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

**Joe Folley** (0:00)
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 jives relatively well with the kind of spirit of a lot of modern empirical research into psychology. I mean, Nietzsche is considered by people like, he was a huge influence of people like Freud and Jung and stuff like that. I mean, 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 a very different perspective. The thing that Nietzsche has, as I say, a picture of the human, which ends up really influencing the psychologist immediately after him, but also it's still a broad view of the human that 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. 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 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 picture and he says, no, that 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, 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 four winds, and the drives are pulling them this way and that way, and 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 late 19th century, and right through the 20th century in terms of psychological ideas and theorizing and research. Because if you think about how a therapist might conceive of the human will today, they tend to talk roughly in terms of different drives, different facets of the mind, but this kind of fragmentary view of the human will, where it's not just kind of one set thing, it's this collection of different ideas and drives and desires. And that kind of comes from Nietzsche. I mean, he's building off earlier thinkers, but that, for instance, is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from. And then this, I say, ends up filtering through right, right, even to today. I mean, you know, I know you've mentioned before that you're kind of in, you have had therapy and stuff. So I think that, you know, I don't know how similar that was to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind.

**Chris Williamson** (2:45)
Yeah, well, I think Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True, evolutionary psychologist, who then pivoted to do mindfulness, a lot of retreats and sort of have a take on Buddhism with an evolutionary lens. He's got this wonderful idea about the mind as a collection of modules. And that's not too dissimilar to what you're talking about, that there is a module for this and a module for that and a module for the other. And trying to get the right module to go at the right time. And the fact that these are kind of compartmentalized off and they don't necessarily communicate very well. So yeah, the difference between there being one train driver at the front that's pulling this big locomotive or kind of like a racetrack with shit tons of different drivers and they've all got their own desire. One's going backwards, one's driving the car upside down. And yeah, I think what I'm fascinated by my point at the very beginning, you have an area of expertise, something that you're very familiar with, and you start to see the world through this lens and then when you start to learn a new topic, your anchoring bias inevitably starts, oh, that's similar to the will to power. Oh, that's similar to notes from the end of the year. That's similar to such and such a thing. Like you have your own framing. But when I read anything from your world, I then start to think about, oh, well, that's the difference between approximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. Oh, well, that's an adaptive ancestral explanation for this thing. Oh, well, this is the balance and the trade-off you have to have between survival and reproduction. So whatever your topic area of choice is, whatever you know best, everything else acts in relativity to that. It's so funny just when you've got one area you know well, you learn something new and you start to pull these threads out in reference to the first one.