Under the Iron Firmament (Part 2 of 2): A clearing after Schopenhauer–An ontic, dialogical, and learning-based approach to the development of will as a concept

When coming to an understanding of something with someone else, do we share “representations,” or do we share views, feelings, impressions, experiences, perhaps even something of ourselves—might we not also, in sharing what we understand, also share the story of what we understand through how we came to understand it and how exactly we know it?  How did we come to understand what we know in the first place?  Merely by way of “sufficient reason”?  Or was reason only one part in a continuous medium of who we are as we learned, the never-ending stream, of our thoughts, memories, feelings, intuitions, and cognition connected as all these were to all of what wasn’t visible as an “object” of our consciousness, namely all of our past history and the being in us of our memory (including all our apposite perceptions over our lives and our persisting or residual feelings about these as experiences), the being in us of what others have shared with us over the years, and even the being in us of us as our changing selves?   How is it that we can know or understand anything?  And how do we actually set about learning?  These are important questions, not to be dismissed as secondary to the responsibility of doing or acting in the world, or even perhaps of the need for us to establish a systematic science for acquiring knowledge, a science for the practice of learning that which we may not yet even be capable of truly knowing or really understanding about ourselves, much less about others and the world.  What is the being that has taught us, now teaches us, or that will teach us?   Is it one being or several?  What does it mean to say that our philosophy must be “ontic” rather than “ontological”?  Was “the being” that taught us “social” (understanding us from how our own view of other persons and humanity as a whole has been shaped by our being of a family, community, and society)?  Was it “psychological” (understanding us as a psychically unique and experienced individual, personally shaped and formed by how our history has personally affected us as subjects of the material conditions in our actual lives?)?  Was “this being” “spiritual” (understanding us as persons entitled to being treated with respect and dignity, and needing acceptance by others and to feel valued by them, which we personally know from our own life and history, in light of being of a sense of a sacred purpose and of being of a real need to feel to be wholly one with the sacred gift of life as something precious to us all, that how humans treat each other is just as material a condition and cause of the quality of our own lives as any other, of our physical and mental health, and of the state of our communities, greater society, our country, and even the world)?  “Ontic” means that the actual, existing being in and of us must have all these aspects to teach us, for us to learn well from it, must be of and know all of these ways.  We are “ontic beings” also.  That is to say, we are existing beings from these three aspects of ontic being–we are in all these ways and we are in and of all these aspects.  Being in all its aspects and in all its ways (and perhaps there are more aspects and ways than the three given here), becomes the “thing-in-itself,” but it is unknowable, so we do not use the word “ontology” (and by this I mean, the “logic of being”) because ontic being is of logics, plural, of the logics of all that is and of all that can cause and itself be subject to change, of what can become different from what it previously was and then still continue to exist and to be.

