StefanBolea The Will To Life in Death

Submission to Academia Letters
The Will-to-Life-in-Death
Stefan Bolea, Babes-Bolyai University
1. Compulsion: The Will-to-Life

According to Schopenhauer, the will is the essence of being: “the will is …
the inner content, the essential aspect of the world”[1]; “Only the will exists…”
(WW1, §35, p. 207): “The will is the innermost, the kernel [Kern] of every
individual thing and likewise of the whole” (WW 1, §21, p. 135). The will is
intrinsically directed towards life; therefore, “will” and “will-to-life” are synony-
mous (WW1, §54, p. 301). However, the “essence of the will” is “an endless
striving” [Streben] (WW1, §29, p. 188), a “transition” from desire to satisfac-
tion and “from this to a new desire”, a via dolorosa where “suffering” [Leiden]
leads to boredom and boredom leaves way only to a new suffering (WW1, §52,
p. 287). Will, being synonymous to (cosmic) life, is inescapable: willing and
striving are “fully comparable to an unquenchable thirst” (WW1, §57, p. 338).
“There is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering”
(WW1, §56, p. 336). If one asked oneself where “did Dante get the material
for his hell”, there would be a clear answer: from this very world (WW1, §59,
p. 351). We are not born to die (that would be easy), we are born for endless
suffering.
2. Psychosis: The Will-to-Death
If life is so terrible, why not aim for the annihilation of the nightmare?
Philipp Mainländer, Schopenhauer’s darkest disciple, speaks of a “demon” which
strives [streben] not for desire, but for the asphyxiation of desire: if thirst was
unquenchable, maybe we should get rid of the whole structure which created
thirst in the first place. This “demon” is the will-to-death [Wille zum Tode].
According to Mainländer, the Schopenhauerian will sees/ conceives/ desires “life
as a means for death” [der Wille das Leben als Mittel zum Tode will][2]. One
Academia Letters preprint.

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1
may discover in cosmos only “the deep desire of absolute destruction” and if
one pays attention, one may hear a calling from the divine spheres: “Salvation!
Salvation! Death of our lives!” [Erlösung! Erlösung! Tod unserem Leben!]and a
consoling answer: „You will find annihilation and you will be saved! [Ihr werdet
alle die Vernichtung finden und erlöst werden!] (PE, p. 19). According to
Mainländer, not only we, as human beings, aspire to death, but also the animals
and the plants; the whole of cosmos wants self-annihilation. Even God killed
Himself to give life to the universe: he moved from the sphere of superbeing
[Übersein] to that of nonbeing [Nichtsein]. After all levels will have collapsed, we
shall gaze “with horror or with deep satisfaction, after our nature, into absolute
nothingness, into the absolute void, into nihil negativum” (PE, pp. 94-5). To
be fair, Mainländer’s extreme nihilism, that we have just touched upon[3], is a
consequence of the paradoxical last pages of Schopenhauer’s main work, where
will, after encapsulating the whole cosmos, allies itself with nihil negativum
(archetypal nothing), becoming pure nothingness: “for everyone who is still
filled with the will, what remains after it is completely abolished is certainly
nothing. But conversely, for those in whom the will has turned and negated
itself, this world of ours which is so very real with all its suns and galaxies is –
nothing” (WW1, §71, pp. 438-9).
3. Neurosis: The Will-to-Power
According to Nietzsche, life is not the endless striving and suffering of the
will-to-be (Schopenhauer) or the disguise and bait of the will-to-death (Main-
länder), “life is will to power”[4]. Life becomes the endless neurosis of Mehr-
Macht-sein-Wollen. In Heidegger’s interpretation, “every willing is a willing to
be more. Power itself only is inasmuch, as, and as long as, it remains a willing
to be more power”[5]. Nietzsche argued that “what man wants, what every
smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increase of power … the proto-
plasm extends it[s] pseudopodia in search of something that resists it – not from
hunger but from will to power” (WP § 702, p. 373) [6] . A personified quantum
of power would probably see itself in the following manner: “I shall not rest
until I incessantly grow and become so much more”. But where does this end?
Are we obliged to trade desires without rest? (Schopenhauer) Does our desire
to live disclose our quest for finitude? (Mainländer) Or are we destined to grow
in a pseudo-capitalistic cancerous fashion not for our sake but for the sake of

