8. Wanting and getting

Why do we always yearn for more? Why does happiness seem forever out of reach? In this episode of Becoming Übermensch, we dive into the inescapable cycle of desire, fulfilment, and renewed longing—tracing its roots from the  bleak resignation of the Buddha's and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche’s radical revaluation of suffering. 

Through the lens of Darwinian evolution, we uncover the hidden function of dissatisfaction: a relentless drive sculpted by natural selection, pushing us ever forward. Is our discontent a flaw, or is it the very engine of human greatness? Is it a curse, or it is the essential pre-condition for any kind of happiness whatsoever? 

Join us as we unravel the evolutionary logic behind our perpetual striving—and why rejecting desire may be the ultimate rejection of life itself.

Music: Familiar Feeling by Moloko

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Music credit for string/piano loop: Little pleasures 1N72 (loop) by Setuniman -- https://freesound.org/s/350572/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

Transcript

The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats is said to have claimed: “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens,”. And it’s true: we seem to live for tomorrow. Final happiness always seems to reside in the future—a tantalising paradise we perpetually strive towards but perhaps never truly reach. This unending cycle of desire, satiation, boredom, and renewed desire led the great pessimist philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, to repudiate existence and the world. For Schopenhauer, in the absence of the possibility of a definitive state of happiness, suffering is the essential character of existence.

In his youth, Schopenhauer had been Nietzsche’s great philosophical hero, but as he matured and developed his own ideas, Nietzsche came to reject Schopenhauer’s pessimistic defeatism in favour of something more life-affirming and, on his own terms, something more healthy. Because Schopenhauer saw existence as suffering, his moral injunction was that suffering should be eradicated wherever possible. To Nietzsche’s mind, there’s something suspicious, feeble, and even sick about this mawkish obsession with suffering. In BGE.186 he counts Schopenhauer among those supposed masters who “still talk like children and old women” Despite this, there was still much they held in common, and in fact Nietzsche’s philosophy can to a great extent be seen and a direct reaction to Schopenhauer’s nihilistic resignation.

An atheist, Schopenhauer, rejected the phoney consolation of an afterlife in paradise. For him, there was no Heaven, no Valhalla, no Isles of the Blessed, no happy terminus where all our needs are eternally fulfilled in the next world. In his estimation, the human condition is one of struggle, dissatisfaction, tedium, disappointment, pain, restlessness, and despair, punctuated only by feeble and ephemeral pleasures. Existence is a curse. The only rational recourse in the face of such a bleak reality is, if not suicide, the radical rejection of desire, that poisonous wellspring of suffering.

Almost two and a half millennia before Schopenhauer, the Buddha had arrived at the same conclusion. He, too, recognised the inherent dissatisfaction in the human condition—what he called dukkha, often translated as suffering or unease. He too indicted worldly desires as the cause of this suffering, their temporary gratification serving merely to mask the underlying discontent. As we’ve already touched on, his prescription was the same as Schopenhauer’s: the practice of disciplined detachment, a renunciation of craving that could lead to liberation from the endless cycle of samsara—birth, death, and rebirth—driven by unfulfilled desires. 

One cannot help but be reminded of Sisyphus too, the king of Corinth from Greek Myth, who was punished by Zeus for his hubris by being condemned to push a huge boulder up a steep hill forever. Each time he neared the summit, the boulder would roll back down, forcing him to begin again. This endless cycle of effort and failure provides a vivid vignette of eternal futility. It is typical of the Greek genius to provide such a sublime metaphor for the human condition. Like Sisyphus, we too find ourselves locked in the endless labour of trying to overcome dissatisfaction, only to see it continually reassert itself in new forms. That “hedonic adaption” we’ve spoken about.

As we’ve ascertained in previous shows, for Nietzsche, the rejection of desire is the rejection of life itself. To desire nothing at all, even if that were possible, is to be dead. Desire brings pain, but it also an inherent component of joy. Nietzsche doesn’t deny that desire causes suffering—its a part of the tragic character of human existence—but if you strip away all your desires, and I mean all of them, what of you is left? We often feel victim to our desires, a slave to their insatiable demands—but for Nietzsche, we just are our desires. To want to erase all our desires is to want to erase our selves. This indeed seems to be the Buddha’s implicit goal. So, for Nietzsche, what is necessary is to develop a new orientation and a new relationship with desire. Therefore, it’s necessary to understand desire, and that’s why we have been spending so much time over previous shows analysing it, locating its wellspring, figuring out the function of its apparent insatiability. Why is dissatisfaction so ineliminable?