In the first article in this two-part series, I said that I didn’t agree with Schopenhauer’s initial premise and statement that “the world is my representation.”  There were two reasons that I couldn’t accept this to be adequate or true.  First, this statement is not true because the more one believes in a representation, the more it is likely to be something borne, whether wholly or partly, of ignorance and not of genuine understanding and/or knowledge.   A representation is more likely to be a “sort of” beginning, certainly can only be a minor part of a beginning, rather than being any sufficient end for knowledge of who we are and what we do in itself.   I do not myself possess a “representation of the world” but of things within it, all to varying degrees of knowledge and understanding of them, but all while knowing that my representations are representations and cannot be inherently true in and of themselves.  But the fact that they are not inherently true does not make them not real in some sense, aspect of them, or way.  They can be real without being true. Representations possess ontic being also.  They have the capacity to make one feel happy or sad, lonely or afraid, and they can have the capacity to aid oneself or others in understanding better.  But as we went to great lengths to talk about in the first article, they can also generate blinding chaos from people’s will to make of the world something they want it to be from their representations of it as these are based in their ignorance.  Have I sufficiently argued that this statement, “the world is my representation” is not something true?   Now I will.  The world, or something of or in the world, can actually be something known or knowable as true, so the world cannot entirely and simply be my representation of it.  A representation can only be a starting point, an aid, but it can never truly be the world, or anything actually in the world, not as it actually exists in itself and also in and through us.  No representation could ever do the ontic reality of the world and the people, places, things, and states of being of living things within it justice.  Probably no representation could do even the ontic reality or some of our representations’ effects on us justice.  Representations are more like a vehicle or a medium for true things in the world and of what can be real in the world, and most people know that the world and its things will always exceed and be something not entirely “representable” to us in the present, or from a sought-after view of knowing more of something or of knowing some yet greater truth about something, or even simply from possessing a sense of one’s own real experience that one knows is not being represented in the representation, in spite of a representation perhaps being true of some part or in some aspect of itself with respect to something in the world.   Was Schopenhauer intending to say that the world was something “unknowable” in itself?  No, he was not.  He thinks just the opposite, that the world, even in itself, is knowable.  So what was he saying?  This brings me to the second problem with the significance conferred on representations in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.  The statement that the world is my representation of it is not adequate, or “just” to what we now fully understand is true of human knowledge, true of what we need or feel we need to know, true of what we actually come to know that can be of value, true of how we acquire this knowledge, and especially true of how this knowledge ontically is within ourselves as knowing beings and of how this shapes our own practices and approaches to life and learning from this.  His solution for everything collapsing into chaos for some (for the lucky and educated few whose representations he might regard as “true”) was the privileged place in his thought he gave to “sufficient reason,” which is an  a priori faculty of the “knowing subject” in relation to objects making up objective reality, what he thinks is a true reality that might come to exist in the subject as static, whole, and true (presumably by virtue of something like a philosophy degree).  In Schopenhauer, true representations are possible, but they are not anything to do with our experience of objects, and we already possess in ourselves the schema, methods, techniques, procedures, and rules of logic and reasoning for grasping all that there is to know of “objective reality.”  Anything not based in this, in what exists in us prior to our being in the world, is false,  Objects are not “things in themselves,” like in Kant, but they can be known, but only by philosophical investigation of them or scientific methods in so far as these are acceptable in terms of the established practice of sufficient reasoning.  This leaves out all of life experience, intuition, ideas that have no basis in philosophical argument consistent with the logic of sufficient reasoning, discoveries that have yet to be understood from established scientific opinion, everything that is not already deemed an acceptable object of sufficient reasoning, and truths that one knows primarily by the heart and that only make sense to the head when another shares their perspective on them based as this may be in their experience.  This latter “object” is something that is not allowed by Schopenhauer’s view that the subject themselves cannot be an object of knowledge for a true representation.  And yet, most of that of actual substance that we can know may have come of knowing ourselves as changing beings, and this, as “a world,” as a “universe,” of “all we are” and “all we have been,” and of which perhaps it is not possible for us even to be aware or to consciously “recall” to mind, might ground a great deal of adequate and true knowledge, genuine wisdom, for ourselves and others.  We do become knowledgeable of ourselves, and the more we know in this, all of it can become less and less accessible to our conscious minds as “thinking,” “knowing” beings.   Of course, all of this could be “indexed,” could find its way through the philosopher onto the “table of sufficient reasoning,” in so far as they could apply rules of acceptable logic to it and deem it adequate, but then the “table of sufficient reasoning” would include ourselves as well, all we presently are, and then also the content of our lives and what our lives have been for us through ourselves and within us.   And as I said, in Schopenhauer’s thought, it is not possible ever to truly know ourselves as representing and knowing subjects.  Could we learn this aspect of ourselves though?  Well, yes, why not?  But then, according to Schopenhauer, what we learned could not be said to be true, could it?  Well, why not?  Why couldn’t it be true?  And yet the knowledge we actually do possess of this, of ourselves as knowing subjects, the true representations we can make of the world we know, some of this we can certainly regard as true for ourselves and others, and at least some of this might very well, in fact, actually be true, if anything at all could ever be said or have ever actually truly been known to be true.  This brings me to how this ontic experience of knowledge within ourselves, of possessing knowledge as something that is seldom, if ever, “visible to us,” and very often cannot even be accessed by us until we actually need it, might better inform and shape how we relate to a world of things we need to learn and to know.

If we’re not working primarily or firstly with a “representation,” then what are we working with?   What do we have to work with?  Well, we have what we’ve always had: Objects, things, concepts feelings, notions, works, realia, texts/contexts, nuances, perspectives, attitudes, points-of-view–this list could go on at some length.  These can be divided, combined, and ordered into subjects or simply remain objects in themselves, but we have placed “representation” into a tertiary position behind that which we are aiming to apprehend, figure, understand, know, or, yes, simply “to represent” (and the list of verbs of what we wish to do in relation to our objects and subjects is perhaps also one of great length).  I say, “representation” is “tertiary,” and that means not second, but third.  So what is second?  The answer is simple: The learning process itself.  And for this we are offering a dialogical approach that will facilitate the development of understanding and knowledge as well as a chance for further learning through concepts, ideas, insights, representations, works, and whatever happens in the mind to better “know” or “understand” what is being learned.

