The will to live. The will to defend. As soon as you start thinking about ‘the will to live’, the expression is juxtaposed with that of ‘the will to defend’. Apart from the fact that these phrases share a 'will', this link, especially in an Estonian context, is as a result of the war in Ukraine and how it affects our sense of self.
‘The will to live’ is a phrase we do not use very often in our Estonian vocabulary, to the point that one is compelled to check the dictionary to see if such a saying even exists. We know that of course it does. Apart from vitality, we can also use other words that are associated with life, such as ‘zest for life’, hunger for life or strength for life. Linguistically, one might wonder why it is perceived as alienating to put the words life and will together. Life is, after all, a gift and a miracle, and how can one associate will with all these categories at once? Does life, living and being alive then require will? When does it need will? Can the will to live be strong or weak?
‘The will to live’ implicitly refers to the possibility of there being a ‘lack of-will’; in other words, there are possible situations in which ‘the will to live’ is absent or very weak. One of the places in history where ‘the will to live’ may have faded is, for obvious reasons are the concentration camps during the second world war.
Holocaust survivors have described those concentration camp inmates who crossed the border between life and death and had given up on themselves as ‘Muselmann’[1]. As they were perceived to be the living dead, those who had crossed the border between life and death, they were also renounced by their fellow prisoners. In the words of the Austrian essayist Jean Améry, this kind of a Holocaust survivor no longer had 'a space of consciousness in which good and evil, the noble and the unjust, the spiritual and the spiritual sister could stand side by side'. According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a ‘Muselmann’ is someone who has lost all will and all consciousness in a concentration camp. In a sense, the ‘Muselmann’ was another word for the living dead, for those whose will to live is weak or extinguished.
Moving on from the extreme example of ‘the loss of the will to live’ to that of ‘the will to live’, there seem to be very different forms of it. First of all, the will to live needs to come to terms with the suffering, both physical and mental, that comes with being human. To put it another way, it is what the writer Viivi Luik calls the recognition of one's own mortality. Being human is defined by mortality and temporality, and this also implies there is pain and suffering that go with it. Paradoxically, it is suffering that makes a person human and offers the greatest opportunities for self-development.
The next form of ‘the will to live’ could be characterised by having curiosity about the world, about all that is alive, but also about all that is new. The realisation of the mortality of oneself, but also of one's loved ones, as well as of the temporal limitation of existence, could be a catalyst for curiosity and the desire to make the best use of limited time. Curiosity, in turn, is linked to the desire to fulfil oneself. In other words, to discover the vitality and inner potential within oneself. In her book “Shadow Theatre”, Viivi Luik writes about the realisation that each of us is born with an undeveloped picture of ourselves – “our true picture” however is something that we must ‘fill in’ throughout our lives, so that our outline also remains. This is an extremely interesting line of thought. Viivi Luik is not just talking about what we often describe as fate; something that is destined to happen to us anyway. There is a great deal of responsibility (in modern terms ‘agency’) in her picture of the self and its path to its fulfilment. It is the human being who must seek the invisible boundaries of the self, and discover and develop his or her own inner skills and possibilities to accept one’s true self.
The desire for self-actualisation is also linked to the will to leave a trace of oneself for future generations. In more solemn terms, it is a need, but also a responsibility, to act as a bridge between generations, to be a creator and guarantor of continuity. This is certainly true in different areas of life, and is particularly important in the field of culture. As representatives of a small linguistic and cultural area in Estonia, we are inevitably dependent on those lighthouses that can show us the way over time.
As a fourth form of ‘the will to live’", I would like to mention altruism or selflessness, in other words the willingness to act on behalf of and for the benefit of others. Not everyone is able to do be selfless, but we need its existence as a reminder of our humanity.
Having published a book entitled “The Courage to Live. Letters to Käbi Laterei”, the most interesting and important form of courage for me continues to be that of the aforementioned desire to self-actualise, or more precisely, to discover and seek the hidden possibilities and perhaps more importantly limits of the self. The courage to live thus stands first and foremost for the courage to face oneself and one's own shadow sides. It is the courage to know and take account of oneself as a whole.
I have written before about the fact that people often have a rather incomplete picture and understanding of themselves. The environment around us is often focused on external performance (be it academic results or physical appearance or material wealth) and so, as a result of the constant persuasion of others, we tend to see ourselves only in a certain light and through certain facets. In other words, we come to believe the image of ourselves that we consistently create for others - teachers, employers and social media friends. But that is only part of us.
Awareness of the whole of ourselves is also important because our ‘shadow sides’ are often what holds us back in life. After all, what we often refer to as the 'mid-life crisis' is often nothing more than the discovery that, half a lifetime behind us, we have not really engaged in things that really interest or matter to us. It's a waking up and realising that we've been spending a lot of our time on things (or people) that aren't that important, or that don't really matter. Meaningfulness is, as we know, one of the most important things for living a satisfying and fulfilled life.
It is inevitable that each of us has to make sense of and accept our own inner world and look through our own inner landscapes. This is well illustrated by a passage from Jaak Jõerüüt's novel 'The Mutable': “Sometimes a person has to go through the jungle of life, through the forest of emotions, through the great canyon of experiences and through the minefields of abandoned memories. In the hinterlands there are terrible, forgotten wastelands, the existence of which has never been known before. Romantic, if menacing-looking, a gorgeous wilderness of slopes are interspersed with abandoned stinking rubbish dumps and waterlogged, mossy walls left to their own devices. Discarded litter and ruins. Broken pieces of our soul and emotional waste. One day you'll walk through all these places."
What Jõerüüt writes about, however, requires enormous vitality and determination to address it. It means that one's will to live is strong and one seeks ways to live to the maximum, i.e. to explore one's own hidden potential, to create order in one's own world and thereby to be more than one necessarily has to be.
[1] The term ‘Muselmann’ (German plural Muselmänner) was a term used amongst prisoners of German Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust of World War II to refer to those suffering from a combination of starvation (known also as "hunger disease") and exhaustion, as well as those who were resigned to their impending death, literally though the term means ‘Muslim man’ and is now considered derogatory.