To understand this, we need to look at it through the lens of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Most people are aware of evolution in principle, but it is a remarkably nuanced theory and people often misunderstand some key aspects of it. I’m going to give a brief potted explanation.

Evolution by natural selection is a fundamental concept in biology that explains how species change over time, adapting to their environment and leading to the diversity of life we see today. This process was first proposed by Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century and remains one of the most well-supported theories in modern science.

At its core, natural selection is based on three key principles: variation, heritability, and differential survival and reproduction. Within any population of a species, individuals show variation in their traits due to genetic diversity, arising from, to cite a couple of key examples, mutations caused by imperfections in DNA copying during reproduction, or novel recombinations of genes from two parents. This genetic variation means that, in any generation, offspring can exhibit chance differences in traits. Some of these variations can be passed down through reproduction, representing the concept of heritability.

Now, in each generation, individuals compete for limited resources such as food, shelter, or mates. Not all individuals will survive and reproduce; there will be a struggle for existence. The chance variations in traits influence an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce in a given environment. Those with advantageous traits are more likely to pass them on, increasing the prevalence of those traits in the next generation.

Over time, as more generations are produced, the frequency of advantageous traits in the population increases, while less favourable traits become rarer or may even disappear. This process, sometimes called “survival of the fittest,” refers to reproductive success rather than just survival or physical strength. Natural selection leads to the adaptation of populations over time, optimising their survival and reproductive success within their environment.

To illustrate, imagine a species of trees in a forest where leaf-eating monkeys strip trees of their leaves, often killing them before they mature and spread seeds. However, one day, due to genetic variation from a chance mutation, one tree produces slightly more bitter-tasting leaves. The monkeys avoid it, which allows it to mature and spread its seeds. Some of its offspring inherit this unpalatable bitterness and are also left alone by the greedy monkeys, enabling them to thrive, reproduce, and spread.

Gradually, over generations, the sweeter trees are selected out of existence by the attention of the monkeys, while the bitter trees survive and reproduce. The sweeter the leaves of the tree, the more likely it is to be eliminated from the race for life; the more bitter it is, the more likely it is to survive and proliferate its genes. As bitter trees outperform sweeter ones reproductively, the species as a whole becomes progressively more bitter—perhaps even evolving to be toxic.

Well, this would be the case is it weren’t for the fact that the monkeys are evolving too. In a world of increasingly bitter trees, any monkey with a genetic variation allowing it to tolerate bitterness will have a competitive advantage, being able to eat what others cannot. These tolerant monkeys are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on their genes. 

This is why evolution is often described as an arms race.

Natural selection is not a conscious or directed process but the result of environmental pressures interacting with genetic variation within a population. It operates on a wide range of time scales, from relatively rapid changes in response to strong selective pressures to slower transformations over thousands or millions of years and it produces changes not just in physiology but in behaviour too—indeed, for Nietzsche, behaviour is grounded in physiology: he calls this theory ‘physio-psychology’. 

Evolution by natural selection is the cornerstone of modern biology, explaining the diversity and complexity of life on Earth and providing a powerful framework for understanding how organisms develop and continue to change over time.

This is a necessarily oversimplified explanation, and evolution is something that will be of concern to us so we will discuss it again. Famously, Nietzsche is supposed to never have read Darwin, though the Darwinian revolution was in full effect during his lifetime, but Nietzsche was an evolutionist, developing his own unique conception of the process of evolution by natural selection, very much aligned with Darwinism actually.

Let’s return to our discussion of dissatisfaction—and what seems to be its inescapability. 

Despite its apparent futility, there seems to be a deeper, evolutionary logic accounting for this psychological disposition. 

The insatiability of desire and the impetus it gave towards striving behaviours likely conferred some survival advantage in past generations of species. A satisfied and contented human might have lacked the get-up-and-go to seek out more resources, improve their environment, or compete effectively for mates. Those that had a variation that meant they were not so easily satisfied, on the other hand, might have found that their ambition gave them a competitive edge in the race for survival and reproduction. The dissatisfied then would be more likely to reproduce and pass on their genes, bequeathing their trait of general dissatisfaction to the next generation, who also then tend towards dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction, then, could be a naturally selected psychological trait in our species. 

