Male flatworms, those primordial swordsmen of the slime, have invented what can only be described as penetration politics. They don’t seduce; they don’t serenade; they don’t even swipe right. They duel. Penises out, sabres up, they jab at one another in a tiny, biological cockfight until one is stabbed into submission. The “winner” ejaculates his way to freedom, while the “loser” becomes a mother by default. Gender, in flatworm society, is not destiny; it’s a duel with dicks for sabres.
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Beauvoir once reminded us: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The flatworm demonstrates this principle with obscene literalness. You are not born female. You become female when you lose the fight and get stabbed full of sperm. Congratulations: you’ve been penis-fenced into maternity.
And here we can smuggle in that old feminist provocation – every man is a rapist. Not in the polite, bourgeois sense of candlelight coercion, but in the bare biological logic of the worm. To inseminate is to penetrate; to penetrate is to conquer; to conquer is to outsource the cost of life onto someone else’s body. The duel is just foreplay for the inevitable violation. Consent, in worm-world, is as fictional as a unicorn with a diaphragm. The “winner” is celebrated precisely because he doesn’t have to consent to anything afterwards – he stabs, struts, and slips away, leaving the loser’s body to incubate the consequences.
Now, humanity likes to pretend it has outgrown this. We have laws, customs, and etiquette. We invented flowers, chocolates, and marriage vows. But scratch the surface, and what do you find? Penetration politics. Who gets to wield the dick, who gets saddled with the debt. The radical feminists weren’t entirely wrong: structurally, culturally, biologically, the male role has been defined as penetration – and penetration, whether dressed in lace or latex, is always a form of conquest.
The worm is honest. We are hypocrites. They fence with their penises and accept the consequences. We fence with our laws, our armies, our religions, our institutions – and still manage to convince ourselves we’re civilised.
So yes, The Left Hand of Darkness can keep its glacial androgynes. For a metaphor that actually explains our sorry state, look no further than penis-fencing flatworms: every thrust a power play, every victory a rape in miniature, every loss a womb conscripted. Humanity in a nutshell – or rather, in a stab wound.
I’ve read Part I of Hobbes’ Leviathan and wonder what it would have been like if he filtered his thoughts through Hume or Wittgenstein. Hobbes makes Dickens read like Pollyanna. It’s an interesting historical piece, worth reading on that basis alone. It reads as if the Christian Bible had to pass through a legal review before it had been published, sapped of vigour. As bad a rap as Schopenhauer seems to get, Hobbes is the consummate Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah, humbug – you nasty, brutish, filthy animals!*
Audio: NotebookLM podcast conversation on this topic.
In any case, it got me thinking of free will and, more to the point, of will itself.
A Brief History of Humanity’s Favourite Metaphysical Scapegoat
By the time Free Will turned up to the party, the real guest of honour—the Will—had already been drinking heavily, muttering incoherently in the corner, and starting fights with anyone who made eye contact. We like to pretend that the “will” is a noble concept: the engine of our autonomy, the core of our moral selves, the brave little metaphysical organ that lets us choose kale over crisps. But in truth, it’s a bloody mess—philosophy’s equivalent of a family heirloom that no one quite understands but refuses to throw away.
So, let’s rewind. Where did this thing come from? And why, after 2,500 years of name-dropping, finger-pointing, and metaphysical gymnastics, are we still not quite sure whether we have a will, are a will, or should be suing it for damages?
Plato: Soul, Reason, and That Poor Horse
In the beginning, there was Plato, who—as with most things—half-invented the question and then wandered off before giving a straight answer. For him, the soul was a tripartite circus act: reason, spirit, and appetite. Will, as a term, didn’t get top billing—it didn’t even get its name on the poster. But the idea was there, muddling along somewhere between the charioteer (reason) and the unruly horses (desire and spiritedness).
No explicit will, mind you. Just a vague sense that the rational soul ought to be in charge, even if it had to beat the rest of itself into submission.
Aristotle: Purpose Without Pathos
Aristotle, ever the tidy-minded taxonomist, introduced prohairesis—deliberate choice—as a sort of proto-will. But again, it was all about rational calculation toward an end. Ethics was teleological, goal-oriented. You chose what aligned with eudaimonia, that smug Greek term for flourishing. Will, if it existed at all, was just reason picking out dinner options based on your telos. No inner torment, no existential rebellion—just logos in a toga.
