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A loss of power and a loss of identity go hand in hand. To maintain a living identity requires an active energy or will set against forces which would dissolve the identity. Indeed it may be argued, and was argued by the German philosopher Schopenhauer, that there is no distinction to be made between life and will, that will, in a word, is life.

This philosophy of Schopenhauer's involves a completely new way of regarding the soul. For Schopenhauer there is no Christian soul, the individual friend of any God; instead of the soul there is the will. For Schopenhauer the will precedes the soul, as he explained thus:


(The eternal and indestructible in man, which forms his very job function email list principle of life, is not for me the soul, but, to borrow an expression from chemistry, the "radical" of the soul, that is to say the Will.)

This in Der Untergang des Abendlandes termed "Faustian" culture, since it pits the individual against the world. In the English language, the word for the will and for the denotation of a decision relating to future intention is the same word. But this notion of the independent will shaping the future is alien to the Christo-Judaic tradition, and the Semitic tradition (Judaic, Islamic, Christian, Marxist) as a whole, in which the actions of man are pre-ordained, a fulfilment of destiny, Kismet.