Act I Volo Ergo Sum Ch. 01

Before Thought, There Is Will

Thought, feelings, will: climbing down the stack

Descartes started in the wrong place. Walk down the stairs.

First floor: explicit thought. Propositions, arguments, the thing Descartes took as his bedrock. Below that, the basement he missed: feelings. Not moods or opinions, but the continuous affective signal your body uses to orient before anything reaches words. This is the layer we share with every animal that turns toward or away. Damasio’s work spent decades making it precise: patients with intact reasoning but damaged somatic signalling cannot decide. They can list pros and cons forever. The feelings that normally collapse deliberation into action are gone, and deliberation never terminates. Feelings are not an ornament on cognition. They are the substrate cognition runs on.

Go down one more floor. Underneath feelings is something even more primal, present in creatures that have no nervous system at all: will. A bacterium following a sugar gradient does not feel hunger. There is no “feeling” machinery. But it unmistakably leans. It swims up the gradient. This is chemotaxis, and it is will in its minimal form: a lean, an orientation, an asymmetry between toward and away. A baby rooting for milk does not theorise. A paramecium does not deliberate. Whatever else is true about being alive, the first thing that is true is willing.

This is what we mean by Volo ergo sum. Not a swap of one slogan for another, but a shift in where the floor is. Thought rides on feeling; feeling rides on will. Underneath cognition, underneath affect, underneath the long arguments about what is real, there is a primal lean. Attraction. Aversion. Care. Everything else is built on top.

Key moves

  • The stack is layered: thought sits on feelings, feelings sit on will. Most of the book’s arguments operate at the will layer, the one shared by every living thing.
  • Feelings are not a human luxury. They are the affective/somatic layer shared with animals. Damasio’s somatic-marker work shows decision-making collapses when this layer is damaged, even with reasoning intact.
  • Will goes further down than feelings. A bacterium has no feelings, yet it leans along a chemical gradient. Lean is the minimum definition of will, and it is present wherever life is present.
  • Will is observable from the outside (a paramecium turns toward food) and from the inside (check where your attention is leaning before you deliberate).
  • “Thought” presupposes a thinker oriented toward something. That orientation is will, delivered through feelings. So thought rides on will, not the other way around.
  • Will is not the same as conscious choice. Will is the entire layer of motivated motion, most of which never reaches awareness.
  • Treating will as primal lets us talk about microbes, mammals, and humans on a continuum without flattening any of them.
  • Refusing to start with will forces you to invent ghosts (souls, pure reason, free-floating subjects) to do the work that willing was already doing.

Where this touches lived life

  • When you can’t think clearly, ask what you want. The answer is usually closer than the analysis.
  • Most stuck moments are not failures of thought but tangles of competing wants: three of them, in disguise, pretending to be one decision.
  • Self-knowledge starts as will-knowledge. You learn what you are by watching what you lean toward when nobody is grading you.

What we’re not claiming

  • Not that humans are “just” willing machines. The wanting layer is the floor, not the ceiling.
  • Not that all wants are good or even tolerable. The claim is that they are primal, not that they are wise.
  • Not that we can fully explain why anything wants. That something does is observable. The deeper why is one of the open questions this book leaves open.

Influences & Further Reading

  1. Antonio Damasio Descartes' Error (1994)

    The somatic marker hypothesis: bodily feeling is first-order, deliberation is second-order. Without somatic markers, patients can reason but cannot decide.

  2. Antonio Damasio The Feeling of What Happens (1999)

    Consciousness itself as the feeling of what happens; the organism's orientation precedes any conceptual self.

  3. Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation (1818)

    Will as the thing-in-itself; intellect subordinate to drive. The most direct philosophical ancestor of volo ergo sum.

  4. Spinoza Ethics, Part III (1677)

    Conatus: we judge something good because we strive for it, not the other way around. Desire is ontologically prior to evaluation.

  5. Varela, Thompson & Rosch The Embodied Mind (1991)

    Enactivism: orientation and wanting are the substrate of cognition, not an add-on to it.

  6. Lisa Feldman Barrett How Emotions Are Made (2017)

    The brain as an allostatic predictor: wanting and orienting are its baseline mode, not reactions to the world.

  7. Anil Seth Being You (2021)

    Consciousness as controlled hallucination. Wanting has a first-person character that neuroscience is only beginning to model from the inside.

  8. Kevin Mitchell Free Agents (2023)

    How nervous systems evolved to generate genuine agency rather than mere responsiveness: the biological story of why want precedes thought.

  9. Ernest Becker The Denial of Death (1973)

    Death-awareness is the specific disruption that elevates animal want into human will. Knowing we will die, we cannot simply follow instinct but must choose what to lean toward, and that gap is where the book lives.