Philosophy and Psychosophy: Will

Note: This is only a brief, and incomplete analysis of the philosophical lineage of the Will. Proper research demands the study of societies, thinkers, and religions throughout history, as well as all Will placements. But what is guaranteed is that the reader will come away understanding the relationship between one's philosophy (worldview) and one's psychotype.

One thing all the authors of this website's favorite typology systems did was associate their definitions and concepts with philosophical concepts, movements, and historical figures. The special element of Psychosophy is that Afanasyev directly defined one’s psychosophy type as the expression of one’s worldview, which is essentially the same as one’s personal philosophical system. Therefore, it’s not surprising to see a direct explanation of this in his book Syntax of Love:

Everyone is religious, but each in their own way. Even the 1st Logic can be religious, but its faith has nothing in common with the mystical idolatry of popular belief. The essence of the 1st Logic's religion lies in the absolutization of itself – of the mind.

The 1st Will sees in the Absolute an unconscious, blind volitional principle (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Kierkegaard, etc.), and grants eternity exclusively to the human "spirit," the will.

The 1st Physics professes outright idolatry, i.e., it deifies matter in all its forms, and conceives of immortality in a purely physical way, similar to the early Christian concept of the coming Resurrection in the flesh.

The 1st Emotion identifies the Divine with the highest and brightest experience ("God is love" 1 John 4:8) and allows only the "soul," the essence of the heart, to live on beyond the grave.”

Knowing this, I decided to make a series of texts dedicated to psychotypes explained in the light of philosophy, starting with the backbone of the system, the Will. All 1st Will types — whether they’re common men or immersed in the field of philosophy — believe that the center of existence is the blind, unconscious, irrational volitional principle, which is why the introductory chapter on Will in Syntax of Love takes the name of Schopenhauer’s book “The World as Will and Representation”.

Schopenhauer is part of the philosophical movement of German idealism, which started after Kant’s epistemological revolution. Kant (“ghazali”) distinguished between phenomena, things as they appear to us, and the noumenon (the thing-in-itself), the reality underlying appearances that cannot be known through experience. Schopenhauer goes against his master, affirming that the noumena could be personally felt by every human being through their body. The body craves, wants, desires even against our own resistance. He affirms that will “is the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man...”

This is the position of a 1st Will, someone who strongly feels the presence of a driving irrational force greater than themselves, which manifests itself through beings in order to perpetuate itself. Now, those who remotely heard of Schopenhauer must know he is the father of pessimism.His ethical philosophy was largely dedicated to finding a way to bring the Will to an end, the state of not desiring or craving anything at all. Isn’t this contrary to the nature of a Tsar? Not at all. See, Afanasyev mentions Schopenhauer not only as a great representative of 1st Will, but also of the mentality of 4th Physics. He writes:

Schopenhauer considered this world the worst of all possible worlds and called his philosophy "the philosophy of pessimism." This is very fitting for all "Akhmatovas", who experience a chronic feeling of loneliness and sadness. Indeed, Akhmatova's sorrowful muse can only be matched by Schopenhauer's speculative philosophy of despair (1st Will + 4th Physics).

The point is Schopenhauer despised life. He didn’t see worth in being alive because the Will (as a bounding force) only led to suffering from yearning and boredom from having. He was a tragic man with a thought made for what Nietzsche (“pushkin”) called “decadent”, someone with a lack of vitality and strength to affirm life in spite of its tragical nature.

Look no further than another pessimist, Mainländer, to confirm the 1st Will + 4th Physics mentality. He was influenced by Schopenhauer and, much like him, put Will as the center of things. However, his pessimism goes further, and he writes about the metaphysical wish of existence to cease itself. The Will starts as an absolute bounding force, but it fragments itself until death, which he equated with salvation:

And if the individual will has a unitary and indivisible movement [eine ungetheilte Bewegung], because it is itself something whole and indivisible, then, as an object, it is an inorganic individual [unorganisches Individuum]. Of course, here we are speaking only of impulse [Trieb], of the internal movement within a determinate individuality. If, on the other hand, the will has a resultant movement [eine resultierende Bewegung], arising from having divided itself, then, as an object, it is an organism [Organismus]. The separated part is called an organ.

Organisms then differ from one another as follows: If the movement of the organs is merely irritability [Irritabilität], which only reacts to an external stimulus, then the organism is a plant [Pflanze]. The resultant movement is growth [Wachstum].

If, in addition, the individual will is partially divided within itself, such that a part of its movement has been divided into something that moves and something that is moved, into something that directs and something that is directed, or, in other words, into irritability and sensitivity [Sensibilität], which, reunited, constitute the whole part of the movement, then we have, as an object, an animal [Thier].