Moreover, when choosing mates, individuals drawn to dissatisfied strivers—those who continually sought to improve their conditions—may have benefitted from better providers for their offspring. These ambitious types might not only have improved the chances of survival for their families but provided an advantageous role-model for their children too. By modelling ambitious behaviour as well as passing on their genetic predisposition for striving, they could enhance their offspring’s own potential for success and flourishing. Thus, in addition to the evolutionary edge of dissatisfaction and desire for more, sexual attraction to ambitious types would be a naturally-selected trait too, further reinforcing the species trait of general dissatisfaction. 

Dissatisfaction, then, serves as a kind of spur, propelling individuals—and by extension, the species—toward growth, adaptation, innovation, acquisition, competition, and every kind of overcoming. It is precisely this insatiable desiring and irrepressible striving that has enabled humanity to transform its environment and secure its survival across millennia. The price we pay as a species is pervasive and irksome psychological discontent—an exasperating inheritance from our reproductively-successful ancestors with their dissatisfaction and their ambition.

A lot of talk of ambition here, but if it’s not obvious thus far, I should say here that Nietzsche does not share our contemporary obsession with productivity, career, fame, and material success. Sure, those things might be important to you, but his sights are on something higher and more transcendent. But I shan’t judge anyone else’s journey. As Nietzsche has Zarathustra say:

“‘This – is now my way: where is yours?’ Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way’. For the way – does not exist!”  

We all must forge our own path. Are you clear on what your’s might be yet?

Last time we conducted a vivisection—we explored the anatomy of desire and found it was comprised of four distinct stages: wanting, trying to get, getting, and having. Did we discover what the most fundamental drive was?—the desire behind every desire. It seems we found part of the answer: the most fundamental drive seems to be related to the desire for that delicious yet fleeting feeling of getting what we want at the exact moment that we get it—the feeling-experience of desire transforming into fulfilment. It is the win! The victory! It is success! And the more unlikely the achievement, the more seemingly unattainable the goal, the greater the resistance that must be overcome, the sweeter the pleasure. 

This is common to every desire we have of any kind soever (even the negative cases, as when the anxious desire to avoid danger transforms into the feeling of comfortable safety). It’s not so much a state then, as a dynamic transition between two different states: the state of wanting becoming the state of getting. Happiness on these terms is not a resting place we arrive at, it is an event! Whatever we want to get, what we really want is the moment of getting itself, the feeling of getting what we want right when we get it. Let’s call this dynamic event: wanting-becoming-getting.

Let’s consider an example: say you want to make lots of money—because money is useful stuff, right? It buys food, shelter, all manner of treats and luxuries. It buys pleasure and having it grants the anticipation of pleasure. But you also experience pleasure from making money because getting what you want itself, against all resistance, just feels good. This is the pleasure of wanting-becoming-getting. It explains why billionaires who have more money that they could ever need or spend still seem to be driven to obtain more, when doing so has no real practical motivation that can justify it. I actually know someone with several million in the bank who will get excited about a card game for loose change. The winning is still valuable and desirable even if the stakes are paltry. Runaway drive

This also explains why getting everything one wants doesn’t generally doesn’t lead to lasting happiness. Consider the baffling conundrum of millionaire depressives—they exist. Or what about those wastrel children of the super-rich: because they can have whatever they desire they so often end up miserable or self-destructive, alcoholics and drug addicts. There is nothing to struggle or strive for and we all need just the right amount of struggle and strife to fuel the  dynamic cycle of wanting-becoming-getting. Nietzsche writes in Human, all too Human 471, “A happy era is completely impossible, because men want only to desire it, but not to have it, and every individual, if he has good days, learns virtually to pray for unrest and misery. The destiny of men is designed for happy moments (every life has those), but not for happy eras.” [HH.471] In Daybreak 262, he writes, “You may give men everything possible —health, food, shelter, enjoyment—but they are and remain unhappy and capricious” [D.262]

On these terms fulfilment is actually premised on desire, a desire for something good in the future—a destination falsely promising final happiness that we can work towards. Fulfilment is found in moving forward in the realisation of our desires and, if things go well, it will involve experiencing regular experiences of wanting-becoming-getting, the pleasure of which can only ever be temporary before a new desire must be identified and pursued. Such is the cast iron law of hedonic adaption.

