Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche, Suffering & Self-Awareness - Joe Folley - #974

So one of the things that in some ways Nietzsche really comes up with a very naturalistic view of what it means to be a human, which I think kind of uh jives relatively well with the kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into, well, into into psychology. I mean, Nietzsche is um considered by uh people like kind of he was a huge influence of people like Freud and and Jung and stuff like that. I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't go so far as to say that Nietzsche was an evolutionary psychologist, but I think that he might be worth reading if you're interested in evolutionary psychology. It's kind of a very different perspective.

The thing that Nietzsche has as a, as I say, a kind of picture of the human, which ends up really influencing the psychologists immediately after him, but also just kind of it's still a a a broad view of the human that um still is around today is that Nietzsche conceives of the mind as basically a collection of drives, or the will as basically a collection of drives. And so it's it as opposed to a lot of thinkers before him who sort of conceived of the will as like one object. So the kind of, I don't know, if you want an image, it's like the little man driving our bodies, if that makes sense. Nietzsche kind of throws out this this picture and he says, no, they're kind of, if I think about how a human being works, they tend not to work quite like that.

I tend to think, okay, I've got this kind of quite chaotic series of drives, and it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the me drive is in there. And so he comes up with this image of human psychology, which is of We all have, we our mind just is a series of drives, and some people have those drives kind of roughly pointing in one direction. Other people are kind of completely scattered to the to the four winds and you know the drives are pulling this way and that way, and they they can't act, they can't get anything done, they can't prioritize. And so this is kind of the view of the mind that I would say is kind of then ends up in a lot of in a lot of late 19th century and right through the 20th century in terms of in terms of psychological ideas and theorizing and and research.

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