“In looking at a waterfall we imagine that there is freedom of will and fancy in the countless turnings, twistings, and breakings of the waves; but everything is compulsory, every movement can be mathematically calculated. So it is also with human actions; one would have to be able to calculate every single action beforehand if one were all-knowing; equally so all progress of knowledge, every error, all malice”[1].

Free will sits as a metaphysical cul-de-sac within which the delusions of ethical thought allow themselves to referentially (and reverentially) construct drives and dualities that guide human nature toward an ultimatum, a telos of action which ends at the good (or at least the end of suffering). Metaphysical thought is paradigmatic, creating the same result from multiple causes across a range of disciplines. Historiography, physics, biology or philosophy all prize explicability as their ultimate goal. A defining theory of everything that is a metaphor for the good, the good being the freedom of the will to fully understand the various drivers of action and reaction, cause and effect. By understanding these, the means can be altered to create new ends, ending the recalcitrance of suffering by reformulating the phenomena that cause it. In this sense willing is self-referential, related to the anthropic capacity to explicate definitive laws that are integrable and all-encompassing, inhering a level of control via knowledge.

As Nietzsche notes with the waterfall metaphor, calculability is as much a function of the turnings as it is an explanation of their purpose. “The delusion of the acting agent about himself, the supposition of a free will, belongs to this mechanism which still remains to be calculated”[2]. The mechanism is the aim of free will, to conquer or become it. The calculating machine is the apex of explication, to fully anthropise thinking and affect as the criteria of law upon which systems can be known – knowledge as teleology, a horizon over the ontic with being an expression of agency, something controllable and therefore within the universal laws. The discoveries of quantum mechanics or computational complexity, the instantaneousness of information and the destruction of agency within systems characterised by black boxes, autopoiesis and unknown unknowns would suggest severe limits on explanation and sapient reasoning.

But metaphysics is not to be denied its pound of flesh. Free will becomes fully machinic, ironically curtailing the capacity for iterative innovation or creative destruction by limiting the terms of inclusion. In economics, this is monopoly power. In epistemology, it is paradigmatic knowledge following a hierarchy of steps. Iterations are merely steps toward explication, toward perfection, toward the good. Ontologically, it is being as process, the interaction of nature with educability to produce the last man, a fully discovered set of intuitions with finite aims. The production of being is a process akin to computation. By knowing the parts one can know the whole.

“In the phenomenalism of the ‘inner world’ we invert the chronological order of cause and effect. The fundamental fact of ‘inner experience’ is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place— The same applies to the succession of thoughts: — we seek the reason for a thought before we are conscious of it; and the reason enters consciousness first, and then its con sequence— Our entire dream life is the interpretation of complex feelings with a view to possible causes— and in such way that we are conscious of a condition only when the supposed causal chain associated with it has entered consciousness”[3]. Sapient reasoning as backward causation, to sublimate drives to processual characteristics, as genes in DNA or conflict in history i.e. the effect they produce explains the discourse they are situated in.

While Nietzsche situates free will as a metaphysical delusion – “belief in the freedom of the will is an original error of everything organic, as old as the existence of the awakenings of logic in it; the belief in unconditioned substances and similar things is equally a primordial as well as an old error of everything organic”[4] – the capacity to will demonstrates acts of power beyond knowledge as an enchaining will of its own. “Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, ‘Know thyself’, but as if always confronted with the command, ‘Will a self, so you will become a self’”[5]. Free will and the freedom to will sit seemingly as opposites, a duality of will as the expansion of knowledge and will as the capacity to become. Sublimation vs. capacity.

Yet we are still talking of will as such, expressions of willing through different means and producing different effects. Willing sits on a continuum rather than ossifying in distinctions. There is not a “habit of contrasts”[6], rather transitions of will from demarcated boundaries of onticity toward horizons of becoming. Nietzsche talks of this in relation to the poet or artist – they are delimited by the forms of convention, by the meter of poetry or the publicity of the play. “Beyond convention, he offers his own free will and takes a risk, his success at best resulting in the setting-up of a new convention”[7]. From the breaking of rules come new rules.

Eternal recurrence is of a similar transitory aspect, Zarathustra seeing eternal return as the disgusting feature of the equilibrium of the smallest and greatest men but also becoming its teacher. “But the plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined, it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return”[8]. The return of the same may be construed as a universal law, an explicable structure of knowledge. But it sits above it, the mechanism of calculability above man’s reason and will. This plexus of causes is not to be fully delineated as the meaning of existence, nor strived toward as an ultimate goal. It is the void of existence into the becoming of all beings, all actants (systems of knowledge, processes and structures, reasonings and turnings both within and beyond man).

Return of the wasteland:

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water”[9].

Broken images as defiled knowledges of the telos of explication, the trash of theories and utopias long forgotten, defining life by the means of its controlling explanandum. “The capacity for informal practices outside these structural constraints, or for opposition via exit, appear limited and even potentially extensible from the structures themselves”[10]. Thus the wasteland grows. “Devastation is more unearthly than destruction. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction. Mere destruction sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary establishes and spreads everything that blocks”[11].

This devastation is ever-present, the blocking power of a will of chained knowledge, a modus ponens of logic defined by its internal dynamics of expansion. The will to power (and its expansion over life) is not limited to the great man of Zarathustrian patience. The wastelands have their own will, to delineate and hold authority over separate jurisdictions, petty suzerainties held by the desires of petty men (the parochial above the cosmopolitan, the committee above the network, the administrator above the innovator, bureaucratic tentacles enveloping deadening practices of cultural pastiche). Life is suffocated in the wasteland, searching for rocky promontories just for the chance of a temporary escape.

Freedom of will comes from the means to overcome and move beyond, freeing the spirit from the cloying parsimonies of simplicity within an overarching explanandum. “I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence. If I had to choose between the world and me, I would reject the world, its lights and laws, unafraid to glide alone in absolute nothingness”[12]. Life is the suffering of thought and feeling, sitting between the realms of peaceful nonexistence. To glide as a free spirit, disinterested and impartial, is the means to freedom of the will. Laws and convention will always have their dictation, their jurisdiction of petty sovereignty with men lining up to be willing sacrifices to this great Moloch. To sit in the reverence of thought, sipping at the godhead while refusing to walk through the wasteland. To become one with what remains of life, above the commands of dead moralities and into the deconstruction and remoulding of their corpses. “I would love a world of free forms and principles, a world of absolute indeterminacy”[13].

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[9] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

[10] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2021/02/21/unknown-unknowns/

[11] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[12] E.M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

[13] E.M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair