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

So, one of the things that, uh, 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, um, 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, kinda... He- he was a huge influence on 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- 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, uh, 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 they're 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." They 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 them 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. 'Cause, you know, if you think about, um, how a therapist might conceive of the- the human will today, um, they tend to talk roughly in terms of- 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- and- and desires, and that- that kind of comes from Nietzsche. I mean, he's building off earlier thinkers, but that, for instance, is- is where a lot of early psychoanalysts kind of credit where their view of the mind has come from. And then this, as I say, ends up filtering through right, right, even to, e- even to today. I mean, you know, I- I know you've mentioned before that you- you're kind of in... You- you have had therapy and stuff. So I- I think that, you know, I don't know how similar that was to- to how some of the therapy that you've undergone has conceived of the human mind.