![\"Nietzsche\"](\"https:\/\/iep.utm.edu\/wp-content\/media\/Nietzsche.jpg\")
<\/a>Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology or \u201cdrive theory,\u201d as it is commonly designated in the secondary literature, constitutes a rich, distinctive, and compelling account of the human condition. Broadly speaking, Nietzsche maintains that human psychology is either directly reducible to fundamental animalistic drives (such as sexuality and aggression) or can be understood indirectly through the historical transformations and sublimations of these drives (as exemplified by feelings such as ressentiment, that is, resentment and jealousy). Nietzsche\u2019s initial articulation of this theory across a wide range of his writings has been significantly deepened and clarified by a robust and insightful body of secondary scholarship. In brief, Nietzsche\u2019s unique, profound, and incisive model of the human psyche offers scholars a new template for more fully appreciating the collective, embodied, and enculturated human condition.<\/p>\nThe article first situates Nietzsche\u2019s project within philosophical psychology and explains key concepts such as the \u201cwill to power\u201d and the \u201creevaluation of all values.\u201d It then connects these ideas to Nietzsche\u2019s theory of drives, which underpins his understanding of subjectivity and agency. In short, Nietzsche challenges the common-sense conception of the self as a rational, unified agent who deliberates consciously and is fully responsible for its actions. Instead, he argues that what is called the \u201cself\u201d is fundamentally a dynamic organization of competing drives. Actions of so-called agents, then, are really manifestations of a drive\u2019s expression.<\/p>\n
A rich passage that captures this conception of philosophical psychology comes from the aptly titled chapter “The Despisers of the Body” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>. There Nietzsche affirms that, \u201cThe body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and peace, a herd and herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call \u2018spirit,\u2019 is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence. You say \u2018I\u2019 and you are proud of this word. But greater than this\u2013although you will not believe it\u2013is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say \u2018I\u2019 but performs \u2018I\u2019.\u201d. This section, along with many others in Nietzsche\u2019s writings, presents an original, profound, and sometimes puzzling view of human subjectivity. The primary goals of this article will be 1) to articulate Nietzsche\u2019s drive theory, at least under a dispositional model; 2) to cut through some of the puzzlement regarding Nietzsche\u2019s model of the human psyche, especially when contrasted with the traditional view of philosophical agency that puts pride of place on rationality, and 3) to clarify what tensions remain with the model.<\/p>\n This article also emphasizes that Nietzsche\u2019s model of human psychology is inseparable from his broader philosophy. Because drives possess intentional, representational, and motivational features, studying them also illuminates Nietzsche\u2019s epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. However, reconstructing a coherent theory is challenging because Nietzsche\u2019s discussions of psychology are scattered across many texts and expressed in an aphoristic, fragmentary style. As a result, scholars must engage in substantial interpretation and reconstruction to formulate a systematic account of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology.<\/p>\n Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is naturalistic, broadly construed, and thus, his purpose throughout his writings, but especially in the middle to late works (From Human All Too Human <\/em>to Ecce Homo<\/em>), is to explain the psychic features of the human animal by not relying on supernatural postulations (for example, a creation story, a separation between soul and body, supernatural origin stories surrounding feelings like guilt, and so forth).\u00a0\u00a0 Such psychic parts include the origin and properties of consciousness (including self-consciousness and reflexive consciousness), the emotions, the motivational structures underpinning our behavior (that is, the nature of intentions and deliberation), memories, and the unconscious. For Nietzsche, all of these components are reducible to drives. As Paul Katsafanas, one of the leading scholars on Nietzsche, puts the matter plainly, “Drives are the basic token of Nietzsche’s psychology” (Katsafanas, 2016, p. 74).