The World Is Will & Communication

A Philosophy for the 21st Century

Ok, so here is the biggest social problem of them all: humans are, almost by definition, willful creatures. I would argue that it is not our intelligence or our emotionality that makes us unique and special. It is our will.

Few philosophers have properly and directly focused on will. Most notably is “Nietzsche’s Will to Power”. But I place that all in quotes because it is likely that he borrowed/learned from another philosopher whose main work was “The World as Will and Representation/Idea”: Arthur Schopenhauer. But we are not here to debate who said it first, we are here to discuss will directly.

Going beyond philosophy, it is obviously hard for social scientists to study “will” and of itself. What do you test for? A person’s decision-making? What choices did they have in the first place? Some have studied decision-making, and this does in fact seem to be the closest we can get to “will” itself. But what is will anyway?

Will = Idea + Communication

Although there are better ways to define will, this is the formulation that most people are likely to understand most easily. “Will” is a combination of idea and communication in the sense that there must be something to start with. Something concrete yet intangible. Perhaps ephemeral like a momentary thought. An idea. But then, it must interact with something else in some way. It must express itself. Verbally, visually, physically…