MPEC. Will. August 2025

1.
The first attempt to build an online discussion has demonstrated that the demand for knowledge and understanding is quite low in this group. Only one member had courage and found time to show up. However, I’m not going to complain about it or shame everyone else for lack of engagement. I screwed it up. I failed to make you interested in the topic. Let’s see how the second attempt is going to play out, but first let’s summarize what’s been going on here so far.

A few months ago, while thinking about why I’m taking part in regular meetings of HSE, I came up with an insight to create the Moscow Philosophy English Club. The algorithm was perfectly clear. Since I talk to half a dozen different people each week, and many of them are from Moscow, I’m going to focus on inviting them to my tg-group and encouraging them to study with me instead of mindlessly “practicing English.” If only one person out of five or whatever joins the group each week, I’m going to have 20-25 people by the end of the year. If half of them are from Moscow, charging a few hundred rubles would be enough to cover my expenses for going to the city and conducting offline meetings once a month.

Last week, when the group’s size reached ten members, I shifted my focus from a far distant goal—offline meetings—to something that was already at hand. It had a significant impact on my understanding of what I’m doing here and brought about new insights.

As a philosopher, I prefer to make my intentions as transparent as possible whenever I’m engaging in any social activity. For those of you who are capable of reading my posts, I have to say that I’m trying to “distract you from distraction” and compel you to think about the same thing or things I’m thinking about. For the next week, this thing is the concept of will. We’re going to talk about it at the end of the week, but when exactly, we’ll decide later.

2.
Both understanding (der Verstand) and will (der Wille) belong to the set of the most important concepts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The latter is indeed the most important concept for him, the essence and the subject of his half-century-long wild meditations. “Die Welt ist mein Wille” is his core message to homo sapiens. He was convinced that he solved “the riddle of existence” by reversing the narrative according to which “reason” (sapiencia, intelligencia, etc.) played the major role in human affairs as well as in the whole of the natural world. Just as for Hume, for Schopenhauer, reason was nothing but a slave, a tool, an instrument of the will. But what is the will? Is it even possible to define it? Schopenhauer says that it is our innermost nature, something that we all find in ourselves as the driving force behind our actions, thoughts or any conceivable movements. We share it with animals, we share it with plants, we share it even with rocks or any other types of material objects. The matter itself is causality through and through; its essence consists in acting. Everything acts upon everything else, displacing each other in space and following each other in time. In this story, our ancestors are not chimps; they are pieces of dust of blown-up stars, which, over billions of years, developed the capacity to make abstract concepts to navigate the sea of purposeless transformations. Although the will endlessly strives for something, it has no ultimate purpose; it can’t be satisfied in principle; it can’t stop willing. Hence, for Schopenhauer, who grew up in the 90s of the 18th century in Europe and later lived through the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the will was primarily responsible for all the mayhem, destruction, death and suffering, setting him on a path of asceticism and self-renunciation.

3.
If we assume that the will is the essence of the entire world and that it constitutes the totality of our experience, the first question we have to wrestle with is probably going to be, “So what?” It helps us figure out why we do what we do. So what? It makes us better equipped for social interactions. So what? It allows us to escape foolish mistakes. So what?

When we try to force someone—and we regularly do it, whether we’re aware of it or not—to pay attention to whatever we’re up to, an appeal to “understanding” would hardly do anything if it’s against their will. Everyone who participates in speaking clubs understands that writing and thinking in a target language must inevitably lead them to higher levels of mastery of the language—reducing the sense of uneasiness, inadequacy, confusion, embarrassment, etc.—but if there is no will behind this understanding, writing and thinking never turn into a custom. When, on the other hand, the will runs the show, the understanding will swallow the dumbest explanations and justifications, take flattery for a sincere expression of admiration, or mistake sarcasm for an honest assertion. Whoever sticks to the view that their English is already good enough and nothing is required from them other than the maintenance of the status quo would by no means engage in the “language game” with anyone who threatens their fragile self-image and attempts to push them beyond the looking glass.

So what? Is it supposed to make me happy? Why am I reading all of this? Why should I care about someone else’s thoughts on the will? I have my own will, and nobody’s in a position to tell me what I should or shouldn’t want. What? The will is primary, and “I” is nothing but a subject of the English language that conceals the fundamental contradiction between subject and object? Nonsense!

