Love Under Will
This piece is part two of a three series of essay’s on Love and Will. Read Part One here, Part Three is forthcoming
Part One
Lately I’ve been thinking about what I call existential anguish: the quiet, unsettling space where familiar meanings fall away and we are left facing what is real without protection.
What has become unsettling to me here is that even when the self shifts from noun to verb, from structure to process, when fixivity dissolves a continuity still remains—an “I” that persists as the one who undergoes the very act of dissolution.
In this sense, my anguish is not just terror—it is the friction of living in a world where continuity is always being torn apart and re-woven at the same time.
This question can be rewritten under more concrete terms: Why can a sense of self fall apart, and yet the habits of that self remain? If the “I” breaks, what is it that keeps repeating?
I’ve started to wonder whether habits don’t belong to the self at all, but to time as it has passed through the body—time stored in muscle, in reflex, in the small repetitions that have carved into the body’s very sediment. The body, in this sense, may be older than the story we tell about who we are—older than memory even, holding sequences of return that predate narration. If this is so, then the pattern is older than the identity that attempts to account for it, surviving every revision of the self.
From this view, habit isn’t about meaning or interpretation. It isn’t semantic or reflective. It’s closer to kinetic motion—the way experience keeps moving through us even when our understanding of it has changed.
This is why you can know a version of yourself is over—you can grieve it, reject it, understand its ending with full clarity—and still feel it activate in your body anyway. What remains is not the self but the body’s timing: its learned readiness to move, feel, attach, retreat, and return in the rhythms laid down by a past that understanding alone cannot erase.
It might sound as though I am over-philosophizing what is, for many, a psychological matter. Psychology wants to reduce such habit to nervous-system regulation. It likes pictures that are fixed and clean: the body seeks stability, the autonomic system preserves familiar rhythms, repetition equals safety. That explanation is not wrong—but it resolves too quickly, and in doing so, bypasses what disturbs me most.
Psychology can explain how habits form and persist, but it cannot by its own methods address what it means for repetition to outlive the self that once organized it. My question is not how repetition is regulated, but what kind of temporal force repetition becomes when identity has already fallen apart. Simply put, biology can describe how repetition happens but it cannot explain why habit seems to outlive identity itself.
When I notice this happening in myself, it registers as a kind of horror: the realization that even when the “I” dissolves, the same time can keep happening. Something older than my will moves through me and acts, and only afterward do I recognize myself as the one who has been moved.
If this is so, then action can no longer be understood as the simple execution of intention. What moves first is not meaning but momentum. Thus, what drives change in the world is not will but something underneath it—something that produces will as echo. The agent self appears only afterward, as effect.
This realization destabilizes the ethical grammar by which I have learned to understand responsibility and care. If movement does not originate in will, then intention is no longer the stable ground of action. The agent becomes a witness to motion rather than its sovereign cause. Ethics does not disappear, but its foundation shifts from mastery to exposure. I am answerable not because I fully author what I do, but because I am the site through which what is already in motion continues to pass.
What makes this frightening is not the loss of control but the loss of ontological location. The boundary between what I am and what moves me grows indistinct. I no longer know whether I act, or whether I am acted through by a time that exceeds me. I remain present to my life, but I no longer experience myself as installed at its source. I am continuous, but not because I sustain myself. I am continuous because something impersonal keeps happening through me.
What makes this displacement feel so violating, I am beginning to sense, is that this horror is contingent on an inherited demand: that the self must be the primary authority of action, the rightful source from which motion and meaning proceed. From within that expectation, whatever appears to act in my place can only register as a threat—as a usurpation rather than a re-situation. It is not merely that I am moved; it is that I am no longer guaranteed to be the one from whom movement properly begins. Under this assumption, time itself becomes an antagonist, and what exceeds the self is immediately misread as hostile. The fear is thus not only of being acted through, but of losing the metaphysical privilege of origin altogether.
It has occurred to me that this position is absurd, as I can say that in my own life, no pattern has ever changed through internal decision alone. Every real transformation I can name arrived through contact—through shock, bliss, touch, loss, intimacy, crisis, through events that struck from outside and opened the ground I was standing on.
Whatever I may tell myself about authorship, change has never originated in my will. It has always come from encounter. In this light, the self appears less as the editor of its habits than as the place where larger forces collide, fold back on themselves, and interrupt what I once mistook for a continuity of my own making.
There is something bittersweet in this. Agency becomes distributed—shared across moments, relationships, and events—but change is also revealed as violent, involuntary, and not under our control. If one accepts this, then a self is not that which governs change, but that which bears it. It is not a center from which motion radiates, but a surface upon which motion inscribes itself.
What I have called “my life” becomes a stratigraphy of encounters—impacts, pressures, incursions—each leaving behind a residue that reorients what can happen next. Yet what dissolves here is not only the fantasy of sovereignty; it is also the fantasy of separateness. As the idea of an independent self thaws, what once felt sealed inside “me” is revealed to have always been moving between bodies, through touch, loss, influence, and response. Continuity no longer belongs to intention, but to accumulation across encounters. I persist because relation persists—whatever has passed through me has not remained mine alone, but continues its passage outward, shaping others as it once shaped me.
