These are the forces that are thought to drive us through life

These are the forces that are thought to drive us through life.

>The will to live
Survival and self-preservation (Schopenhauer)

>The will to meaning
The pursuit of finding meaning in life (Kierkegaard)

>The will to power
A desire for domination and success (Nietzsche)

>The will to pleasure
Maximising pleasure and minimising pain (Freud)

Arguments have been made about which is ultimately the most powerful and fundamental force, but in reality they are all connected.

1. Every living being starts with the will to live, the most primitive of the forces, and mostly involves hunting, eating and sleeping i.e. basic life processes, which keeps them happy.

2. Once these are achieved comfortably -- as they have been for the last 3000 years for humans -- a will to meaning is necessary for happiness, otherwise we experience existential dread. A life purpose can effectively keep people happy their entire life.

3. If a person enters a state of existential dread, the will to power takes over, which causes the person to try to excel at something and gain recognition from his peers.

4. If that person is at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, they will be driven by the will to pleasure and will have no choice but to engage in hedonism and likely fall into an addiction.

Cont.

>Cont
Oh- please don't

>Equating metaphysical concepts like will to live and will to power to psychological/physiological concepts
>Thinking they can exist at the same time
>Dominance hierarchy
Either bait, retarded or american.

What is your point?

>Equating metaphysical concepts like will to live and will to power to psychological/physiological concepts

Philosophers have tried to define concepts like pleasure and happiness in philosophical terms, now we have neuroscience and have identified what actually happens in your brain when you feel these. This actually affirms some of the philosophical ideas.

For example, John Stuart Mill talked about different kinds of pleasures, and tried to define them based on what you would choose based on certain circumstances. It's very clear now that he was talking different kinds of neuroanatomical pleasure.

Once again, science and psychology have become better tools for understanding ideas which once belong to metaphysics.

The rest of your post makes it clear you're at most 19 years of age.

I've literally plagiarised a psychology/philosophy book and wanted to talk about the ideas presented here, but judging by the reaction you people are very angry and when someone has that much anger inside them, a discussion cannot be fruitful.

If I had just pasted the paragraph here and said where it came from, the response would have been much different. It basically proves how effective appeal to authority is with dumb people.

Yep, definitely an american.

I've rephrased the work of a well known German philosopher you literal spastic. Back to school kid.

Who?

But you're the one appealing to authority?

Nope, I am simply reposting the claims here for the sake of discussion, which isn't happening because of the fact that I didn't mention where the claims came from.

If I were to reposting this and begin with "

The world as will is real.

They would call the philosopher a retard.

What book? Because the other user is partially correct in that the descriptions are misleading. It may work well enough for the first two, but will to power's description is too vague to do it justice since domination and success are entirely relative to which ever will to power dominates. So for some the will to survive and self-preserve can be will to power just as much as the will to overcome (domination, success, etc.), because it is a will to power turned inward.

Also the will to pleasure ascribed to Freud is inadequate because Freud literally wrote a book called "Beyond the pleasure principle". That Freud indeed oscillates between Eros and Thanatos for example and doesn't always stay faithful to his discovery doesn't mean that he can be reduced to advocating some simple hedonistic calculation.

why do you think that acquiring power will solve existential dread? Even if I was king of the world, kings are still afraid of dying.

Why does that love.jpg look like something Humbert Humbert would partake in?

It's no longer a discussion once you think you've got it all figured out

either read the philosophers you talk about or don't talk abut them. SEP/wikipedia are not enough. Freud does not view the mental apparatus as completely governed by the pleasure principle. In my opinion it seems that the death instincts, given their regressive character, may actually completely operate under it but it is unclear to me. As the death instincts ultimately lead one back to lower states of excitation (the womb, childhood, nirvana), it seems that they operate under the pleasure principle. But, sometimes when he talks about their aggressive character it gets messy. Eros CERTAINLY does not operate according to the pleasure principle.

Reducing will to power to domination/success reduces a metaphysics to an explanatory causal psychological process (read: WTP sections 617 and 635 if you want a sneak preview). Nietzsche is really a vitalist by the time he really starts caring about the will to power as a metaphysics.

The crux of Schops will is not survival and self preservation but the fact that it is defined as a lack; satisfaction is a brief and fleeting exception. The remarkable point isn't that we have a will to survive but that this will is perpetually dissatisfied. Anyone will argue that we will have a will to survive. If that's what schop meant by will, no one would have cared. This is partly why this particular German daddy is associated so much with the whole buddhist being is desire desire is suffering stuff.

Kierkegaard argues that the self is a synthesis of a bunch of different aspects (temporal/eternal, finite/infinite, possible/necesary). This synthesis is self conscious--in his Hegelian terms it relates itself to itself. Finally it relates its self aware self to god. It mUST do this by virtue of its composition as a being with a sense of the eternal otherwise it fails to adequelty synthesize itself and falls into dis-pear. Read the first page of sickness unto death if you want sneak preview. It is good book so read all of it

probably fucked up some shit summarizing all of this soplease correct me if I did

If you wanna know about biological drives just read Panskepp's affective neuroscience and Freud's beyond the pleasure principle and the ego and the id. That way you get a thicc dose of both speculative psychoanalysis and empirical neuroscience. But just read the fucking books. Summarys don't do dick.

I should say Eros CAN operate against the pleasure principle, often times it doesn't

Will to Power is the only legitimate one you uneducated fumbler. Never return to Veeky Forums until you've actually read Nietzsche's books.

>Once these are achieved comfortably -- as they have been for the last 3000 years for humans
if anything the quality of an average human life and iirc its average lifespan too decreased when humans switched from hunting to growing crops and it recovered only after millennia

also is it a boy or a girl on the bottom?