Self-awareness is required for the dialogical approach to learning.  Dialectic can be one entry-point, and may even be required as an introduction for beginners, but dialectic is not the same thing as the dialogical approach. Does dialectic produce self-awareness?  Perhaps.  It is a safe way to try.  If not, mindfulness practices (and we caution here that meditation is something different from mindfulness practices, and that meditation should not be attempted without a trusted instructor) coupled with Zen can produce an awareness of oneself as a thinking being.  But how does one come to be aware of one’s own feelings?   Is feeling oneself and others within oneself for oneself and others not a whole half of a whole person?   Feeling comes with time in thoughts that one has come to recognize as one’s own, especially from the real memories and the emotions and feelings this elicits.  But another caution: memories can be scary or distressing and they can also cause a person to become very sick.  But nevertheless, it is true, being aware of one’s own feelings (and also of those of others) requires self-awareness itself, and self-awareness is not adequate for the dialogical approach without awareness of one’s own and others’ feelings.  In other words, a “whole person” is required for the dialogical approach, but by “whole person” we simply mean a person who can think for themselves and others while genuinely feeling themselves and others.   Becoming a thinking being is relatively easy in terms of being straightforward—it simply takes practise, time, and effort.  Becoming a genuinely feeling being is certainly not.  If a person knows of other, safer ways of accessing oneself as a genuinely feeling being, one should feel free to try them.  But mindfulness practices will always work eventually, as long as one receives the right help if one encounters serious difficulties.  My own best and safest possible recommendation for becoming a genuinely feeling person for oneself and others: Reading and writing poetry.

If dialectic is an exchange between two different or opposing sides, then what makes it dialectic is the fact that it is always done in syllogisms, in the form of a formal argument.  Dialectic is also one mode of doing philosophy if your argument only involves you as its presenter.  In this case, you are sharing both sides in a formal argument, in syllogisms, and  mediating and establishing a conclusion from how you view the relation of opposition or difference between the two sides, aspects, or perspectives, with both of these being necessary for you to draw your conclusion from your argument.  This practice produces self-awareness in thought probably because one learns that there always is more than one side or perspective to anything, and one learns respect for sides other than one’s own—that is, one learns that one’s own side is one’s own in a world of other perspectives.  But dialectic is a thinking enterprise.  A dialogical approach is not dialectic because dialogism is not reducible as a rule to philosophy, to one of philosophy’s modes; it is not reducible to the syllogism; and it is not reducible to the formal practice of two sides being argued in opposition or in relation to one another toward a logical conclusion.  Dialogism does not occur in a “single moment,” as a “single event,” in time and space for the purpose “then and there” of drawing a true conclusion.  Dialogism is ongoing for all of time and in all of space.  But one can use dialectic in dialogism as one of its media, mode that it is, however one wishes or feels the need to do so.

So let’s talk about just dialogism on its own.  I said dialogism always involves the use of media.  But some of the media are or involve modes, modes through a medium, but I only say this because a poetic can simply be understood as a use of a medium, that medium being language, or it can involve developing a special mode, a certain way or special technique that can be understood formally in terms of a “science” or “school” of poetics.  Dialectic, as we’ve seen, is a mode within philosophy that can be valuable or useful in dialogism, but it is actually only one part of one’s own dialogical approach.  Media is a far broader, formally looser term, than mode, but dialogism involves media that might be used in modes for what dialogism is, which we’ll now present and then further inscribe into its apposite human context.  Dialogism is participating in a world of things, living beings, other people, and objects and/or subjects, and anything else that makes up one’s own living, changing world, through one’s own use of media of communicative expression and thought with the awareness that one is doing so intentionally and with a certain intention of practice that will enable one to think and to feel, and to experience, the world as a living ontic being, a world of beyond-material significance in and for one’s own life, and to gain knowledge about oneself, others, and the world from being in communication or even in communion with it, and, if or when possible, applying that learning and knowledge to one’s life, relationships, work, and other activities.  Self-awareness makes your participation an ethical commitment wherever you happen to be in your life, which is why self-awareness is seen as required for it to be considered dialogism.  Now that we’ve given a definition, we can say, with this definition understood, dialogism is an approach to living out a relationship with the earth and the world that respects all of its things as ontically living beings, whether alive in themselves or alive in us.  It involves the heart, the head, all the senses, the intuition, the soul, the psyche, the mind, the body, the spirit.  To develop one’s wholeness in a way that one realizes the fruits of any or all of these aspects of ourselves might be an aim of dialogism but this is only possible through being in living connection and communion with our planet, the world, and everything within these that can live within ourselves, and so learning everything we can from this as a practice, an activity, a work, a life, a dream, a changing reality.  My own hope is that this form of dialogism will help people come to care better and “more” about the planet and all that is alive in our world, not as they feel they must or should, but as they feel they would like to and as they actually will want and need to.