In that sense, the yearning and suffering that characterises lacking and desiring is an essential component of the dynamic. How can you enjoy the transition from lack to satiation without the first half of the equation? Satiation depends on lack for its existence. Without lack, there can be no satiation. To maximally enjoy a good meal, you need to be hungry.

This reminds me a great deal of the action of nicotine in smoking. Nicotine releases dopamine which is pleasurable for sure, but one of the most marked psychoactive symptoms of nicotine addiction is the unpleasant suffering caused by withdrawal symptoms. When a nicotine-addicted smoker is compelled to have a cigarette, it’s as much to alleviate the suffering of withdrawal as it is to enjoy the pleasure of smoking. In fact, it’s kind of difficult to separate these two motivations. Does the smoker smoke to alleviate pain or to obtain pleasure? Well—both I guess, but don’t both these states depend on each other, in a sense? Would smoking be as pleasurable to the nicotine addict if it didn’t cause the horrible withdrawal symptoms which it then alleviates? Nicotine is the solution to the very problem it causes—that’s almost addiction in a nutshell.

When I worked in addictions, there was a nice metaphor: taking up smoking is like deciding to carry a heavy suitcase everywhere you go, just so you can enjoy the pleasurable relief of occasionally putting it down for a few minutes. Pain and pleasure are related to each other. Suffering and fulfilment are first cousins.

You can see again, I hope, why Nietzsche thinks that “pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other”, (JS.12) Setting addictions aside and thinking about our most profound desires, for Nietzsche, extraordinary triumphs require extraordinary trials. Some sort of final happiness is an illusion. Happiness is not really a place, a terminus that we can arrive at where we can down tools and put our feet up, a comfortable retirement in the sun—an end to all our struggles. This is a mirage, a horizon that recedes even as we journey towards it. Final happiness is a fable—note its similarity to the idea of Heaven, a place of absolute happiness beyond space, time, and necessity where every need is sated and nothing ever happens. More the one commentator has observed that such a heaven sounds like a very boring place. Nietzsche says happiness “endure[s] in the human imagination as “the place beyond the mountains,”. [HH.471] i.e. as some sort of mythical lalaland. Fulfilment, it seems, is to found in the journey, not the destination, because every destination is just a temporary resting place before moving off once more. If you reject religious supernaturalisms, our only certain destination seems to be the grave, oblivion, the annihilation that the buddha craved—what we might call the buddhistic “place beyond the mountains”. 

Perhaps we can all can be assured of eternal rest in the bosom of oblivion. In the meantime, while you’re alive, as happiness is the one thing that you inescapably want and aim for, what are you going to do with your life to realise it?

The wonderful Zen Buddhist teacher, Allan Watts said "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." 

This is true and wise, but being alive inevitably involves desire—it involves wanting. Making sure your desires don’t run you into the ground and sap your life of joy is important, but whether your wants are great or small, you cannot escape wanting.

So, that nagging question rears its inscrutable head again: what do you want?

Okay, so we know that we want things and the dynamic experience of getting the things we want feels good, at least for a while, but this doesn’t explain why we want what we want—its value—or why it feels so good to get what we want. What is the meaning of this wanting-becoming-getting experience that seems to govern all our behaviour?

By what standard do you judge a thing as “good”—as worth pursuing? You do it through evaluating and your judgement good is experienced in your feelings of desire for that thing—or more specifically in your yearning for the pleasure that obtaining it promises. As Nietzsche puts it in his notes: In 84:26[72]: “Valuations lie in all functions of the organic being. . . . / Every ‘drive’ is the drive towards ‘something good,’ seen from some standpoint”

What standpoint?

Essentially, all our desires, evaluations, and motivations find their origins in an axiomatic imperative, one that governs all organic life: survive to reproduce. In Nietzsche’s naturalistic account, anything it is even possible for our species to desire must be, or must have been, constitutive towards this end (or at the very least, must not have been contrary to that end). Why? Because if you discount all supernatural explanations for the existence of humans, the development of the human species from the simplest, primordial lifeforms over billions of years is the history of characteristics slowly accumulating through a process of natural selection. Any variation in an organism that confers a benefit which increases the chances of survival-for-reproduction is, by definition, likely to be passed on to offspring and may then have a chance of proliferating through that species. 

