Who Is Doing the Willing? An Upstream Genealogy of the Wills

From Striving, Through Power as the Answer, to Love as the Question
Dr Olivier Branford · Illustrated PDF ebook · 443 pages
The philosophers were children too. Before Schopenhauer wrote about striving or Nietzsche about power, what had each learnt about love, safety and belonging? What can we learn by reading their philosophy alongside the lives of the children they once were?
Olivier Branford traces eleven Wills from the nursery into philosophy and onwards into the professions, institutions and civilisations that inherit its ideas. Alongside adverse childhood experiences, he examines what he calls the ‘11th ACE’ — the warm face of conditional approval. A child sees a parent’s face light up when they excel and begins to wonder whether they will be as welcome when they fail. Years later, a profession may reward that child, now an adult, for the very habit of excellence that once helped them feel loved.
On the cover, a boy stands inside a glass case with his hands on the buckles of a suit of armour. He could be fastening it. He could be loosening the first strap. The distance between those two gestures opens the book’s central question about agency, and with it the possibility of a Will to Love.