5. What everyone really wants

Life itself forces us to posit values—this is Nietzsche’s insight, and it’s inescapable. Every desire, every choice, every “yes” and “no” reveals what we truly value. But have you ever questioned the structure of your desires? Have you peeled back the layers of rationalisation to uncover what lies at their core?

In this episode, we undertake a radical investigation into the bedrock of human motivation, exposing the forces that shape our wants, drive our actions, and dictate our sense of meaning. Only in this way can we understand what really drives us, equipping us with knowledge that will enable us to apply ourselves more effectively to achieving fulfilment in life.

Music: 14:31, by Global Communication

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Transcript

“life itself forces us to posit values” —that’s from TI.v.5. Nietzsche is saying that to be alive is to be valuing: wanting this rather than that, a yes here, a no there—Pepsi instead of Coke, jazz instead of classical, you name it. Everything we want is, by definition, something we value. So what do you value?

In our first show, I put to you a question; arguably, the most important question for all of us in life. What do you want? 

Today, we dig deep into the structure of our desires, peeling back the layers of explanation and rationalisation until we reach the apparently irreducible core. We then approach something deeper—something Nietzsche himself discovered as the engine of all change in a universe of unending becoming? - here we glimpse into the abyss where all “whys” and ‘wherefores’ must be abandoned. 

Our goal here is to understand the essential drive within human beings so we can better harness it to create the kind of life we all yearn for. Along the way in this first season, you are going to develop a vital relationship with your own physical body, understand the mysteries of your unconsciousness and how to develop a productive relationship with it so it is working for you not against you, and you’ll learn some proven techniques for self-mastery. 

We will also explore your inherited slave psychology and herd psychology--how these powerful forces constrain you and how one goes about extricating one’s self from their tentacles—this is quite hair-raising stuff, prepare to have the scales fall from your eyes. And we will explore Nietzsche’s concept of personal destiny and transcendence, his formula for ultimate liberation and self-actualisation. By the end of this first season, you’ll have a grasp of the extraordinary breadth, vertiginous depth, and essentially life-affirming ethic that permeates Nietzsche’s whole body of work. The consummation of this endeavour is the realisation of a state of a kind of transcendent joy. That may sound hopelessly naive to us jaded moderns, but in Nietzsche’s opinion this is only so because we have had our worldview poisoned. We think life as we live it now is the only possible mode of existence—we can’t even imagine life lived differently; lived at a higher octave. Nietzsche forged a path to this ascending life; the becoming Übermensch project provides the map and the directions.

But for today, this show is a continuation of our exploration of happiness, a crucial question, and in the next few shows we will unpack it completely, so you can understand Nietzsche’s conception of true human happiness and think about its implication for your own life and your own goals.

So that question I asked in the first show: what do you want?

What was your answer? Did you make a list? Did you ask yourself ‘why do I want this thing or that thing?’ 

Did you interrogate this answer by asking the why-question again and again. I encouraged you to keep asking why until asking why stops making sense. This was an analysis of your desires, tracing your motivation right to its essential core, to find out what it is you really want. What is it that you really value in any particular object of desire?

I also advised you that you wouldn’t reach the bottom with this analysis until you arrived at a conclusion something like, ‘I want it just because I want it’, which is to say you want it because having it feels good. 

The question that really interests us is: what fundamental need are you really satisfying?

This is a subtle point: but we are not asking why as in, from what cause?, or why, as in, for what purpose?, but why, as in to what ultimate end? So, not the historical explanation of how your desire came about—that’s one kind of why—or its instrumental value to some other goal—that’s another kind of why—but the future end-point—the terminus of your desire—its final value to you, the fundamental value that it represents that motivates you to obtain it.

Let’s say you want a romantic partner. Why do you want this? An answer expressing the first kind of “why” might be something like ‘I want a romantic partner because its an evolved trait in sexually-reproducing organisms that increases the chances of propagating genes’. Now, that’s ‘why’ as explanation - it isn’t at all about your immediate, personal, psychological motivation.

The second kind of why might be the answer: ‘I want a romantic partner because I want to start a family’. That’s an answer to the question ‘why’ providing a reason that’s instrumental to getting something else you desire, for which this desired thing is a necessary step. 

The third kind of answer to the question “why” is something like: ‘because it would make me happy’. That’s the motivation we wish to analyse and understand. And it’s the terminus of your desire because any further questioning, asking why you want to be happy, is absurd.

