We are typically endowed with enough, if not more than enough, willfulness. Humans are born to this trait, an ancient, reflexive, hard-wired response to being in the world. It’s undisciplined and without conscience. Its primitive ruthlessness drives those who would use any means possible, i.e., corruption, exploitation, cruelty, to get what they’re (also) driven to want. We see its evidence everywhere. It’s a blight upon our peopled world and an insoluble stain upon our planet.
The rest of us, educated to a conscience and a persistent fascination with the possibility of living a purposed life, want to stamp our will or make our mark upon the world, too. Despite all the privileges to which we are heir, we are well aware of how much of life is muddled, unpredictable, threatening, confrontational and for one reason or another, often just disappointing.
Taking action in service of how life ought to be or, said another way, “doing the right thing,” is imperative. However, to get it done, we understand that we must transform the brute willful driving force into an effective and promissory willpower whose means are moral, civil and rational. It is the decent approach to our ends and the hallmark of success with our finitude.
Willpower, or the transcendent will, is authority. In service of our well-chosen convictions, it is a control we deliberately exert to restrain our reflexive willfulness and immediacy and to get something done. But its distinction is yet finer, more affinitive, more honorable. For willpower refers to the self-initiated subjective process to rule over ourselves, to think and to imagine, to create and interpret, to assess and decide, and to bring all this to bear on how we live out our lives. Its acquisition and expression is a life-long, dedicated commitment—we’ll always have to climb the ladder of the transcendent will.
Of course we will. How could it be any other way? Because it’s always been true—since forever, really—that every pioneering effort, every frontier, every broader horizon, every new possibility and every new responsibility to which we obligate ourselves must be fought for.
We fight not only for the territory reflexively guarded by willfulness, but for original and better cognitive practices and territory that reach beyond the harsh judgment of the Scoreboard and the isolating ego-protection program. Each of our originative efforts requires attention, energy, nerve and the will (authority) to match word to deed, despite the pressure of an unmediated immediacy from within and the politics from without.
Regarding the challenge from without: We have always to transcend the fear and anger that arise when we clash wills with others or must confront what is crude, unfair and ruthless in the status quo. This conflict of wills may not be newsworthy, and just because it doesn’t come to physical blows doesn’t mean that it’s not nerve-racking or intimidating. Most often, it’s an everyday event and occurs when family members engage, when members of a church or of a school’s board engage, when community issues are at stake.
Life is not beautifully enacted and illuminated and its outcome lovely—except when romanced by some films. It’s never how it ought to be, or will be. Even values and priorities we think the family or community should share are rarely conceded by everyone to be unassailable and viable principles. What we sincerely think best for teen, peer, mate, friend, employee or country often becomes a real or bogus point of contention and has to be worked out, ideally via persuasion or diplomacy rather than the hammer.
In such instances, and they are legion, we have to overcome any deficit of will or nerve and press ourselves to be heard and, perhaps, to prevail, sometimes over irritability, cantankerousness or just plain nastiness on the part of the other. (Or, worse-case scenario, on the part of ourselves.) In addition, the contested territory is rarely won, once and for all. Yesterday’s clashes may have to be resolved again today, and later today, and tomorrow.
So that’s the challenge from external forces that we face. And, internally, we have always to transcend the wayward drift—the lingering passivity and inertia not to mention the inevitable and innumerable distractions that separate us from our convictions.
In my post titled, The will to transcend, there’s life after everything, I discussed transcendence—this capacity we have to go beyond our reflexive, immediate selves. The focus of that particular post was the creation and invocation of the transcendent will that enables us to recover from severe realities of life that overburden the human spirit and bring the human body to its knees.
But the transcendent will is also what raises us above the humdrum, above marking time, above thinking that if not this day, then the next, or the next, we’ll get to work on creating a life of our own design. In fact, this project, if not made urgent, actually undermines the quality of life for ourselves and those who depend on us for leadership. Understanding the demand for transcendence and learning to satisfy it is the ennobling deed that makes life worth living and a light for those we hold near and dear.
Said another way, to generate and to bring the force of the transcendent will to our immediately realized presence is the highest order of our authority, our autonomy, our humanity. This commitment to performative excellence, that is, activism in service of how life ought to be, is our moral identity.
Yes, a certain amount of autonomy or authority is a civic obligation. Despite pressure from the immediate—anger, fear, desire, inertia, or a general “I don’t feel like it,” we get up and get to work, pay the bills, chauffeur the kids. We’re instrumental participants in the ordinary workaday machinery of life.
However, we aren’t just cogs in the machinery, and an ability to follow the rules is not the whole of our possibility. Products of the historical enterprise to further the human project, we recognize a call, from without and from within, to do and be more than a competent instrument. We accept the challenge to bring the transcendent will to our willful immediacy. We recognize that such transcendental authority absorbed into our immediacy is our real freedom.
But nothing can turn this freedom into a permanent condition. The state of our mind and our will and our moral identity is achieved on a decisive moment to decisive moment basis amid competing claims and circumstances, not least of which are the tugs of passivity, inertia and distraction.
So, our focus, here, is more than the personal authority demanded by law. Our focus is the subjective dimension of life. It is in the nature of climbing the ladder of the transcendent will that we are required to mediate our immediacy and to breach our inertia. We do this in endless instances where we are, in fact, challenged to exercise (fight for) our freedom, our promise and our hope for a better life for those currently excluded by condition and circumstance from its promise. The rewards are worth it.