good candidate. It just happens that often we love the wrong thing, but we can learn not to love it through knowledge or true belief.

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True belief in what?

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By true belief I meant when we believe in something by trust or opinion (for instance) because we believe it works, then later on it turns out to be true. So it’s truth not based on knowledge.

Eg, you may act like a girl loves you (based on hope/trust), then discover that she really does, so it is good that you followed your beliefs even though you didn’t have knowledge.

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I guess it means that sometimes belief is ahead of knowledge when it comes to truth.So we don’t want to discard belief systems that bring benefit just because we can’t prove or know their truth.

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Oh. So I won’t be discarding my belief that all Christians should be slowly tortured to death, any time soon.

Cool.

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How would you interpret his concept of the ‘will to power’ as stated below?

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (–its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on–”

Was this more of a statement about how we address & use the idea of the ‘will’ than a statement about the ‘will’ itself maybe?

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Yeah, not all beliefs are ahead of knowledge, only those that seem to bring benefit (possibly over a long period of time).So Hitler’s view that we should discard Jews doesn’t appear to have brought many benefits (to him or Germany) in the long run, does it?

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of course it is about your beliefs which say how you never base your mind on objective recognition of truth existance

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Belief systems will only yield a perception of benefit. That’s what makes it a system of belief - not a matter of ‘fact’.

I can’t think of any belief held by any one religion that is both:

  • Universally “beneficial”
  • Not able to be gathered from mere experience (as in dictated solely by a particular ‘belief system’)
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.Isn’t ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ just the prevailing culture’s definition of ‘life-affirming or supportive behavior’
and ‘life-threatening destructive behavior’?
We need ‘right’ and ‘God’ to keep those monsters in line and if that doesn’t work we make them cops to
go after the ‘bad’ guys and put their violent behavior to good use.
.

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Ah - the Hitler reference. Whodathunkit?

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it is stupid because one of the principle of truth say, life which is the move must be the positive opposition position to existing base in relations both to truth

which means that if you have some beliefs you care for, which i never have, but since you have, you should pick your moves for something else and not your beliefs actually the opposite of beliefs, and that what would assert your beliefs as existing truly when you can invent their projections realities in their oppositions positions shapes forms