Let’s look at another simple example: you want a glass of water and I ask you why. You might say, ‘because I’m thirsty. The next question would not be ‘why are you thirsty’?, because that is not a question about your motivation; it’s asking for an explanation of your thirstiness. No, the right question would be something like ‘why do you want to quench your thirst?” If you reply, ‘because it feels good to drink water when I’m thirsty’, that seems to be the bottom of the analysis. It doesn’t make sense to ask why you want to feel good—you want to feel good because it feels good to feel good. Feeling good is its own justification. It’s desirable because its desirable; and its good because its good.   

Can you see here how we eventually leave the realm of the rational when we explore our desires right to their ends in this way? 

Now, you might say, wait a minute, ‘I want to quench my thirst because I will die of dehydration if I don’t’—that’s rational, right? Well, firstly I would question whether you are truly motivated by fear of death when you get yourself a glass of water, but let’s assume that’s the case. Fine. So, now we must further analyse your motivation and we ask, ‘why don’t you want to die?’ Of course, the irreducible answer to this is just because. You don’t need a rational reason to want to stay alive. In all but the most extreme of circumstances, humans will do just about anything to stay alive. In this high level of motivation is an implicit evaluation: being alive is good, at least its good relative to the alternative, and so we’ll expend considerable effort in trying to stay alive. Ergo, being alive is good, and its good because its good—or we could say because the alternative, being dead, is bad.

However, maybe you would answer something like, “I want to stay alive to care for my children”, that would be perfectly valid, but then it would require further analysis: why do you want to care for your children, and so forth. You keep going until you leave the realm of rationalisations altogether.

Or lets say you respond to the drink of water question saying, ‘I want to drink water because dying of dehydration would be painful.’ Indeed so, but why do you want to avoid pain? A stupid question. Pain is bad because its bad. There is no rational justification necessary for wanting to avoid pain. If you find you come up with one, keep asking why until you get to the point where asking why stops making sense.

So you see, we are interested in fundamental motivation rather than explanations and rationalisations. In each case, what are you valuing, right at bottom? Because at the bottom of every human desire there is a self-justifying feeling. 

Let’s have another illustration, and maybe get some hints as to where it leads. 

Let’s say, for example, you want a promotion at work. Why? 

—Well, most obviously, you want more money, right? Additionally, let’s say you want increased status and a more stimulating working day. There may be many, many reasons why you want the promotion, but it helps to analyse one motivator at a time, in this case: money. Pretty much everyone would like more money—it’s useful stuff. Our questioning continues: why do you want more money? 

Now, remember, take care that you are identifying your own personal motivation with this further questioning. If you want more money, your initial answer to the question ‘why do I want more money?’ might be, ‘because I need money to buy things.’ An appropriate next question would be something like, ‘why do I want to buy things?’ It would not be, ‘why do I need money to buy things?’, because the latter is not a question about your motivation; instead it is a question about the role of money in society. 

With that in mind, why do you want more money? 

—So you can comfortably pay for the necessities of life and maybe a few luxuries to boot. 

Okay, let’s stick with the necessities, choosing just one. Let’s say you need money for your rent or mortgage. Why do you want to pay your rent or your mortgage? 

—Because you will be evicted if you don’t.

Why don’t you want to be evicted?

—Because you could end up homeless and sleeping on the streets. 

Why don’t you want to end up homeless and sleeping on the streets? 

—Because it’s cold and its humiliating and its dangerous. 

Picking just one of these motivators again: why don’t you want to be cold? 

—Because it just plain feels bad. 

Ah!—So now we have reached the point where asking why stops making sense. If being cold feels bad, it’s nonsensical to ask why you don’t want to feel bad. Being cold feels bad and maintaining a certain body temperature is necessary to avoid hypothermia and death, which is also something you want to avoid, presumably. So in this example, we can say one of the reasons you want a promotion at work is that, ultimately, you can better insulate yourself against the chances of dying of hypothermia. 

Of course, I doubt very much this is an explicit conscious motivator, but in a vague sense, fear of the misery of destitution motivates you, and fear itself is a bad feeling. Having more money from your promotion can allay this bad feeling, not just reducing the chances of you freezing to death, but reducing your anxiety that you could be put in a position where this could happen. To put it bluntly, having money feels good. That’s even aside from all the things it can procure that will also grant you good feelings.

