Who Is Doing the Willing? A New Book About Striving, Power and the Question of Love
My new book, Who Is Doing the Willing? An Upstream Genealogy of the Wills, is out now. In writing it I wanted to ask what we might learn about the philosophy of the will if we took the philosophers’ own childhood trauma seriously. Nietzsche was four when his father died. Within months he had lost his little brother too. Years later, when I read Nietzsche on the Will to Power, I find myself wondering what power could have meant to a boy who had so little say in who stayed. The surviving record can tell us whom he lost. What that loss meant to him is a question I want to leave open. I follow that question through eleven lives, and on into the professions and institutions where one person’s answer can come to govern the lives of others.
The Exhibit That Is Looking at You
On the cover of the book there is a glass case of the kind you find in a museum of arms and armour. Inside it stands a magnificent suit of gilded plate, a lion and a crown worked into its plates, with a barrister’s wig and gown on a stand beside it and a sword. The back of the armour is open, and inside it, standing on a wooden box so that he can reach, a small boy is working at the leather straps and the buckles. From where we stand, the movement of his fingers would look much the same whether he were fastening a strap or beginning, at last, to loosen it.
Outside the glass, a doctor in a white coat and a woman in a dark suit are discussing what they see. They are plainly experts. They are plainly concerned. And they are plainly, comfortably, on the outside. Inside the case, a brass plaque gives the exhibit its title: The Battle of the Wills.
Look again at that plaque. It looks like a joke, and it looks like an accusation, and it is neither. It stands inside the case, facing outwards. It does not describe the exhibit; it describes the visitors, and it is facing you. The professionals believe they are observing the child, but perhaps the child is teaching them. They can inspect the armour, describe its construction and explain, very learnedly, why he built it, and none of that tells him he is safe enough to stop working. The glass separates knowledge about him from relationship with him.
So here is the question the cover asks before the book has said a word. Have we built our lives, our professions and our very idea of success on children like this one? And what would it take for the boy, one day, to undo the buckles he once had no choice but to fasten?
Who Is Doing the Willing?
Who is doing the willing? The child? The ego? The True Self? The institution? The civilisation? The question can be asked at every level, and the book asks it at each of them. Genealogy explains where the wills came from; the question asks who is responsible for what happens next. The first is about inheritance. The second is about agency.
Arthur Schopenhauer recognised the restless striving of a life organised around lack, the ‘Will to Live’, swinging in his famous image like a pendulum between pain and boredom. Friedrich Nietzsche recognised the extraordinary creative and transformative force of the ‘Will to Power’. Neither insight should be dismissed, and the book dismisses neither. Nietzsche’s own Zarathustra, after all, ends his three metamorphoses not with the lion but with the child. Yet I wanted to ask a question further upstream than either of them: what happened to the human being before striving became necessity and power became the apparent answer?
That is why I call the book a genealogy. The word comes from the Greek genea, generation or descent: a genealogy is a family tree. Nietzsche used it to ask how our morals came to be. I take it further, beneath the branches of civilisation and through the roots of our intellectual traditions, until we find the child who first learned to survive by becoming someone else. So the genealogy travels in two directions at once: backwards through the history of philosophy and back through the generations to the nursery, and then it turns, and travels forward across the Bridge of Awakening. Nietzsche himself handed me the method, in a sentence every philosopher of the will should have tattooed on the inside of the wrist:
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), §6, translated by Helen Zimmern
The Philosophers Were Children Too
I kept coming back to the child who wrote those words. Friedrich Nietzsche was four when his father died. About six months later his little brother died too, and the family left the parsonage. Years afterwards Nietzsche gave us the camel, the lion and, at the end of the metamorphoses, the child who can make a new beginning. When I read that passage now, I think of the small boy who had to begin again in another house. His losses are on the record. What it cost him to leave that house, and what he made of it when he came to write, belong to him.
Arthur Schopenhauer leaves us a different kind of scene. He wanted a scholarly education. His father offered him a choice. He could stay and pursue classical studies, or he could travel through Europe with his parents if he agreed afterwards to train as a merchant. Arthur chose the journey. I find it hard to read a philosopher on the freedom of the will without pausing over the terms on which that particular boy was free to choose. We know what his father asked of him. Whether Arthur feared losing his father’s affection if he refused is a more intimate question, and the bargain itself cannot answer it.
