The Will to Nothingness

The other day, when I opened my closet and looked at all the clothes hanging in there, at the dress shirts and dress pants, the blazers and ties, the dusty shoes, it struck me that I haven’t worn ninety percent of what was there in a year. It’s like someone died, I thought, and I remembered my mother’s closet after she had died and how I had to go through her clothes, deciding on what was to be thrown out and what was to be donated.

And all at once I understood what it was that drives all those who flout social-distancing rules, who party with their friends, who get on airplanes to vacation in sunny climes: it’s an expression of the will to life—at least that’s what it pretends to be on the surface: an adamant refusal to abandon all vestiges of what we believe is our free will. I say “vestiges of free will” not only because of the many can’ts that constitute our current lockdown but also because the notion of “free will” that we moderns treasure so highly, according to Nietzsche, is actually a misnomer. We have no free will, he argues, or very little of it, as so much of our lives is constrained by convention, laws, rules, social pressures, and of course, morality as it’s evolved through the influence of Christianity. Indeed, the moral and social principles governing modern democratic societies demand the sacrifice of free will in exchange for the fetters inherent in a full-time job, a mortgage, car payments, children. We are a slave to our credit cards, to our so-called possessions, not to mention any number of addictions, including that most subtle and insidious one: social media. Even good manners are a reflection of the suppression of the will. And so, to flirt with danger, to secretly break the rules and party with friends, to fly down to the Caribbean with the family for a few weeks offers the delicious, tingling sensation of being alive, the illusion of freedom—in short, a bold assertion of the will. But that’s all it can be, an assertion of the will. Given the rising numbers of covid-19, the record number of deaths, the rapid spread of even more infectious variants, such actions are anything but life-preserving; rather, they are what Nietzsche would deem as nihilistic. “So many people just don’t care until it happens to them,” is something I often hear said about those who display a cavalier attitude in the face of the pandemic. But the fact is that they do care, only what they care about is avoiding the deadening feeling of seeing a ghost of themselves in a closet full of unworn clothes, a refusal, in other words to abandon the will, even if it is as the cost of their own lives or the lives of others. It’s the thesis of the third essay in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: that “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”