The Problem of Value and Other Outstanding Issues in Freud's Sexual Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 107 (5) ◽  
pp. 405-434
Author(s):  
Thomas Olver
Keyword(s):  
Will To Power ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Will ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals ◽  
The Way

The author takes up Freud's sexual theory and examines several key issues—narcissism, infantile sexuality, heterosexuality, and gender—in order to reassert the radical aspects of Freud's epistemology. These areas are explored in two broad and interrelated themes, which are characterized loosely as a genealogy of morals and a philosophy of the will to power. Although this moves substantially beyond the formulations used by Freud, the underlying issue in all this material is the problem of value, and the author demonstrates the truly radical arc of Freud's thinking in the way he addresses value in his sexual theory.

scholarly journals Will to power as physis: Nietzsche and Aristotle

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Mico Savic
Keyword(s):  
Will To Power ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, as the way of the overcoming of the modern interpretation of being, is based on his doctrine of will to power, which evokes a certain kind of the return to the Greeks. Therefore, the paper points to the close relationship between Nietzsche's notion of the will to power and the Greek notion of physis, which is primarily stated in Aristotle's philosophy. For this reason, the relationship between Nietzsche's and Aristotle's philosophy is also explained. However, the fact that Nietzsche interprets the being by the notion of will is the sign that he succeeded to rid of modern metaphysics only partly, for the metaphysical concept of will is the modern interpretation of the Greek concept of physis. Subsequently, Nietzsche's metaphysics holds some ambivalence, which is reason for different interpretations of his undertaking.

Horkheimer and Adorno

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Form ◽  
Subjective Reason ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the claim by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, articulated in their work Dialektik der Aufklärung that the Enlightenment underwent a dialectical reversal that paradoxically transformed it into a new form of myth, a totalitarian religion devoted solely to an instrumental rationalism whose final aim was to creatie a dehumanized society dominated by science and technology. Dialektik der Aufklärung began with the adventures of Odysseus (the first Dialektik der Aufklärungrer) and traveled on all the way to Adolf Hitler's totalitarianism and the American mass consumerism in their own day. Horkheimer and Adorno indicted what they saw as the historical failure of the Enlightenment's emancipation project. They took issue with the philosophy of the subject as described in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, appropriating both Karl Marx's critique of ideologies and Friedrich Nietzsche's unmasking of subjective reason as a smokescreen for the will to power.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora ◽  
Derek La Shot
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
The Will ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a German philologist, philosopher, and iconoclast. He is best known for his controversial but powerful reevaluation of traditional Western morality, epistemology, and theology. His early academic career was devoted to philology, and he secured a professorship at Basel University at the age of twenty-four despite having failed to obtain his doctorate at Leipzig. He obtained most of his philosophical training outside of his speciality. His principle resources were Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, followed by Richard Wagner’s revolutionary music. Although he admired Schopenhauer’s stark premise that existence was a chaotic affair guided by a will to life, Nietzsche later replaced Schopenhauer’s embrace of ascetic "will-less-ness" as the only response to suffering with the "will to power": the idea that man "will rather will nothingness than not will" (Genealogy of Morals, III: sec. 1; emphasis in the original). His first book was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872; title altered in subsequent editions), which explained Greek tragedy by revealing the wrestling of two intellectual energies within it.

Key issues in policy research for psychosocial risk management and the way forward

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Leka ◽  
T. Cox ◽  
G. Zwetsloot ◽  
A. Jain ◽  
E. Kortum
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Psychosocial Risk ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Way

Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Compassion

2020 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Richard Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Metaphysical Explanation ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

The focus of this chapter is Schopenhauer’s On The Basis of Morality (1841). His distinctive views are that compassion marks one’s being as spontaneously motivated to relieve another’s suffering as one’s own and that this requires a metaphysical explanation for how one identifies with another. The author defends these views and shows in some detail how they mirror the Mahayana account of compassion in Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. Next, the author outlines Schopenhauer’s case for compassion being the sole basis of moral value and defends this claim against the Kantian view that acting beneficently cannot (rationally) override so-called perfect duties to others. Finally, the author explores how Buddha Shakyamuni’s teachings cohere with Schopenhauer’s account of suffering and how mystical consciousness, as represented in Mahayana Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” coheres with Schopenhauer’s asceticism—the “denial of the will”—as the path to overcoming suffering.

Belief and the Will

Philosophy ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 47 (180) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony O'Hear
Keyword(s):  
Long Period ◽  
General Account ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Power ◽  
The Way

In this article, we will consider how far we might be said to be active in forming our beliefs; in particular, we will ask to what extent we can be said to be free in believing what we want to believe. It is clear that we ought to believe only what is really so, at least in so far as it lies in our power to determine this, but reflection shows that, regrettably, we do not confine our beliefs to what we have evidence for, nor do we always believe in accordance with the evidence we do have. So it is natural to conclude that non-intellectual factors may be at work here; such, at least, was the view of Descartes, who attributed error to the influence of our will in leading us to assent to judgments which go beyond the evidence presented by our infallible intellect. This view has some initial plausibility when we think of cases in which emotional considerations lead people to take up and genuinely believe things they have no evidence for, but it is not a view which has received much support from modern philosophers. So, in Part 1 we will look at criticisms levelled against Descartes' view by J. L. Evans, and in Part 2 we will see how far Descartes can be defended. Our conclusions here will lead us to give in Part 3 a general account of the influence of the will in beliefs. We will suggest that we are always responsible for our explicit beliefs, even though it is not true that we can simply believe what we like. Thus we will reject the idea that a man can consciously know something, and at the same time, by will power, believe the opposite. Belief is not then totally free, but we will argue that people do sometimes form beliefs which go against what they should and could believe, and that this can in a way be put down to the influence of the will. Finally we will consider some of the ways in which it is possible to influence our beliefs by willed acts over a long period of time, though this is not the way that we clami that the will might be said to play a part in every judgment that we make.

Key issues for planning futures and the way forward

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simin Davoudi ◽  
Sir Peter Hall ◽  
Anne Power
Keyword(s):  
Key Issues ◽  
The Way
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