Sensitivity (and therefore also spirit) is nothing other than a part of the movement, just as essential to the will, and as such likewise a manifestation of the will, just as irritability or the remainder of the total movement is. There is only one principle in the world: the individual will to live, and outside it there is no other.

But at the bottom, the immanent philosopher sees in the entire universe only the deepest longing for absolute annihilation, and it is as if he clearly hears the call that permeates all spheres of heaven: Redemption! Redemption! Death to our life! and the comforting answer: you will all find annihilation and be redeemed!

However, just because the 2nd Emotion brings intensity to such a mentality, it does not follow that “socrates” is any less pessimistic. Recall that the representative of this type accepted his death gladly when the Greeks condemned him, uttering the final words, “Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt.” With the knowledge that Asclepius was their god of healing, it’s not unreasonable to interpret this as Socrates believing death was, ultimately, a relief from the illness we call life. We have a similar belief expressed in another philosopher Afanasyev mentioned, Hartmann. Though he was only typed 1st Will, I’m certain he was a “socrates”:

For the same Unconscious which wills life, and, moreover, for its quite special ends wills just this life in spite of its wretchedness, will certainly not omit to fit out the creatures of life with just as many illusions as they need, in order not merely to make life supportable, but also to leave over enough love of life, elasticity, and freshness for the life-tasks to be accomplished by them and claiming all their energy, and thus to cozen them concerning the misery of their existence.

From that, the mentality of 1st Will and 4th Physics is expressed. Those curious about his Logic and Emotion positions can quickly take a look at his philosophical system to understand reason didn’t come distant from Will. From Britannica:

Hartmann centred his system on the single phenomenon of the human unconscious, thought by him to evolve through three stages. In the first, called the “unconscious,” both reason and will, or rationalism and irrationalism, were united as an absolute, all-embracing spiritual principle underlying all existence. With the fall of man, reason and will were separated, and will, as blind impulse, began to determine the melancholy career of the unconscious. The second stage, called “cosmic,” began with the origin of conscious life, in which man began to strive for such idealistic goals as happiness.

How does the philosophy of a Tsar express itself in other types? Let’s take a look at what the most famous and universal man in history has to say. Of course, I’m talking about Christ. The debate of Jesus' type is already too troublesome for me to bring it here, so I’ll side with Afanasyev’s opinion that Apostle Matthew’s portrayal of Christ is indicative of the “tolstoy” psychology:

Matthew 6:24:

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Matthew 8:21-22:

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”

The “tolstoy” and “lenin” dilemma is, according to the theory, between the Spirit and the Body. And it doesn’t need much to understand how Christ and Christianity itself wage war on everything regarding bodily egoism, sensuality, greed for riches, idolatry… Only the spiritual aspect — meaning, the Will — embodied in God and lived through faith (2nd Emotion) can bring upon salvation. This of course isn’t different from what the writer Leo Tolstoy, or the religious leader of Islam professed. As long as 1st Will and 3rd Physics exist, so will the ascetic war on the material. And we see the same phenomena in our next thinker, and his systematized willful asceticism, Karl Marx.

Contrary to the previous examples, Marx didn’t have the artistic and mystical gift of a prophet, since he was a “lenin”. But the dilemma is still there:

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Scientific socialism was what Christian and Utopian socialism already hoped for but through a rigorous systematization and analysis of capitalism and how it drained the spirit (Will) of the people.

What is being described here is how the creative essential force of life, the Will (to think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence… essentially, to be), is drained by a world which is progressively chained by material accumulation, greed. His communism not only represents the mentality of 3rd Physics, but that of 1st Will later embodied in Lenin, the destruction of divisions of class by the willful uprising of the proletariat, the historical protagonist.

The final element I will add is the inherent Oedipus complex in the 1st Will and 3rd Physics. Freud, also a “Lenin”, went in a different direction from his brother-in-type and instead focused on psychological exploration of the Unconscious. It’s obvious that his conceptualization of the Unconscious is synonymous with Will, as the force that continuously desires without our own awareness, slipping through dreams, behaviors we can’t explain, and cycles we can’t help but repeat. While that is true, in the same way Schopenhauer’s 4th Physics made the Will inherently tragic, Freud’s 3rd Physics made it inherently sexual. He is jokingly thought of by our culture as this man obsessed with neurotic sexuality, the daddy issues. But Afanasyev said this is precisely the way of the 1st Will and 3rd Physics, both positions that compose jealousy and possessiveness in one's mind. Freud was, to him, the first person to make a diagnosis of the matter, though he committed the mistake of thinking his own psyche worked the way everyone else’s did. And it’s no wonder the triangulation of desire, the castration, the Oedipus complex is so unappealing, often repulsive, to other psychosophy types. His former colleague and student Jung (“plato”) thought that was questionable, and it’s what led to their separation.