Over stretches of time so vast that the human mind cannot possibly grasp them, the assimilation of beneficial variations gradually alters the morphology of a species so profoundly, so astoundingly, that an aquatic, single-celled organism can be ancestor to an African elephant. This fact of evolution by natural selection—of the accumulation of characteristics that enhance survival-for-reproduction—means that, since the dawn of life itself, every characteristic of every living species exists, or has existed, only because it has made some contribution to that great genetic succession (or, at the very least, has not been detrimental to it). If this is true, then everything about humans as a species must have come into existence because it serves survival-for-reproduction (or is, at worst, neutral to that end). This includes not just the facts of our anatomy but all our behaviour too.

It should be noted too that this imperative is solely directed towards the survival and reproduction of genes, not species, and not individuals; or, at least, the survival of the individual or the species is important only as a means to the survival of their genes. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book, the Selfish Gene, from the perspective of evolution by natural selection, we are mere vehicles for our genes.

I re-iterate: this survival-for-reproduction imperative applies not just to anatomy, but to all physiological and psychological characteristics too. So not only does every part of your physical body exist only to serve this function, everything you are, or are capable of, does too. This includes all your thoughts, feelings, opinions, beliefs and, yes, all your desires. Everything you desire, and through that feeling evaluate as “good”, you want only because it contributes to genetic survival-for-reproduction. 

This assertion is likely to be scoffed at. There are human preoccupations that don’t seem to have any apparent value for survival or for reproduction: think of playing or listening to music, composing poetry, chewing gum, visiting art galleries, watching TV, collecting stamps, playing Call of Duty until three in the morning, going to church, astronomy, gossip, gambling, keeping cacti, scratching your butt, shooting-up heroin, same-sex sex, masturbation, vasectomies, suicide, or dying in battle for your country. But be assured, dear reader, all these activities can be absolutely accounted for as part of this survival-for-reproduction function, as will be demonstrated in future shows. 

For the time being, I ask you to trust me on this, but here’s a hint. Instinct, which consciously and unconsciously underpins all human activity, is not teleological, not purposive, it functions as if it has a goal, but it has no goals. This means that instinct acts even when its action is not fulfilling its evolved function. And where there is a disconnect, a misfire, this is explained by the fact that the instinct is not operating in the environmental conditions within which it evolved.

Instinct is explained not by its goals but by its causes in the past, which give a complete account of how it evolved—in Nietzsche’s parlance, all present phenomena can be explained genealogically.   

Granted that this is true—that all one’s motivations and desires evolved solely because they served our axiomatic imperative for life—then the pleasure you experience from a desire fulfilled can be considered the hedonic reward that evolved to positively reinforce behaviours that supported this end. Once this hedonic reward system emerged, encouraging behaviours that genuinely promoted genetic survival-for-reproduction, its proliferation within a species was inevitable. 

I guess it must have been the case that, in the past, there have been individuals whose tentatively emerging hedonic reward systems were triggered by behaviours that didn’t actually promote SFR, or worse rewarded behaviours that were contrary to that end, and it’s easy to see how their genes would fail to proliferate. Therefore, as contemporary humans are demonstrably the product of successful genes, our hedonic reward systems must have contributed to survival-for-reproduction in the past. 

It’s easy to understand how motivating desires for behaviours like sex, eating, drinking, resting, avoiding predators, and nurturing children, reinforced by the hedonic reward-system, promoted survival-for-reproduction in early humans. Fulfilling these desires felt good and so merely being led unquestioningly by their good and bad feelings our ancestors actively promoted survival-for-flourishing for their genes. This is what it is to be steered by instinct—or what Nietzsche refers to as First Nature—just like any animal. Instinct communicates through bodily feelings of evaluation: hunger, thirst, fatigue, sexual attraction, fury, fear, love, need for social acceptance, desire for status etc.—essentially, a spectrum of feelings with opposite poles that constitute desire at one end and aversion at the other; a “yes” to this and a “no” to that.

Some of these motivating desires provide their hedonic reward as immediate sensual pleasure. Eating is enjoyable—food we want to eat tastes good. The physical sensations of sex are usually highly enjoyable too. Resting when tired provides pleasurable relief. But some of these motivating desires furnish a less sensual, more psychological form of satisfaction. For example, forming a friendship, frightening intruders out of one’s tribal territory, or caring for one’s children—these behaviours contribute to survival-for-reproduction but the pleasure, though still physiological, is more abstract, felt a little more in the mind than in the body—more refined, we might say. Sugar tastes sweet, and a lingering glance from someone you are attracted to is sweet too, but the first is a more physical form of sensuality; the latter, a more psychological one. 