That distinction matters to what I call the ‘11th ACE’. By it I mean parental love experienced as conditional, including its warm face. A parent takes delight in a child’s success. The question is what happens between them on the evening the child comes home having failed. Over time a child may learn, from the difference in that welcome, which version of themselves seems to bring the parent close. I use the name to ask about an experience the familiar ten categories of adverse childhood experiences leave out. Childhood bereavement, for quite different reasons, falls outside those ten too. A low score would tell us very little about the house Nietzsche left.
In the book I lay eleven childhoods side by side. In six, the record places the first loss of, or separation from, a parent before the age of ten. Rousseau’s mother died nine days after his birth. In his Confessions he remembers reading with his father from the books she had left behind. Much later he wrote Émile, his great work on education, and also recorded that he had sent his own five children to the foundling hospital. I want to hold all three scenes in view. The boy reading beside his widowed father deserves our tenderness. The children at the hospital door have a claim on us too. Here the genealogy reaches beyond a philosopher’s private grief to a public institution that could receive a child, and to the question of what an adult does with the history he has inherited.
A Family Tree of Wills
The book does not open with a philosopher. It opens with a girl of eight, practising the piano before bed on a Tuesday evening in February. Her father is at a late meeting. Her mother is upstairs bathing the baby, and the bathwater is loud enough that nobody in the house can hear the scales, which to the ear of a child of eight is exactly the same thing as nobody listening. In the ninth bar the left hand stumbles. Before she begins again she does something so small that no adult would notice it and no questionnaire would think to ask about it: she glances at the doorway.
The doorway is empty.
She plays the bar again, correctly. Then the whole piece. Then the whole piece again, for nobody.
Nobody in this scene is cruel. Her father loves her, and would be bewildered, and then appalled, to learn that a glance at an empty doorway had become the subject of a book. A great many children glance at a great many doorways and grow up free. But she will carry this one into the examination hall, onto the ward, into the partnership review and into the small hours of the night before a judgment is handed down, and it will outlive every person who might ever have stood in it.
Every will in this book is a theory of that glance. Schopenhauer will say she glances because she is hungry, and the hunger will never end. Nietzsche will say she must stop glancing and become the light herself. Rousseau will say she must be taught to glance correctly, by a state that knows where the light is kept. The Stoics will say the doorway is not within her jurisdiction, so let it go. Frankl will say the glance can be given a meaning. Jung will say the doorway is also inside her. Shakespeare will put the doorway on a stage and make us laugh until we notice we are standing in it. Maslow will see, far off, a house where nobody needs a doorway at all, and die before he builds the stairs. And Gethsemane will say the most dangerous and most liberating thing that has ever been said about a doorway: not my will.
Here is the whole family, in the order the book meets them. Each will has a witness who gave it its classic voice, and each has a sentence it speaks when nobody is listening.
Not Only a Book About Philosophers
If this sounds like a book for philosophers, it is not, or not only. It is a book about the person who cannot stop. The high achiever whose diary is a fortress. The professional who has been rewarded for thirty years for the very qualities that are now quietly wearing them out. The perfectionist who can detect a fraction of a lumen’s difference in a face. The leader who mistakes control for care. The parent who loves their child completely and passes on, without meaning to, the doorway they inherited themselves. One of the line-stones in the book puts it in a sentence: what looks like ambition from the outside is often panic with better tailoring.
We are taught to live backwards: HAVE → DO → BE. Acquire the credentials, the house, the title and the approval; perform flawlessly and without complaint; and then, perhaps, we will finally be allowed simply to BE. The book follows that inverted sequence from the nursery to the school, from the school to the professions that reward it, and from the professions into the institutions we all have to live inside. Then it asks what happens when the sequence is turned the right way up: BE → DO → HAVE. Not less excellence. The same hands, the same instrument, the same possibility of excellence: a different source of action.
There is a reason, too, that the book speaks so directly to law, medicine and every profession that holds power over people at their most vulnerable. No profession speaks the language of will more fluently than law, and none has been more reluctant to ask where wills come from. The law has a will for the dead, the testament. It has a will for the guilty, the guilty mind, and a will for the act itself, which must be voluntary to be blamed. Its whole architecture of blame rests on a presumption of free will that it rarely examines and almost never measures. It is, in the most literal sense, a genealogy of wills with the genealogy left out.