2
the neurotic becoming of the will to power, which possesses us? (Nietzsche)
4. Solution? The Will-to-Life-in Death
If to live is to suffer (Schopenhauer) or to endless grow (Nietzsche), and to
die is to end both suffering and growth (Mainländer), wouldn’t we find tran-
quility and ataraxia if we cheated both life and death and lived as dead? Of
course, it would still be a form of passive nihilism, which Nietzsche loathed,
and perhaps existentialists would despise us as inauthentic zombies, but, again,
wouldn’t we be free of the “unquenchable thirst”, “cancerous growth” and the
actualization of “the will-to-death”? Indeed, it is a nihilistic solution, and from
the perspective of realistic life one that does not solve much, but what if we
acted on perception alone, and not on reality? And to those which argue that
without the pain and suffering of life, there can be no sweetness or happiness,
we answer absentia doloris melius quam voluptatem / “the absence of pain is
preferable to pleasure”.
Choosing life-in-death over life and death, we return to the wisdom of Eu-
ropean Buddhism (and perhaps to the pseudo-stoicism of the late Cioran), as
Claudio Magris showed in A Different Sea: “He pauses in front of an ancient
drago tree, possibly even older than the cult of the Madonna. It was not so much
its height that fascinated him as its sideways expansion and tangled branches
stretching out seemingly without limit. Any moment now it would collapse un-
der its own excessive growth. Proliferation courts disaster (emphasis mine). His
Austrian education taught Enrico the virtue of cutting back, of doing less (e.m.)
… Branches should be pruned. Proliferation is a rhetorical, bubonic swelling to
be lanced and cauterized. Shape is achieved by reduction … That is the way
forward, not the tropical tumescence of this tree. To presume something from
life leads to megalomania, as Ibsen said. Even Buddha only started the true life
when he ceased to yearn (e.m.) and instead drained the spurting, excess lymph
that bloats the heart and glands”[7].
References
Ștefan Bolea, “Toward the ‘Never-Born’. Mainländer and Cioran”, in Revue
Roumaine de Philosophie, 65, 1, pp. 143-153.

3
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1-2, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper
Collins, 1991.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will as World and Representation, vol. 1, trans.

and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway, Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010 (WW1).
Claudio Magris, A Different Sea, trans. M S Spurr, Harvill Press, 1995.
Philipp Mainländer, Philosophie der Erlösung, ed. Ulrich Horstmann, Insel,

1989 (PE).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Holling-

dale, Random House, 1968 (WP).
[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will as World and Representation, vol. 1, trans.
and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway, Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010, §54, p. 302, henceforth WW1.
[2] Philipp Mainländer, Philosophie der Erlösung, ed. Ulrich Horstmann, Insel,
1989, p. 59, henceforth PE.
[3] For more on this, see Ștefan Bolea, “Toward the ‘Never-Born’. Mainländer
and Cioran”, in Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 65, 1, pp. 143-153.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R. J.

Hollingdale, Random House, 1968, § 254, p. 148, henceforth WP.
[5] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I-II, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper
Collins, 1991, p. 60.
[6] See WP 644, WP 656.
[7] Claudio Magris, A Different Sea, trans. M S Spurr, Harvill Press, 1995, p.
23-4.


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Submission to Academia Letters

1. Compulsion: The Will-to-Life

Academia Letters preprint.

Academia Letters preprint.

Academia Letters preprint.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will as World and Representation, vol. 1, trans.

Claudio Magris, A Different Sea, trans. M S Spurr, Harvill Press, 1995.

Philipp Mainländer, Philosophie der Erlösung, ed. Ulrich Horstmann, Insel,

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Holling-

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R. J.

[6] See WP 644, WP 656.

Academia Letters preprint.

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