Will

Close your eyes and extend your hand slowly, very slowly, until it meets the resistance of some object. Feel the sensation of that thing blocking, or at least slowing, further extension of your hand.

You’ve just summarized in experiment the basic argument of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. We tend to think of will as something like a wish. A strong want. To carry out your will means to accomplish what you set forth after. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, would say that you don’t just have a will—you are will. And so is everything else. He argued at length that all in the universe can be thought of as a will going about its way. The collection of impressions we receive as a man bent over a plate of food is a superficial manifestation of a will to survive, and in the complex case of a man, to do many other things. When your hand reached out, that was will. When it felt the wall, for example, it encountered another will. “A will of a wall?” You say? Absurd! Walls aren’t sentient.

But we’re not talking about sentience, whatever that means. Will might be described as something like character—the totality of your qualities, and the momentum behind them. So the wall, as a will, might be a will to stand upright, to be hard, to divide, etc. The force that bends our compass needles, the force of gravity, a blade of grass shooting towards the sun, a horse in a canter, a rock at rest—all is will, Schopenhauer says, and representation.

That latter is what happens when a will contacts another will. When your hand touched an object, its extension was resisted, and that gave you a sense of the thing and its will. Not an omniscient, all-penetrating sense. A very passing one. We can’t know the thing-in-itself, only the way it’s represented when it meets our will. Your hand passed through dust particles and bacteria on its way, but you probably didn’t notice them because your will was sufficient to overpower them before they could make an impression. When Jupiter orbits the sun, likewise, it may not notice the old man selling fruit on the side of the road on the planet Earth. Our signs are representations of unyielding phenomena of will.

Thought to Action

From bare awareness, the next step might seem to be thought. In fact, it’s action. Thought and emotion are certain classes of actions, but belonging to signs of secondness and thirdness, they’re more distant from awareness. There are many species of animal capable of basic awareness of things that are important to them. They’re also capable of following up with appropriate action. Many of these species are incapable of thought as we define it. If I want to think for myself, I have some ground to cover first.

The natural order of sign processing runs from firstness (present, sensation) through thirdness (future, judgment). While it can also change direction and spiral in convoluted ways, I suspect that we never actually act from our thoughts. Rather, a thought produces subsequent signs of secondness and firstness, and those are the ones that move us. Equally possible is that we act on some threshold of agreement between signs, but the lower-order animalistic ones hold more sway. We respond to a sharp pain before hunger, before a good idea. Often, our motivations appear in conflict.

So is it possible to think for myself if I can’t act on my thoughts? If I notice a problem, do the research and the experimentation, consider all the angles, model the possibilities, calculate the risks, reason through it, and formulate a plan—then sit down on the couch with a bag of flaming-hot Cheetos, instead, what the hell happened? If that’s independent thought, what use is it?

What I’m probably experiencing is a will divided. Imagine there are two selves: one intent on carrying out a fine project, and the other intent on avoiding the pain of failure and preferring to feed itself. Which one do you think will win more often than not? When people waffle in their decisions, they’re often accused of “overthinking it.” More likely, some signs of firstness and secondness make us feel discomfort, which leads to overthinking as an act of protection. The role of thinking is to add judgments, which serve to predict the future. It’s a peripheral function—after-the-one-fact and before-the-next-one.

Action always occurs in the present. It’s the thought-killer, because we commit to a single movement at the expense of all others, and the results are made plain, removing the need for prediction. Now if we could act on all the great thoughts we had, I’ve no doubt many of us would be healthier and happier. Most adults are rational enough to know what’s best for them most of the time. So why don’t we?

I can’t believe that we live in constant error. There’s a wisdom to our folly. We might reason well most of the time, but all it takes is one well-coordinated stupidity to start shedding limbs and ghosts. There are good causes for our fears. Our survival instincts are here because they’ve survived millennia or danger. Remember: the goal of life from the species’ standpoint is to pass on our genes and bring our offspring safely to an age where they can do the same, not to satisfy our wildest dreams. Those often come with phenomenal danger, or so it seems at times.

The Will as Rope and Separation

If the will is represented as a rope, then a tightly braided and unified will can do just about anything that’s humanly possible, because it’s singular. It eats, sleeps, thinks, breathes, and moves toward a singular goal, as the sacrifice of all else. This goal need not be noble or well-calculated, but God help whoever stands in the way.

Almost no one fits that description. For most of us, that rope is fraying. From a single self, we get smaller and smaller strands, fixed to different and sometimes contradictory goals. If you can’t get something done, you don’t have a weak will. You have too many strong ones. While our survival instincts do a better job of keeping us safe than our big gray brains, there are times when it’s clear that they’re firing erroneously. We might understand that, but we can’t reason our way out of the situation, because it’s the product of deeper signs. Those signs tell us about our will. To Schopenhauer, we are will, and all that we will ever know about ourselves is expressed in coded form through our signs, our representations. Signs show up at the point of friction, of collision, of joining, or anywhere that the two things meet. To think for ourselves, we have to set thinking aside. Is there a way to translate these fine thoughts into more primary, more powerful signs that can move us to act on our better notions?