So the book can also be read as the ego’s last will and testament: drafted in fear, read aloud with love, witnessed, and then executed, so that the estate can pass at last to its rightful heir, which turns out to have been the child at the piano all along. It is offered to the professions, and to all of us, not as an accusation but as an invitation.
Love Is the Question
The plaque on the cover reads The Battle of the Wills, but love does not enter the battle as another combatant. It informs it. It is not a stronger sword or a more magnificent suit of armour: it is the possibility of putting the sword down without mistaking that for weakness. Love does not abolish power. It changes what power serves. And it changes the question. Where striving asks how I might acquire enough, and power asks how I might become strong enough, love asks something altogether different:
"Who would I need to BE to know the answer to the question 'What love would do now?'"
That is the journey the subtitle names: from striving, through power as the answer, to love as the question. Through, and not to, because power does not replace striving as a stronger destination. It arrives as striving’s attempted answer, and the frightened child is still inside the magnificent armour when it does.
This is the paradox at the heart of the Will to Love. Love is both the answer and the question. It does not demand more grit, another achievement or a final victory over the ego. It asks for willingness: the courage to see reality without requiring it to conform to our fears. The old will says: I will make reality conform to my need. This is a book about the history of willing, but its destination is willingness.
Think of Maria at the end of West Side Story, with Tony dead and the gun in her hand. She need not lend inherited hatred her hands. Her refusal is what I call the Maria Protocol: the change is not first in what happens, but in who is authoring what happens next. The child on the cover, with his fingers on the buckle, need not go on fastening what he once had no choice but to construct. One holds a gun, the other a buckle. Neither can change the history that brought them to this moment. Both may discover that history need no longer dictate what happens next.
That discovery is what the book calls the Pivot. The first fork in a life is choiceless: the child chooses attachment over authenticity long before there is anybody there to do the choosing. The second fork offers the possibility of a first genuine choice. The Will to Love begins there, not as a reward at the end of the journey, but as the willingness that makes another journey possible.
Inside the Book
Who Is Doing the Willing? runs to 443 pages, in thirty-five chambers rather than chapters, because each one is a room you can sit in for a while. It moves from the fracture beneath every will, through the Will to Live, the Will to Power and the Will to Lead, and through three smaller detours that almost everybody is living without having read a word of philosophy: the Will to Strive, the Will to Be Seen and the Will to Be Right. It passes through meaning, Stoic acceptance and the Will to Lie, through the professions that guillotine the human being and call the blade procedure, into Jung’s great inward chamber, on to Shakespeare, who signed himself Will, out to Maslow at the horizon, and into Gethsemane, where the weight lifts. Only then does it arrive at the place where the Will to Love begins, and at the engine shift that follows, from the combustion of striving to something much closer to fusion.
Along the way you will meet a cast that no seminar would dare to seat at one table: Augustine and Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, Viktor Frankl and Jim Carrey, and a perfumer from a novel who perfected the technology of being loved and died because it worked. There are charts for readers who like to see the whole architecture at once, and images throughout, because some things are understood faster than they can be explained.
The whole book is held to one rule: one hand in the Earth, the other in the Sky. The Earth Hand asks for evidence, checks every quotation and says plainly what the evidence cannot carry. The Sky Hand is allowed to reach further, but never while wearing a lab coat. The book stands beside my other writing on the Human Condition, and it stands perfectly well on its own.
The Question Belongs to You
The child on the cover is still holding the buckle. The glass is clear. The observers are watching. And perhaps, for the first time, the question belongs to him. I wrote the book because I think it belongs to all of us: to the girl at the piano and the partner in the boardroom, to the surgeon at two in the morning and the judge the night before a judgment, to anybody who has ever looked up at an empty doorway and gone on playing for nobody. The book cannot answer the question on your behalf. That would reproduce the very authority it asks us to examine. What it can do is show you, chamber by chamber, who has been doing the willing all this time, and what becomes possible when you begin to reclaim the authorship of the next act.
Who Is Doing the Willing? An Upstream Genealogy of the Wills is available as an illustrated, 443-page PDF. Buy the ebook — £15
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