Part Two
Everything I have traced so far shows how agency is displaced—how movement, habit, and encounter precede will and undo the idea of the self as a sovereign origin. But this way of thinking has now reached its limit. If I continue only by dissolving authorship and intention, the ethical questions that follow—about responsibility, care, harm, and repair—will remain unresolved rather than clarified.
Once will is no longer treated as the sovereign source of action, responsibility can’t be grounded in intention alone. The only remaining ethical threshold is the moment something reaches us and has not yet been translated into meaning. That threshold is attentional: ethics becomes rewilded toward what happens after contact—in how we are affected and how response takes shape. What matters, then, is less what appears as choice, and more which signals become available to register, which pass without contemplation, and how movement unfolds from the conditions of receptivity that reflect the form my body has thereby assumed.
In this sense, ethics settles at the level of perception—not as a private stance, but as a condition of relational availability. It resides in the ways sensing has already been shaped to admit or exclude what can circulate between bodies: which demands are able to register, which never arrive, and how attention moves once contact has occurred. Because perception is never solitary, these conditions do not remain internal. They propagate as rhythm, coordinating or obstructing shared movement in time. Ethics, here, is thus what one’s manner of perceiving allows to gather, continue, or fall away.
Returning to our question of habit, the difficulty might be described more simply as response continuing even after something in a relation has shifted—a failure that weakens our ability to relate to ourselves and to one another, as we cling to forms that no longer carry the truth of the relation as it moves. Movement makes us feel alive, and so we learn to stay with its traces—to keep speaking, looking, or addressing as though the possibility of reply were still there, even when nothing answers in quite the same way.
As our ancestor reminds us, we cannot step into the same river twice; yet habit inclines us to try, responding to what remains visible or familiar as if it still carried the same current. This is not because we intend harm or refuse care, but because attention has been trained—through repetition and instruction—to linger where form endures, rather than to register when movement has quietly changed.
Consider how in everyday life, the habit of attention is largely organized around what can be taken in at a glance. Through constant repetition, we learn to trust what appears immediately to the eye, and to treat what presents itself in visible form as already complete. Over time, this trains us to assume that what can be clearly seen can also be fully known.
To explain this more concretely, as we can see a body that appears coherent and bounded, we assume that a unified self must exist inside it. Because we can see that the body moves toward an action, we assume that the self we imagine inside it must be the source of that action. What is actually only a visible succession of forms and motions is quietly arrested into a figure, and then converted—by the privatization of sight—into a story of inner cause and sovereign agency.
In other words, we learn to want actions to have a single, visible author. We learn to take comfort in the idea that there is someone “inside” who decides, who owns the movement we witness. The pleasure of seeing a clear source, a clear agent, a clear cause becomes part of how reality feels stable to us.
In this way, in order to avoid the anguish of loss that might accompany the de-privileging of sight, we fancifully take what is given to us as one sensorial truth among many and elevate it into the whole ground. The self becomes something we must believe as settled fact, rather than risk the vertigo implied in the possibility of a self assembled through time and relation.
This is why ambiguity about where action comes from is not just confusing, but unsettling: it disrupts our relationship with desire, revealing the lack of total aliveness that emerges when we depend only on visible nourishment.
The most interesting part of this, I think, is that this stance isn’t even wholly honest to how images operate. Even the stillest image reaches us as temporal variation: light striking the eye in pulses, the body shifting, attention wavering, memory stirring. When I look at a person across a room, what reaches me is not a finished object. Light shifts across their skin, their posture changes, my eyes move, my memories flicker. The scene is restless, full of tiny variations.
Yet almost immediately, my gaze gathers all of this into “a person,” into one stable figure that I feel I am seeing as such. My assumption from here may be that the scene has become still, but this is only because my perception has learned how to hold motion still long enough for recognition. The image feels fixed not because it stops moving, but because my looking has learned how to freeze it to produce a steady gaze.
The problem begins when this freezing is mistaken for truth. The figure I stabilize with my eyes begins to feel complete in itself, as though it contained its own meaning. My memories and expectations fold into it so seamlessly that they become indistinguishable from what is seen. What is actually a moving encounter between body, light, memory, and attention is quietly mistaken for an encounter between two sealed objects—the image and the self both appearing to possess an agency that, in fact, comes from relation.
This is why the arrest of the image is never neutral. To fix an image is also to fix the movement that brought us there. The gaze freezes what is, in reality, a passage. Desire, which had been circulating as tension, draw, and unfolding relation, is condensed into a visible terminal. The force that moved through time is thus objectified—made to become a thing. And once desire is housed in a thing, it can be owned, repeated, fetishized, exhausted. What is lost in this translation is the capacity to remain answerable to what is unfolding.
This clarifies why visual fixation feels both satisfying and deadening at once. The image grants a momentary sense of capture—this is it, this is what I want—but what is captured is only the husk of the force that moved us there. The aliveness of desire depends on its capacity to exceed its forms.