4.
The contradiction between der Verstand and der Wille might be expressed vividly in the following propositions: I’ve done it because it was necessary vs. it was necessary because I’ve done it.

In the first case, der Verstand thinks that it is in the driving seat, so it is always ready to provide justifications and explanations for why it was necessary. In the second case, der Wille proclaims itself to be the ultimate source of everything that happens.

To illustrate it from a slightly different angle, let’s bring up the notorious “ought vs. is” contradiction. This is the contradiction that distinguishes science from philosophy and all sorts of other cognitive enterprises. Science studies the world as it is and tries to explain how it turned out to be what it is. Philosophers run around trying to change the world so that it fits in their paradigmatic narratives.

What it ultimately amounts to is that if we assume our will to be free, if we elevate the concept of free will up to the highest rank in the hierarchy of our thoughts, then our understanding, intelligence, reason must be turned into mere tools, the will’s advocates. Sounds familiar? The will = devil. A will = evil. And if we start from the freedom of thought, our will must follow “the ought.” Wait a minute. Does science serve de-vil? What a weird form of linguistic reductionism!

Our story gets exceedingly complicated. We barely even started making sense of the most powerful and honorable English concepts that have been determining the evolution, survival and flourishing of this language throughout the history of roughly the past five hundred years. Next time, we’ll make an argument that writing is closely associated with the understanding, while speaking has a similar relation to the will.

5.
Here is a simple observation to support the thesis that speaking is closely linked to der Wille while writing is to der Verstand. In speech, we’re repeatedly making mistakes and saying things we didn’t expect we would say. Just a little introspection is enough to see that in a conversation we often go beyond our actual knowledge, playing fast and loose with language in a sort of linguistic hand-waving. In writing, mistakes also occur, but their frequency is usually much lower; we have time to calculate where every hastily written sentence might lead us, so we can cut off most of the unadulterated nonsense that pops up at the surface of our consciousness when we examine a certain subject.

Although I’ve been practicing both speaking and writing more or less equally, I have to say that the essential part of mastering a language consists in the latter. Speaking is quite natural—we start off by learning how to speak, and normally everyone acquires the skill without much effort simply by being around others and doing what everyone else is doing. Writing is way more sophisticated and artificial. We’re supposed to learn it at school, but it probably works for one person out of ten—if not one out of a hundred—and thus it is rare. Good writing is extremely rare, and that’s why it is preserved for hundreds and thousands of years, as the case with Schopenhauer and Plato demonstrates. Taken the concept of will as it is broadly understood—the capacity for desire, the ability to make choices—where is Schopenhauer’s or Plato’s will, and where is their understanding? The latter is preserved almost intact in their language. Everyone who is capable of reading Greek or German can understand what they understood, but can anyone will what they “willed”?

6.
Based on what we’ve already covered over the past few weeks while studying the concept of understanding and the concept of will, I’d like to show you how these concepts can be applied in practice.

I divide my personal experience into two broad periods. The first lasted roughly 9,500 days and was characterized by the dominance of the will. I have many memories from that period, but most of them are vague and disconnected. Sometimes, I call it an irrational period of my life; sometimes, just childhood. The second period starts with the resolution to write at least one page every day, meditating on what I’m going through, how I should organize my life, why, when, where, etc. This period is characterized by the dominance of understanding, and currently it has reached the 14541st day. This period is further divided into multiple periods characterized by the structure of different tasks I’ve been working on. The first task was to write a dissertation on the subject of the state of law to complete my “higher education.” I strongly advise any of you who are seriously interested in studying philosophy with me and building the Moscow Philosophy English Club together to find a couple of hours to read it. Here is the link: http://proza.ru/2012/08/14/862. It’s going to give you the key to an elaborate, self-referential philosophical labyrinth I’ve been building for more than 5,000 days ever since.

Now, let me make it clear—I’m going to emphasize it over and over since it’s impossible to overemphasize it—I’m not interested in small talk; I’m trying to make you think about the same things I’m thinking about. Every post is a prompt designed to make you engage in a philosophical discussion with me and stop wasting your time on whatever other algorithms (languages) are trying to feed you with.