If that sounds like a stretch, let’s follow a different, more positive, but equally valid line of inquiry. Rarely, if ever, in Nietzsche view, do we do anything for one identifiable reason. So let’s say another reason you want the promotion is because you want higher status in your company. Okay, great: why do you want higher status? 

—Because it feels good to have higher status. 

We could stop there but out of interest, why does it feel good to have higher status?

—Because you get all kinds of social privileges: people will afford you more respect and consideration; you are less likely to be bullied; you will find it easier to book a good table at a fancy restaurant; the retail assistants won’t look down their noses at you when you enter a high-end boutique; you are likely to have more luck in attracting high-value romantic partners, and so on and so forth. 

Lots of lines to fruitfully pursue there. With higher status, your comfort and welfare tend to be more assured, whereas, with lower status, your comfort and welfare are much more sketchy. People who have the lowest status in society tend to live on the cusp of crisis all the time (or even in a constant state of crisis—consider those exceedingly low status people sleeping on the streets whose ranks you do not wish to join). Those with the highest status breeze through life by comparison, so higher status feels good because it is a signifier and a guarantee of greater material and social security—it feels good in itself and it promises other things that feel good. Safety, health, comfort, respect, and privilege feel good. We’re ticking all the boxes on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here, if you are familiar with that model. 

All these things increase your chances of surviving and flourishing. Their presence in your life suggests you are more likely to have your pick of desirable relationships. Their presence in your life suggests the chances of an unpleasant and ignominious premature death are minimised. Who doesn’t want this, right?

Briefly, let’s explore that other motivator I mentioned: wanting the promotion because you want more stimulating work. Why do you want more stimulating work? 

You want it because it is more engaging and captivating—put another way, it’s not as boring as what you do currently. So we reach a bottom quickly here. Stimulating work, work that is interesting, challenging to an appropriate extent and meaningful feels like a good in itself for humans. It’s good because it’s good.

How about something simpler: let’s say you want a slice of pepperoni pizza. Why do you want that? Following from the aforesaid, you may be tempted to answer immediately that hunger feels bad and eating promotes survival. This is true, but you picked the hot, crispy, spicy pizza with extra anchovies when you could just as easily have chosen a healthy avocado salad or a big steaming plate of fried liver and onions. Eating is necessary for living, but most of us in the developed world do not eat in order to live—the reverse is generally more the case. Yes, being hungry feels bad and you need food to live, but mostly you choose the foods you do just because they taste good, and asking you why you want to eat something that tastes good is a stupid question. It’s good because it’s good.

Hold on though. You may have found that not all your desires appear to reduce to your own basic needs and pleasures, in the way the aforementioned examples seem to. There are goals that might even endanger your comfort and survival, such as climbing Everest or impetuously quitting your job and escaping the rat-race. What is it people really want when they pursue high stakes goals like these?

In the early 1920s a reporter asked the famous British adventurer, George Mallory why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, which at that time was still unclimbed. His reply is legendary: "Because it's there." 

This is a reason that isn’t a reason. He might as well have said “because I want to” which, notice, is not a rational justification. If I ask you why you want something, and you reply, just because I do, this is not rational. Neither is it irrational, for that matter. It is non-rational, or as Nietzsche would put it, it is extra-rational, meaning not that it is even more rational—which the way we use the word “extra” these days—but in the sense of the original meaning of extra, meaning outside or beyond the rational. Our need to come up with rational accounts for all our behaviours is our modern obsession, in Nietzsche’s view. A legacy of the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Nietzsche writes of Socrates in BGE:

“and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the reasons for their actions?” 

But as our analysis of our own desires demonstrates, everything we value and want is ultimately grounded in non-rational good and bad feelings. To ask why you want to feel good is a stupid question.

Why then do people engage in dangerous escapades and adrenaline sports when they entail bad feelings: fear, anxiety, stress, uncertainty, suffering and pain? When they don’t meet their basic survival needs in any obvious way? Indeed, when they positively undermine basic survival needs like warmth, safety, health, comfort and all the rest. Nietzsche himself encouraged us to QUOTE “live dangerously” UNQUOTE but isn’t embracing avoidable risks and hardships irrational—in a sense, it seems to be a case of wanting what we don’t want? We will return to this question and to Mallory, who is going to be a test case for us, in the coming shows.      

Okay, so let’s take a look at some goals that don’t seem to be about you at all? What about, for instance, the desire to make your parents proud? That doesn’t seem like something that contributes to survival and flourishing in any obvious way. Why would anyone want to make their parents proud? I guess an answer to this question might be something like: 

—because it will make them happy.

