Inward to Nothing: Outward to Will

To what end do I suffer? To what end do I struggle? Ends, ends, so consumed I am with ends, even though everything seems to always be only starting. The path is always yet to be taken, the road yet to be walked, decisions yet to be made. Maybe I've always had an issue of dedication, or commitment. Sometime someplace I had written a reminder to myself: "Dedication is the start of the will!" But do I have the dedication to follow any reminder to myself? How can I, if the answer to for what do I suffer, for what do I struggle, is still empty, blank?

For a moment I thought it Freedom. Freedom from the shackles that bound me, those of my upbringing, those of the world that seeks to constrain me with its ideas of what is right and wrong and how one should spend their life, those of the serpent mounted, impaled, on a spear: Money. It is necessary, yes, that freedom. Without it I would have nothing of myself. And yes, it is a constant struggle to maintain and expand it. But to what end is freedom? Where does freedom lead to but back to that question of struggle and suffering: for what? I knew only I can answer this question for me, but my attempts brought forth nausea, and a dread of decision and indecision.

But dread has lead me only to emptiness, to nothing. Dread is the mire that I trudge through in the hope to reach the small islet lit by warm orange lamplight dimly peeking through through hazy misty fog, that is decision, that is action. But how to tell that light from will-o'-wisps and swamp gas? But no, the search for that islet has led me only to nothing.

If dread leads to Nothing, can it lead to the Creative Nothing? When everything empties out of the world, even what one perceives to be the self, then what is there left to hold on to?

Max Stirner in the Unique and its Property, for all his effort to dissuade us from following the will of another, be it another person, some conception of a "higher" being, or any other ghost in our head, does little to inform us on how to arrive at our own will. A function of the time perhaps: in the 1840s while there was a host of ideas (fixed or otherwise) and coercive thoughts abound, there was not the system of mind control that exists within the dopamine-dominating media landscape that has been growing steadily from the radio to the television, and now with the internet growing exponentially faster. Perhaps it was easier to disconnect from external social controls before they became so infusive and as subliminally manipulative as they are today, once those controls were realized for what they were at least. But perhaps that is too present-centric of a claim. While much of modern "developed" society has submitted itself to the will of the internet, we have also today escaped many other great wills. The church, while still for many an object of submission, in prior years used to subsume society to the point where sectarian debate could end in war or massacre. And it is religion and God that Stirner, after all, spends the most of the text of the Unique and its Property, along with the new religion of the liberals,³ railing against: indicative perhaps of that which he saw as the most direct and all-encompassing forms of control over the individuals will.

But regardless of the reason, while I find reading the Unique and its Property to stir a fire in me of creativity and will, a fire to grasp the world and call it my own, I am still often left with the unanswered question of what to do with the world when I get my hands on it. This does make some sense of course: who can I turn to for my own will but myself? Stirner will not tell me what it is, nor will anyone else writing any other book. Whatever could the man say? I will still always bear the responsibility for my own actions, and bear the responsibility for the will, my will, which leads to those actions. When a student came to Jean-Paul Sartre to ask whether he should go to fight for Free French Forces and avenge his brother killed by the Germans, or whether he should stay home and take care of his despondent mother, all Sartre could do was tell him that it was his decision to make.⁴ It was his decision alone to make, indeed Sartre believed that he had already made the decision. Perhaps then his coming to Sartre was like when someone flips a coin to make a decision, but only does so to see if they are happy or not with when the decision the coin has made for them. But this is still a method.

Stirner begins his book with a prologue entitled "I have based my affair on nothing", and ends the text with the same line. It is this nothing upon which the whole text is based, from which his creativity and expression flows. But can nothing, emptiness in which "there is no form, sensation, conception, synthesis, or discrimination" truly give rise to creativity, to anything? But it is a nothingness of another sort: "I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create everything as creator." It is a nothing from which we have the full power to embrace our own will, our own creative power. And if God created the universe from nothing, why can I not create myself from the same?

To reach the Creative Nothing, one has to strip themselves of all external influences on their own will, one must go into the abyss. To become without any external influence, so that the self's true will can be freely creative. But where does the external end and the internal begin? As one peels away one conspicuous layer of external influence, another layer, albeit less obvious, appears beneath it. Even thoughts must be stripped away. All knowledge is preconceived knowledge. And if one continues on peeling back the layers of the onion? What is left? If there is anything left in that place without a sensible (sense-able) world, without a thinking thought, it would not be describable with words, it could only be experienced.

The project of the Tractus Logico Philosophicus seems at the outset to be to delineate what is knowable, or that which can be sensibly considered, that which is logical, from that which is senseless, that which is unknowable. The ultimate project in the eyes of the logical positivists he inspired. They were, in the words of Stirner, Christians. Christians giving thinking its supremacy, always seeking a greater, higher explanation, seeking a deeper truth and new master. Yet Wittgenstein whose Tractus was the inspiration for much of this did not share their idolization of science and dismissal of the religious and metaphysical. Rudolf Carnap, a lead actor of Vienna circle that popularized positivism, who did the right thing for the wrong reasons: disparage metaphysics, after meeting with Wittgenstein for the first time wrote that "[h]is point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist, one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer."⁵ The concerns of Wittgenstein were not so much those of science, but more so what came after.

Wittgenstein spends all this time to construct the world of facts, of reason, and then it becomes necessary to, as he says "throw away the ladder" that is this constructed world in order to reach a true understanding. He does not let the world he has constructed decide his fate, his understanding, he does not submit to logic, not even what could be called his own logic. He takes the mystical experience for what it is firsthand, and as the human experience, his experience, that it is.

Only from thoughtlessness do we come back to pounce on thoughts and take hold of them as our own. And of the question of my will, of what it means to take hold of ones own freedom, what is there left to ask when we no there is no expressible answer? I take these words of Wittgenstein for my own use:

Thought, analytical investigation, does not reach the source of the self. Stirner knows that it is insufficient to simply follow one's thoughts freely, for these thoughts are not our own, but implanted by society writ large. By the clergy, or the public school system. As such simply knowing that there are fixed ideas that can control and dominate us is not sufficient to escape those fixed ideas. We must for come to possess them, to make them our own. But they must be made our own, not the possession of an us constructed by society, but of an us all to our own, uniquely ourselves. I do not answer any question given to me by another, I do not answer any question. Of what is my will I cannot say, but I say of will that I will seize it, possess it. It is mine.