When the gaze arrests the image, it arrests that excess as well. The image lingers beyond the passage that formed it. It stays. It waits. What remains once desire has been fixed into an image is not the movement that brought it there, but a residue that continues to remind us of that former aliveness through the sensation of lack. And because the movement has gone, it begins to be mistaken for the thing itself, rather than the trace that now carries only the memory of that motion.
Once a living encounter is frozen into an image, the image stops being just a record of what happened and starts taking the place of the relationship itself. Instead of relating to another person, moment, or force through time, vulnerability, and mutual uncertainty, we now relate to a stable substitute. The image can move around, be shared, revisited, and desired, but it does so without requiring us to wait, risk being changed, or be exposed to the other in real time.
What gives the frozen image its authority is this very lack—what has been silently removed since collision with the aliveness of desire. A photograph, a memory, a fixed idea about someone only stands there because the ongoing exchange that once animated play and curiosity between you and the other has been stopped. The back-and-forth, the response, the timing, the risk, the possibility of being changed—all of that has been removed so the image can hold its shape. The image isn’t false, but it is no longer alive in the way the encounter once was.
The consequence of this, I believe, is that we stop being in relation with a living other and start being in relation with a phantom substitute. The difference is in the simple fact of being able to meet another in real time. For both parties to carry forward the aliveness of relation depends on both people being able to approach each other without posturing, without being held up as an image, and without hiding behind a fantasy of who the other is supposed to be. Only then does what passes between two people take on the weight of shared reality instead of closed, private feeling.
This is why live speech feels so different from memory or image. In actual conversation, something is always unsettled. You can be interrupted. A word can land differently than you meant it. You may have to pause, adjust, try again. You have to wait for another voice before you know what will happen next. Conversation opens the possibility that the image you carry of the other might be disturbed—but it does not ensure that it will be. Only when you remain open to that disturbance does projection begin to loosen. The relation stays alive not because speech happens, but because response is allowed to change what you thought you knew.
Even when relation returns to real time through response, it is still carried through the narrow channels of recognition and memory. We meet one another as best we can, yet something in the encounter always passes too quickly to be held as a stable figure. There is a surplus of relation that slips through images and stories alike. It is this surplus—the part of encounter that only exists as motion—that remains open here, asking to be followed rather than captured.
Part Three
The double-slit experiment has always interested me because it offers a way to think about motion without immediately resolving it into an object. What appears as a particle in one experimental context behaves as a wave in another, suggesting that matter does not arrive already fixed as one thing or the other. The experiment sustains this tension, allowing incompatible descriptions to remain necessary for understanding how encounters are structured by conditions of allowance, rather than training them into a single account.
This frames ontology as relational to conditions rather than intrinsic essence: wave and particle are both required, even though they cannot be unified into a single picture. I’m drawn to this because it models how encounters are structured by conditions of allowance—by what is permitted to appear, register, or count. Attention operates as one such condition of allowance on a structural level: as a constraint-setting orientation comparable to an experimental apparatus, it determines whether reality is encountered primarily as fixed, locatable form or as ongoing movement unfolding through time.
This suggests that when perception is trained toward localization and site, it privileges particle-like registration, whereas attention oriented toward waveform phenomena—rhythm, vibration, resonance, duration—permits continuity to register without collapse, sustaining a porous relation between wave and particle rather than resolving one into the other.
I say this because sound is only known through duration, and thus cannot be grasped at once or secured by immediate capture. It unfolds over time and requires sustained attention. For this reason, listening unfolds as a temporal practice shaped by endurance, exposure, and response, one that resists the pressure of instant decision.
What I am trying to trace here is not a new theory of perception, but a shift in how we conceive of what is already happening. Thus, a perhaps more helpful way to think about habit is as attunement. Using this as our metaphorical grounds suggests that over time, our bodies learn how to meet the world. They learn what to brace for, what to expect, what to fear, what to seek. This tuning is shaped through our experiences and how we are willing to be in relation with them. It happens slowly through repetition—through care and harm, safety and threat, attachment and loss—shaping not only what becomes possible to feel, but also what becomes difficult or unreachable.
By this I mean shifting from assuming habit as something we can control or correct, to understanding habit as the result of attunement. Framed this way, habit names an ongoing relation between perception and the real, rather than a reaction to the real as directed by the self. It thereby allows the body to stand with what shapes it—continuously formed through its encounters, calibrated by what it meets and how it is met in return.
This tuning is neither imposed from within nor received passively from without, but emerges through relation itself, as perception and world adjust to one another over time. The problem begins when this relational process is mistaken for mastery—when the self attempts to claim authorship over what is, in fact, a shared and ongoing negotiation, reducing attunement to will rather than remaining answerable to the conditions that sustain it.
Seen this way, the will as echo names the after-sounding of motion: the reverberation that continues once desire has passed through a body shaped by attunement. Just as the myth foretold, the body answers what once moved it, sounding toward its beloved in whatever tone the instrument has culled. Or, more poetically, I might say: will is the reaching that motion produces—the after-gesture of the force we call Love.