This will strike many as a dangerous enterprise because are we not dealing with nature, most especially human nature, in this?  And does nature, human nature also, not possess its own “will to power” that it can, without any question, direct against us, utterly erasing, destroying, or vanquishing us unless we become subject to the limit it places on us in its own seemingly blind and sublime power over us as individuals.  That’s what people are and have always been inclined to think, and so they should, because there have been countless instances in their very own times, in countless lives, when this has been shown to be true, that nature is nature’s own dominion and that nature governs above all else (and this is perhaps even what makes up a great share of what the news conveys to us, one of the “lessons about the human condition” of the news).  This is true when, try as we might to keep nature “out there” or nature “within us” “in check” or “in balance,” nature can always remind us that all of what we cannot observe of what is happening within itself, all of what is “going on” within some quasi-ontic bubble within and of itself that it is not possible for us to observe or perceive, can breach us and overrun us as beings and claim us for the quasi-ontic purpose that our obliteration or our oblivion serves for it.  It can be considered a hard truism, a disturbing and even potentially pathogenic one, and yet one that we even and especially must teach to the young (sometimes the very young), that, for this aspect of nature, we must all learn to always “respect” it, or we risk being destroyed by it or its destroying others through our own unfortunate errors or ignorance.  We are to be told that nature has a will that is indifferent to us ourselves as beings, or perhaps, if we are young, told that nature has a “will of its own.”  Schopenhauer would go so far as to say we also have a will, and he would go so far as to say that, our own will, our own personal will, is all that can be objectively “known” by the human mind in the entire human universe.  It would likely miss the point of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to say respecting our will, and respecting us ourselves, in consideration of nature’s “blind” will over and against us and of all the effects and chaos from distortive and untrue representations in the phenomenal human world, that our will is or can be “our own.”  We have “free will,” it is true, but in being unable to control, shape, or even influence much of what exists in the phenomenal human world and in not being able to know anything of “what is really going on” within nature’s will, while we have “free will,” this also misses the point for the same reason that saying our will is “our own” misses the point.  In Schopenhauer, nature is what governs us above all, and it tends to impose an inflexible and sometimes cruel set of conditions upon our bodies and minds and to dictate if it does not utterly determine with something like implicit, but strict and unforgiving, parameters how we can work with it within the distinct conditions that exist wherever we are.  We are also subject to the nature of other humans and their wills (whatever they have determined these to be for themselves).  Our own will is all that we can come to possess for anything we could possibly imagine we might set out to do, “freely” or otherwise.

In Schopenhauer, the will is the only objective fact within ourselves of which we are consciously aware as subjects. But we are not consciously aware of it as a “thing” but as an action or state of being, or as an agency (as a “verb”). Nevertheless, it is phenomenal while also being perceptually ontic.  This is why it can be, for, in, and of our reason, the “thing-in-itself.”   Can be.  And it is the only thing in the human universe that can.  So it is made so.  If he hadn’t made it so, then he’d not be reasoning from what he claims is objectively true.  It is seldom, if ever, remarked that this is something of a negative or “weak” discovery, because its being an illuminating discovery that is true and genuine does not necessarily mean that it offers us anything positive for our human problems, concerns, or enterprises in the phenomenal world.  Not directly as something we can necessarily come to enact or possess for ourselves or direct immediately to our own ends through community, with others, or living in society, but rather only as individuals “for ourselves” as subjects of our own will.  Not everyone’s wills are formed the same.  As individuals, then, it is a weak discovery for there are very special conditions that exist in and for developing the will for the fruits of knowing and acting in nature and in the phenomenal world for the purpose of what our will further allows us to do.   What can we “cash out” from the discovery of our own will as a real and genuine thing, as the only “thing-in-itself,” as the only “thing in us” that we can actually and truly know for and as what it is?   First, in making the will the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer grants that we cannot completely know the thing-in-itself even though we can perceive our will and derive from it something of what is required to know and to act in nature and the human phenomenal world.  What then do we actually know about this will of ours?  As stated, it is not to be confused with some “thing” in the material world.  It is as we perceive it to be, not a “thing” as an object of our physical senses, but it is something that can only be known to our perception as it acts in ourselves, something known merely as it “is.”  Thus, all that we can know of things as they are and of us as we are is reduced to something that is a state of our own being and something that exists in nature as nature itself acts and is (although, once more, nature’s will is unknowable to us).