This may help us understand how the wanting→getting hedonic mechanism could evolve because here we have desire that appears to be completely abstracted away from any ‘animal’ satisfactions or indeed any specific, practical function. It is not the psychological motivation to fulfil this or that desire, but the motivation to fulfil any desire, and the harder it is to fulfil—provided there is some chance that it can be fulfilled—the better. This is because the pleasurable reward is commensurate with the difficulty of the achievement. 

To illustrate, imagine you are awarded a medal for winning a footrace against a field of average runners. Probably not too disagreeable an experience. Now imagine you are awarded that very same medal for winning the same footrace against a field of competitors comprising the best runners in your community. Not only this, but you are recovering from an injury that had put your participation into question. Not only this, but the crowds watching the race have turned out to support the other runners, having written you off as an also-ran. Not only this, you stumble and fall at the start of the race and have to dramatically make up some significant ground to win. It is exactly the same medal being awarded in both cases. Which victory is more gratifying to you?

Obviously, it isn’t about the medal at all, it’s not even just about the achievement, the acclaim, or your dominance over the other competitors (though this is assuredly no small part of your pleasure), it’s about the magnitude of the overcoming that was required of you to pull off this victory.  “What”, you ask yourself, “does this extraordinary triumph say about me?” 

The drive for wanting→getting is not tied to any specific behaviours that directly promote survival-for-flourishing but can apply itself flexibly to any and all of them. It functions as a meta-drive: a higher-order motivation that operates above and beyond more practical drives. In life, you want to get specific things for real practical purposes, but you also want to get just for the sake of the feeling-experience of wanting→getting. 

To conceive of this wanting→getting meta-drive, imagine a lawyer representing a whole range of clients. Some are suing, some are being sued. These clients are the practical motivated desires (hunger, thirst, libido, desire for acceptance, status, safety etc. etc.) They want to win their cases. Their lawyer is the meta-drive: the pure and abstract appetite of wanting→getting. She may be invested in the fortunes of her clients and care about their struggles—indeed, as their representative she cannot even have the opportunity of getting what she wants, of winning, without them—but, principally, perhaps even exclusively, she is trying to win the cases for her own gratification—the pleasure that comes from just winning itself. 

She is so enamoured of winning that she may even take on the cases of clients with spurious or fabricated law suits, so long as there’s a chance she can enjoy the excitement of a hard-fought victory. She may—and this is another thought for you to ruminate upon—she may even take on the case of one of her clients against others, or even side against all of them for the thrill of overcoming her own clients—so intoxicated is she by the heady draught of mastery. Now, imagine the lawyer and her clients all live in your brain. 

Your drives, the desires for specific things, and the wanting-becoming-getting meta-drive, the desire to get what you want whatever that is, all evolved as means towards survival-for-reproduction. 

The great advantage of the WBG meta-drive was that it was more flexible, more versatile, and more plastic than the more grounded appetitive and immediately practical motivated desires. For complex animals with complicated existences, the irrepressible desire to overcome and prevail, thereby securing resources, advantages, and dominance in any situation that one might be faced with, provides an invaluable competitive edge. While the utility of this drive is general, it still tenaciously directs individuals’ behaviour toward practical problem-solving, striving, and overcoming challenges—including, and perhaps especially, outcompeting others. 

Yes, there is a strongly competitive tendency in wanting→getting because any and all success in human survival-for-reproduction is necessarily a social matter. After all, one can only reproduce with members of one’s own species. This then introduces two critical dynamics. Firstly, individuals must compete with others to secure opportunities for reproduction and a strong wanting→getting drive can be a hugely advantageous asset in this most frenzied of high-stakes contests, not least because (secondly) individuals must appeal to potential mates by displaying traits that are attractive and these traits—whether physical, behavioural, or social—are precisely those that maximise genetic survival-for-reproduction. 

As Nietzsche writes as much in his notes wanting→getting means: 85:34[208] (LNp13): “‘more’ and ‘better’ and ‘faster’ and ‘more often.” ’Just like all other desires (hunger, libido etc.), this meta-drive evolved because it contributed to survival-for-reproduction, but it has never been purposive to that end—it does not aim at it. Again, just like the other drives, the only thing it aims at is its own satisfaction. Consider that an animal does not eat for the conscious purpose of nourishing itself, it eats because it feels good and satisfies the ache of hunger; nor does it engage in sexual activity for the conscious purpose of reproduction, it engages in sex because it feels good to fulfil that urge—and the same can be said for we humans most of the time. 