In the century-plus that followed Schopenhauer’s work, a great many people realized that whatever you believe or don’t believe about the will, it’s within the grasp of even the most ordinary person to train it.

How to Train Your Dragon

Reams of books exist on the topic of training the will. It’s out of fashion these days that anyone takes responsibility for themselves and strives to increase their personal agency through hard work, but countless people have done it and found it incredibly beneficial. When someone thinks they’re incapable of something, it’s often because they tried to reach too far, too soon.

Lots of folks can deadlift 600 pounds. If, having never exercised or done manual labor in your life, you settled on that goal, walked into a gym, loaded up 600 pounds on the bar, and heaved with all your might, what do you reckon would happen? A better approach would be to deadlift 100 pounds, or even less if you had to, a few times a week, adding weight incrementally as you grew stronger. The single effort rarely gets anything worthwhile done. It’s the frequent repetition of an effort you can handle that builds big pullers.

The general principle of will training is as follows:

Take a simple task that neither benefits you nor harms you, and do it once a day, every day. Too easy, right? What you’re training is the ability to set a resolution and follow through on it. You build your deadlift by first establishing the habit of deadlifting and the basic motor patterns.

The best tasks are random, often silly. Try to choose one that you’re emotionally attached to, and you’ll find an impressive fortification springs up to defend your dearest bad habits. Take memory out of the equation. Write it down on a sticky note and put it somewhere prominent, so that the first time you see it, you do it. Just once! Part of training the will is also the ability to resist action. Don’t turn it into a neurotic tic by repeating it all day long.

Over time, you can increase the complexity and the demands of your daily item. Eventually, it can become some small thing you care about. Then a larger thing, and many things, until you have the habit of aligning your signs of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, and turning your thoughts into acts of a unified will.

Exercise

5. Pat the top of your head three times with your right hand once per day for a week.

You might want to rush out and design your own will exercises. Resist that temptation, too. Often people come up with acts that don’t qualify, or that are burdened in one way or another. Just do the one prescribed for the first week. I’d advise using some of the other options provided below for future weeks before eventually coming up with your own, for the same reason a new exerciser is best off listening to a trainer than guessing their way through a workout.

I’m aware that listening to someone else is hardly thinking or willing for yourself. Treat it as an early step in the learning process.

Optional bonus work: If we act on primary signs, then it makes sense to practice turning our thoughts into more basic signs to guide us. The better we are at aligning firstness, secondness, and thirdness, the easier it will be to become free agents.

Pay attention to the sensations and feelings in your body 1) as you prepare to do your will exercise, 2) as you do it, and 3) after you’ve done it. Noticing common impressions over time will help to more easily transfer into a state of doing.

You can also notice the sensations and feelings you get at other times when you’re procrastinating, waffling, dreading, or otherwise not doing what you set out to do, as a comparison. Having a handle on both states will make it easier to move to the one you want.

Future Will Training

A single week of will training will get you as far as a single week of weightlifting. Here are some ideas to keep you going. Spend a week each on the easy ones until they’re a breeze, then move on. If moderately complex exercises cause you to miss a day, move back down until you’ve built up some will. And at some point, it’s best to ditch the list altogether and make up your own exercises.

Easy

Lay a coin on a bookshelf or desk. Once a day, flip it over so that the other side faces up, and leave in that state.
Open a predetermined book-of-the-week to a random page and read aloud the first sentence your eye falls on.
Touch the mirror on the reflection of your face.
Spend 1 min noting all objects that begin with the letter “H”.
Spend 1 minute noting everything that’s a shade of blue.
Spend 30 seconds listening for the most distant sound you can hear.
Slowly lie down flat on your stomach then get back up again.
Pour a beverage from your glass into a second glass, then back to the first.
Spend a week reading only page 118 of a different book each day.
Print a blank sheet of paper.
Place a random object on a scale and write down the weight.

Moderate

Leave a coin lying heads-up in some public location, sidewalk, etc.
Take a different route, driving or walking, to a habitual place. Even a single divergence counts.
Take three articles of clothing out of a drawer. Refold them more neatly and put them away.
Predetermine an exact time and place to be somewhere (that you don’t have to go, and that does not help or hurt you in any way), and show up exactly on time, no matter what. For example, the bank parking lot at 7:03pm on Tuesday.
Handwrite a letter to yourself, buy a stamp and envelope, and mail it.
Before bed, set out tomorrow’s shoes so that the soles are touching.
Make a meaningless decision by tossing a dollar bill into the air and letting it fall, where heads means yes and tails means no.
Write out one new will exercise each day for a week, then spend the next seven weeks doing them.