The will cannot really be known as such, as will, so to best serve us it should be made subject to what we can know in and through what Schopenhauer terms “sufficient reason.”   Furthermore, for Schopenhauer the will is not something we can really “learn” but something we apply sufficient reason to in becoming more familiar with what we can possess by way of sufficient reason as knowing subjects.  Again, all that is knowable to us is merely all that we can acquire as knowledge by applying sufficient reason to our will as actors while knowing what we can from sufficient reason as knowing subjects of nature.  Our will and ourselves then are to become “unified” by means of sufficient reason so that we can then be directed toward the task of acting and surviving in the natural and phenomenal world.  And that is what Schopenhauer offers us for our chances and for our lives, a will that is our own but that cannot be directly learned, but that is to be made subject to what he has determined to be all we can know as knowing subjects, in terms of sufficient reason, which are laws, principles, and established, static, and fixed relations in the objective universe that are the only known determinants of nature accessible to us.  It is to action then which our knowledge in relation to our will can best be applied, actions of ourselves but also action as something of nature as we can know it as “knowing animals” through subjecting the objects in the universe we encounter to sufficient reason and thereby further learning how to apply our will.  The medium of our human activity then are the laws of nature as we can know them merely as subjects, in and as ourselves, as “knowing animals.”   We require sufficient reason not to “master” our will, but to apply ourselves to it, which we know through applying to our will the principles, laws, and fixed and static relations we come to know for this purpose from knowing the “rules of nature” in ourselves.

The will is something ontic and perceivable within us but for Schopenhauer it is univocal, of an entirely determined and fixed nature, and static or unchanging.  This allows our will to be made subject to our own knowledge of determined, static and fixed relations, principles, and laws.  It can be of and in us as “nature intended” only in so far as we know these relations, principles, and laws, which we also know from within ourselves and from nowhere else, and in applying these we can learn to apply our will as best we can to our own acts within the natural world.  If the will were not static or unchanging, not of an entirely determined and fixed nature, and not univocal, this relation of ours through sufficient reason to it would not be possible.  Everything in Schopenhauer’s thought that we can know originates in nature as it can be understood entirely from within ourselves, and everything is made possible by acts of our own will, which can only be known through the principles, laws, and sets of relations comprising “sufficient reason.”