Remember our friend, Hume? Reason is a slave to the passions? Purposiveness only enters the human arena when a blind instinctive desire presses its slave, reason, into service as a means to realising its own designs. You are not a thinking creature wrestling with some instincts; you are all instinct, with a rational servitor that does its bidding unconditionally and completely. As Nietzsche says in BGE.192, ‘reason is only a tool’.

This will be proved to you.

No animal has so developed a wanting-becoming-getting drive as the human. Though is still functions to maximise SFR, however blindly, it often seems to have broken its bounds. One implication is that, just like our other drives, wanting→getting can, in some cases, work contrary to the explicit end of survival-for-reproduction, setting its own satisfaction (that’s all it cares about) over and above that which would best contribute to the axiomatic imperative for life. Instead this compulsion longs only to win, to prevail, to feel the joy of triumph, no matter what the cost.

Okay, you may be finding that there’s a lot of information coming at you here, so let’s briefly summarise:

1. To be alive is to want things, which is a state of suffering. 
2. We determine what we want through evaluation. 
3. We evaluate what we want based on their value for SFR. 
4. We strive for the things we want to try and alleviate our suffering and experience the pleasure of obtaining what we want. 
5. The moment of wanting turning into getting is the most intense experience of pleasure—an abstracted, versatile meta-drive that provides an edge. 
6. The harder it is to get, the more resistance we must overcome, the more pleasure we experience. 
7. But this pleasure is temporary and it tends to fade, meaning we must find new desires to pursue.

1. To illustrate: you want a romantic partner and you suffer from this lack—loneliness and frustration. 
2. You evaluate potential candidates by how attractive they are.
3. This evaluation is really an instinctive assessment of their reproductive viability, but this is non-purposive remember! You are not necessarily attracted to someone beautiful because you consciously want to reproduce with them, but rather, the reason you find them beautiful is that they exhibit traits that, across innumerable generations, have tended to signal reproductive fitness. That’s what beauty is.
4. You attempt to court your chosen candidate, pining for them, obsessing perhaps.
5. They respond and you get together. You not only enjoy the pleasure of being with them, but the intoxication of having succeeded, and having been chosen, of getting exactly what you wanted, of wanting-becoming-getting.
6. It happens that there had been others avidly pursuing your candidate too, some who were high status making them real competition, potentially making your success less likely, and this too sweetens your triumph further.
7. A few years on and you have grown bored and jaded by you partner, and so you eye begins wandering.

A crude example, but I hope you get the picture.

Let’s turn to this week’s music choice…

Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that reflects the emotions of this Becoming Übermensch project—at least as I see them.  

I invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to Familiar Feeling by Moloko. I love this track’s upbeat urgency, and its erotic connotations. And I also love the line, “love in all its entirety, is no less than we deserve”. You will discover how Dionysian that sentiment is at some point. Links in the show’s description. Enjoy!

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested in hearing about your impressions.  

You may already have divined where this talk of an inalienable drive for wanting→getting is heading. 

What is it to want? . . . It is not to will something? 

What is it to get? . . . Is it not to possess, to be able to bestow, to impose your preferences, to reshape part of the world in your image? Is it not to exert influence, seize resources, annex territory, assert dominance, sweep aside opposition, take control? Is it not to feel oneself superior, to feel oneself a cause that cannot be denied, to revel in one’s own freedom, agency, and mastery?

In essence, wanting is willing, and getting is the lived experience of one’s power manifesting itself and creating desirable effects in the world. The greater the resistance one must overcome to achieve what is willed, the greater the surge of power felt in the act of getting. The wanting→getting drive is, of course, inevitably, unmistakably, Nietzsche’s will to power.

Next week we will begin to unpack Nietzsche’s psychological concept of will to power, exploring the extraordinary breadth of its compass, and learning how we can best manage and leverage our own will to power to enrich our lives. Don’t forget: if you like the podcast please do like, follow, subscribe, comment, review and all that good stuff. It makes a huge difference to the sustainability of this enterprise. If you like it, support it, in whatever we you can. 

So, that said, join me next time for episode 9, Nietzsche’s will to power unpacked. 

Until then, live dangerously.