But why do you want your parents to be happy?

—One answer to this is, essentially, because it makes you happy to make them happy. Probably you love them, I suppose. Okay, fine—have we reached the bottom here? To ask why you love your parents is a nonsensical question. You can try to justify your affections by pointing out that they brought you up and fed and clothed you, for which you are of course grateful, but the fact is people usually love their parents even when their parents have been poor at their parenting duties. 

A different driver of the desire to make your parents proud could be that you feel powerfully validated when the people who brought you into the world are impressed by your achievements—it feels good. 

It is true that the happiness, welfare and wellbeing of loved ones is often as important to us as is our own. That promotion at work doesn’t just keep the roof more firmly over your own head, it keeps the roof over your family’s heads too. In particular, the welfare of one’s children can be one of the strongest motivations there is. To ask why you care about the welfare of your children seems obtuse—as a personal motivation, it’s just a brute fact. Genetic factors can be, and are, invoked as explanations, but only at the risk of infuriating people who feel that their most meaningful relationships are being demeaned by such biological reductionism. In terms of our analysis, it feels good to look after your children and see them thrive, and it is distressing to see their wellbeing decline. 

Finally, there are desires that do not appear to have any kind of self-interested motive at all. Compassionate individual that you doubtless are, you want to help other people, right?—strangers even. Maybe you want to volunteer in a soup kitchen or become an aid worker in some war-torn failed state. The same forensics should be applied: Why do you want this? Why do you want that? With such unambiguously moral cases, many of us will deny that there is any self-interest here at all and, when we do attempt to trace our motivations, we are likely to arrive at the apparently self-evident truism that moral acts are good just because they are. These acts are purportedly pursued for their own sake. To say a moral act is carried out for a reason that is in any way self-interested is to somehow degrade its moral pedigree. Even one’s own satisfaction in acting morally could be considered compromising. If I help you out when you are in need just so I can feel good about myself, there’s an unsettling implication that I have used you, in some sense, for my own personal gratification—even if you have benefited. There might even be a whiff of something sociopathic about this. 

Or alternatively let’s say that I am exercising rational prudence, and so I help you out so I can rely on you to return the favour when I might be in need—isn’t this essentially transactional and so ultimately self-serving too? If, however, I help you out with no thought for any recognition, reward, or reciprocity, this would be considered a truly moral act. It’s good to help you when you are in need just because it’s good—so say our moral intuitions. We shall take a microscope to these assumptions later.

Time for this week’s music recommendation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I’m going to recommend you a track every week that reflects the emotional states I encountered during the development of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have some significance. Remember, sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

I can invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, making use of your own digital music platform subscription or other sources. So, reflect on what we’ve discussed today while listening to 14:31, by Global Communication. Links in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested. Also, feel free to speculate on my reasons for choosing the tracks I do with regard to the work we’re doing here.                                                                                            

As we’ve seen, many desires, goals, or aspirations can be broken down into smaller parts, each with their own justifications. Whether you want a promotion for more money, higher status, more stimulation, or all of the above, as we follow these motivations further and further, we eventually reach a point where the questioning must stop.

Take safety, for example. Safety is something we all value to some extent, but why? On the surface, it seems self-evident: safety helps you avoid harm, danger, or death. But we have to push further. Why do you want to avoid harm? Why do you want to avoid danger? Why do you want to avoid death?

The answers might seem obvious: harm is painful, danger is frightening, and death is final. But keep going: why don’t you want to feel pain? Why don’t you want to feel fear? Why don’t you want to die?

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where the only possible answer is that these things feel bad, you don’t like them; you don’t want them. Why not? Why don’t you want to feel bad? It’s the same as saying, why don’t you want what you don’t want? The question itself becomes nonsensical. It’s not something that is susceptible to rational justification; it’s something you simply experience. Feeling bad is bad, full stop.

On the other hand, when you arrive at a positive motivator—like enjoying the company of loved ones, achieving something meaningful, or savouring a slice of pizza—you’ll notice the same thing. Why does spending time with loved ones matter? You might say it strengthens your bond with them or brings you closer together. Why does achieving something meaningful matter? You might say it gives your life purpose. Why does eating pizza matter? You might say it tastes delicious.