It is true that we do not learn in the way Schopenhauer expects people to learn anymore.  And the content of what we learn is no longer something that we can regard as fixed, unchanging, entirely determined, and entirely lawful and ordered in itself for all time.  If people wish to believe that nature can be understood this way, then I will permit them their chance to argue it, but I will never accept that human beings should be regarded as incapable of thinking about a world that makes sense to them in their time and place and then communicating what they understand or learned about it in a way that that world cannot be thought or felt by another person as something within the ambit of their own belief, genuine understanding, true knowing, or personal interest such that that other person cannot explore it from this “new” vantage to further their own understanding or knowledge from that shared content.  It is utterly impossible that two human beings completely ignorant of the laws, principles, and relations of sufficient reason have never shared something with each other that did not or could not have added to our knowledge of our human society, of their own community, of themselves, or of the natural world.   In today’s world, sharing information, perspectives, the content or meaning of our experience, theories, stories, representations of scenes we’ve witnessed, all of this is content through which we learn about ourselves, others, and the structures, institutions, spaces, and places that make up our human world, how we study and come to know nature itself notwithstanding (and we certainly no longer rely on Schopenhauer’s table of sufficient reason for this, but a range of tools, procedures, methods, approaches, instruments, and our own observations and theories (some of which may even require representations of what is perceived and how this is to be interpreted and understood)).   Dialogism is an approach that is learning-based not because we believe people should always be learning wherever they are and whatever they happen to be doing, but because it is possible that we in fact are always learning or that learning does not happen just when we decide to make it or to let it happen.  Being involves learning and learning is involved in being.  Furthermore, everything we understand or know we have learned.  Perhaps nature is kinder with respect to the ease of learning of some as compared to others, but never is simple awareness of a relation or a categorical distinction between two objects sufficient to qualify as knowledge.  Knowledge requires something more, something of understanding.  Knowledge is not understanding, but understanding is required for true knowledge, and simple awareness cannot on its own be understanding.  That brings us back to the dialogical approach.  It is a person’s own choice to follow the dialogical approach.  There are other ways to learn.  But this approach is meant not just to be a practice or a method, but to “represent” a philosophy of learning.  That philosophy of learning can be the learner’s very own because this method of learning is how we ourselves become a knowing individual whose own thoughts, feelings, attitudes, perspectives, understandings, and knowledges can shape a positive relation to the human and natural world with the view that one’s own philosophy of learning might itself draw on one’s own knowledge of being and learning in the world.  One thing is certain.  Whatever the will is within us in terms of our ontic being, our own will is primarily a concept that we learn socially, psychically, spiritually, and in life, that we learn initially in terms of another’s representation, and then that we must continually relearn better and further to “make it our own” throughout our lives, as our world, our relation to our world, and we ourselves change.  Do we all possess a will?  I believe we all do.  But our will is our own and our relation to our will, within reasonable limits, is also our own.  Motivation, as Schopenhauer himself admits, is a matter of our will.  But reward-based motivation can become a pathological condition for our will, while true inspiration, desire, and love can provide the will with what it needs to draw on ontic being, the sense of what ontically is within ourselves that then goes deeper than the will, and that then is likely prior to the will within us, for the sake of our own needs or those of others or another.  Will should be something that allows ethical relations with others to bear real fruit, for it is what enables us to act in courage, out of love or compassion, and simply for the sake of kindness in our world.   The will is a concept and that makes it something we also learn as something real and true of ourselves that we ourselves relate to as individuals through dialogism within the human and natural world.  What is the will really though, and by what reasoning?   Does it matter?  It is in our brain, our mind, our heart, our psyche, of our soul, and it can become one with our spirit—but whatever it is, it is whatever we understand and can know it to be as a condition and/or factor in personal effort, strength, and volition for ourselves and others.

We are not just ourselves, purely and entirely of our own nature and nature itself, but our being ontically consists also of aspects of being such as the social, the psychological, and the spiritual, and these involve or require us to consider directing our will toward other beings.  This is necessary for our learning, our health and well-being, our growth into personhood, and for our very survival.  As regards learning and knowledge, a person might think they know until they actually understand and then they will realize that, before, they did not really know and that now they do, but that they may not yet know everything.  This is awareness which is not the same thing as knowledge, but self-awareness, awareness of one’s own feelings, awareness of the feelings of others and awareness of what one thinks, knows, and does not know is required for an approach to learning that involves the whole self.   This approach might be described as “learning in life and life in learning,” as it involves fully participating in a world of things, ideas, people, places, and concepts as a world that changes as one lives and that is alive in a person as they themselves change.  In dialogism, understanding is essential for and in knowing, and true knowledge is not possible without it.  However, the whole of the person as a unity is required for actual understanding, with them feeling as they think and thinking as they feel, which they can develop through the dialogical approach to learning.  In Schopenhauer, one knows by means of a system that is the very opposite of dialogism.  The person is subjected in their will to laws, principles, and established relations that are static, fixed, and entirely determined.   It is possible, and in fact, desired by its designer, that a person in this system never engage at all with the world in terms of what exists, changes, and is alive within it.  It is possible that, in subjecting oneself to the static, unchanging, and determined laws of nature that have no existence for the person within the living world that one becomes an animal-like being that cannot change, cannot learn, and so cannot grow, while life itself becomes something that makes one liable to lacking the understanding to form relationships, understand other people’s needs and motives, or participate in one’s community for reasons other than one’s own self-interest.  Will in this system is all one has for survival and everything else beyond the will is reduced to what is not of the world but of one’s own reason as can be known through the aforementioned laws and principles.  Would it be surprising at all if such a person in and of this system subjected others to their own will as a rule and could not respect the life and liberty of another soul?   Will must be directed towards others, but we first must understand our world and others in a way that allows acts to be true and genuine in their object, not just in their motive.  Dialogism can help with this, because in it, will is a concept that brings together all of the person, all aspects of the person as a living being, and as being something learned and developed through life in the living world.  Being and we ourselves ontically precede our will and the world and us in it can be whatever we can make it become, granted that we can learn it in this way and how to be in it in this way.  Our will can be “made good” for this, and then our world as a living being through our own being in and of it might become the subject, object, and the complete expression of who we are.