Augustine: Sin, Suffering, and That Eternal No
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and along comes Saint Augustine, traumatised by his libido and determined to make the rest of us suffer for it. Enter voluntas: the will as the seat of choice—and the scene of the crime. Augustine is the first to really make the will bleed. He discovers he can want two incompatible things at once and feels properly appalled about it.
From this comes the classic Christian cocktail: freedom plus failure equals guilt. The will is free, but broken. It’s responsible for sin, for disobedience, for not loving God enough on Wednesdays. Thanks to Augustine, we’re stuck with the idea that the will is both the instrument of salvation and the reason we’re going to Hell.
Cheers.
Medievals: God’s Will or Yours, Pick One
The Scholastics, never ones to let an ambiguity pass unanalysed, promptly split into camps. Aquinas, ever the reasonable Dominican, says the will is subordinate to the intellect. God is rational, and so are we, mostly. But Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the original voluntarist hooligans, argue that the will is superior—even in God. God could have made murder a virtue, they claim, and you’d just have to live with it.
From this cheerful perspective, will becomes a force of arbitrary fiat, and humans, made in God’s image, inherit the same capacity for irrational choice. The will is now more than moral; it’s metaphysical. Less reason’s servant, more chaos goblin.
Hobbes: Appetite with Delusions of Grandeur
Then along comes Thomas Hobbes, who looks at the soul and sees a wheezing machine of appetites. Will, in his famously cheery view, is simply “the last appetite before action.” No higher calling, no spiritual struggle—just the twitch that wins. Man is not a rational animal, but a selfish algorithm on legs. For Hobbes, will is where desire stumbles into motion, and morality is a polite euphemism for not getting stabbed.
Kant: The Will Gets a Makeover
Enter Immanuel Kant: powdered wig, pursed lips, and the moral rectitude of a man who scheduled his bowel movements. Kant gives us the “good will”, which acts from duty, not desire. Suddenly, the will is autonomous, rational, and morally legislative—a one-man Parliament of inner law.
It’s all terribly noble, terribly German, and entirely exhausting. For Kant, free will is not the ability to do whatever you like—it’s the capacity to choose according to moral law, even when you’d rather be asleep. The will is finally heroic—but only if it agrees to hate itself a little.
Schopenhauer: Cosmic Will, Cosmic Joke
And then the mood turns. Schopenhauer, world’s grumpiest mystic, takes Kant’s sublime will and reveals it to be a blind, thrashing, cosmic force. Will, for him, isn’t reason—it’s suffering in motion. The entire universe is will-to-live: a desperate, pointless striving that dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction.
There is no freedom, no morality, no point. The only escape is to negate the will, preferably through aesthetic contemplation or Buddhist-like renunciation. In Schopenhauer’s world, the will is not what makes us human—it’s what makes us miserable.
Nietzsche: Transvaluation and the Will to Shout Loudest
Cue Nietzsche, who takes Schopenhauer’s howling void and says: yes, but what if we made it fabulous? For him, the will is no longer to live, but to power—to assert, to create, to impose value. “Free will” is a theologian’s fantasy, a tool of priests and moral accountants. But will itself? That’s the fire in the forge. The Übermensch doesn’t renounce the will—he rides it like a stallion into the sunset of morality.
Nietzsche doesn’t want to deny the abyss. He wants to waltz with it.
Today: Free Will and the Neuroscientific Hangover
And now? Now we’re left with compatibilists, libertarians, determinists, and neuroscientists all shouting past each other, armed with fMRI machines and TED talks. Some claim free will is an illusion, a post hoc rationalisation made by brains doing what they were always going to do. Others insist that moral responsibility requires it, even if we can’t quite locate it between the neurons.
We talk about willpower, will-to-change, political will, and free will like they’re real things. But under the hood, we’re still wrestling with the same questions Augustine posed in a North African villa: Why do I do what I don’t want to do? And more importantly, who’s doing it?
Conclusion: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Mess
From Plato’s silent horses to Nietzsche’s Dionysian pyrotechnics, the will has shape-shifted more times than a politician in an election year. It has been a rational chooser, a moral failure, a divine spark, a mechanical twitch, a cosmic torment, and an existential triumph.
Despite centuries of philosophical handwringing, what it has never been is settled.
So where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the way? Twisting, contradictory, and littered with the corpses of half-baked metaphysical systems.
Welcome to the labyrinth. Bring snacks.
* The solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short quote is forthcoming. Filthy animals is a nod to Home Alone.
Philosophics 