But keep pushing. Why do you want to feel close to your loved ones? Why do you want your life to have purpose? Why do you enjoy the taste of pizza? At some point, you’ll find yourself saying, just because it feels good. And there, again, the reasoning ends. You want what you want because you want it. It’s good because its good.

This is the irreducible, self-justifying good feeling we’re talking about. Once you reach it, you’ve hit rock bottom—or so it seems. Surely, there is no deeper “why” to ask, because the experience itself carries its own answer. Good feelings are good because they are good. They need no further explanation.

This process—digging down to the bedrock of your desires—is where the real insight lies. You may think you want safety, money, or success for their own sake, but when you peel back the layers, you’ll discover that these are proxies. They’re scaffolding, built to serve something far simpler and more primal: the pursuit of good feelings and the avoidance of bad ones.

Before I wrap things up, a word on the frequency of this podcast. Thus far, I’ve produced a handful of episodes to get things established. You should be getting this latest episode on Friday, European time, and my aim is to produce an episode weekly released every Friday. If you’ve been listening and intend to keep listening, I’d be grateful if you’d subscribe as that really helps make this show more sustainable. There’s so much great stuff to come and I really believe it can be life-changing. We tend to think of the concept of destiny as something quaint, antiquated, perhaps a bit silly, but Nietzsche avidly believed in destiny and this was not some flowery nonsense but was a conclusion arrived at philosophically and scientifically. This podcast has found you and, on Nietzsche’s terms, that is destiny, the question is what effect might it have on your destiny from this point onwards?

Though we still have work to do unfolding the Nietzschean understanding of happiness, next time we will be looking at Nietzsche the man again, and examining the accusations of Nazism that have plagued his memory, as well as the misogyny implicit in some of his writings. Should Nietzsche’s unpalatable comments be a reason for dismissing his philosophy completely? We’ll discuss that in next week’s show.

With regard to your analysis of your desires then: to be clear: whatever your desire, you haven’t truly arrived at the root of what you truly desire until the “why” question no longer makes sense. Until you find yourself facing a self-justifying good feeling. This hedonic judgement which determines that 

this is good, that is bad, 

I want this, I don’t want that, 

I like this and do not like that

—these individual evaluations add up to what Nietzsche calls our taste.

What does everyone really want? This exercise should have revealed this to you—what everyone really wants and pursues is good feelings.

Okay, enough. In this experiment, for each and every goal, aspiration or desire you have, you are looking to identify your personal motivation at bottom. Even if you analyse just one or two things on your list, take your analysis as far as you can. Endeavour to expose the root of your desires. This is a first step toward gaining a valuable insight into your own basic drives—and those of all humans, for that matter. By carrying out this preliminary experiment, you will have already undertaken the kind of psychological vivisection that some of the greatest minds in history, concerned as they were to promote and protect the ‘dignity of man’, have neglected; purposely avoided; actively rejected! Does this mean that you now are a privileged witness to the real, irreducible and fundamental nature of the human animal?

Hardly.

And so to Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

‘There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it.’⁠1 

In this passage, Nietzsche is writing about other philosophers, but this observation could not have more relevance for our little enquiry. Do we really reach a limit when we arrive at the apparent ground of our motivations? For Nietzsche, one can go deeper, much deeper. Certainly beyond the superficial criteria of human motivation that Maslow identified. Of the thinker and his investigations, Nietzsche asks if,  ‘whether behind each of his caves there does not and must not lie another, deeper cave – a stranger, more comprehensive world beyond the surface’ [BGE.289]. His conclusion is that beneath every apparent foundation there lies ‘an abyss’.⁠2 

Nietzsche is saying that those apparently basic motivations are no base at all. For us, meanwhile, the question is not so much how can this mysterious subterranean realm of motivation be accessed, as who would undertake such an expedition and for what profit? In our sunlit world, our familiar world, our ‘apparent’ world, we are rightly cautious in venturing to peer over the lip of this most unillumined of rabbit holes. It leads precipitously down into unimaginable depths, far beyond the point where questions of human desire make any sense, to a realm of primal formlessness that is incalculably ancient. For those intrepid souls who are prepared to make the descent, what can be glimpsed down here is the workings of the machinery of the cosmos. What can be comprehended down here is the resolution of every ‘why’—every ‘why’s presupposition, in fact. What can be discovered down here is the secret of the goodest good thing of all—the essential key to all human self-overcoming, all meaning-making, all fulfilment and joy. 

Here is the profit. Here is the prize. Will you take it?

1 BGE.289

2 Ibid.