<\/p>\n Another concern is to demonstrate how drives offer a rebuttal of mind\/body dualism<\/a>, a problem that has plagued all areas of Western philosophy at least since Descartes. \u00a0The problem, in brief, is to understand how a non-physical substance, namely the mind or soul, can interact with the physical world, principally the body. Nietzsche\u2019s works attempt to provide a naturalistic understanding of human beings that dispels the need to treat the mind and body as separate entities to explain human behavior and motivation. The thrust and reasoning informing Nietzsche\u2019s work, then, are not dissimilar to those of the evolutionists of his day, such as Haeckel, Lamarck, and Darwin, who all noted the shared features between animals and modern humans and sought in their own unique ways to offer models of organismal evolution (Moore, 2002). The general aim of these thinkers is to demonstrate how the human animal could have descended from less complex organisms (Darwin, 1871).<\/p>\n From the standpoint of nineteenth-century biology, then, one key interest amongst scholars was to provide a mechanism to account for species alteration. Nietzsche clearly rejects natural selection (Berry, 2005; Johnson, 2014), though some scholars have suggested he did not fully understand it, given that most of what Nietzsche knew about Darwinism came from the German reception, which was not always a faithful representation (Richardson, 2004, p. 22; Emden, 2014). Indeed, at times Nietzsche seems to have flirted with Lamarckianism (see BGE 200 and 264) and, on occasion, offers some interesting yet purely speculative \u201cjust so stories\u201d that are naturalistically inflected, just enough to give an air of scientific seriousness. For example, Nietzsche provides conjectures regarding the rise of ocular phenotypical capacities (GS 111); the real engine behind organismal development and alteration, namely, the will to power (See BGE 36); and even microbial events, such as the infamous sec. 636 of The Will to Power (WP), <\/em>Kaufmann and Holingdale\u2019s translation of Nietzsche\u2019s unpublished works or Nachlas<\/em>s, where Nietzsche writes:<\/p>\n The Will-to-Power can manifest itself only against resistances, therefore it seeks that which resists it\u2014this is the primeval tendency of the protoplasm when it extends pseudopodia and feels about. Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a forming, shaping, and reshaping, until at length that which has been overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same. (WP 636)<\/p>\n Such remarks, when compared to a Neo-Darwinian model, which explains evolution as the process by which heritable genetic variation (produced by mutation and recombination) is filtered by natural selection, causing traits that enhance survival and reproduction to become more common in populations over generations, seem quaint by comparison, and, accordingly, Nietzsche has been roundly criticized by scholars who are sympathetic to his philosophy on this score (see Richardson, 1996, 2004; Schacht, 2013).<\/p>\n Where Nietzsche clearly excelled was in his naturalistic investigations, which pertained to his anthropological analyses. \u00a0Thus, another influence on Nietzsche\u2019s naturalism can be found among the anthropologists of Nietzsche\u2019s day. Nietzsche\u2019s reading of nineteenth-century anthropologists and ethnologists was extensive, but John Lubbock and Albert Post were particularly influential on his intellectual development (Brobjer, 2023). Indeed, the former\u2019s early influence on Nietzsche\u2019s thinking (c. late 1870s) cannot be overstated. As David Thatcher writes, \u201cIn [Lubbock\u2019s] The Origin of Civilization<\/em>, Nietzsche found a densely packed, well-documented, informative miscellany of facts, statistics, anecdotes and theories which lent themselves to expropriation and elaboration. The book\u2019s comparative, anthropological perspective stimulated his philosophical thinking and at the same time helped to emancipate him from the historical, geographical, and intellectual constrictions in which he saw other philosophers hopelessly enmeshed\u201d (Thatcher, 1983, p. 301).<\/p>\n By the early 1880s, Nietzsche was well acquainted with Albert Post and Otto Caspari, two of the leading anthropologists of the late nineteenth century, both of whom were influenced by Lubbock (Morrison, 2021). \u00a0As Morrison argues, Nietzsche adopts Post\u2019s theory of community progression from egalitarian, nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to pastoral tribal cultures organized along kinship lines to agrarian political states wholesale (Morrison, 2021; Lightbody, 2023). Nietzsche\u2019s anthropological and ethnographical assessments are clearly connected to drives. As Nietzsche himself writes in the first section of essay 2, On the Genealogy of Morals<\/em>, \u201cto breed an animal with the right to make promises\u2014is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?\u201d (GM II, 1). The notion of how an animal became a promise-maker is indeed perplexing at first glance, especially if one construes the animal as a cauldron of competing instincts. As Zarathustra states, \u201cwhat is this man? A knot of savage serpents that are seldom at peace amongst themselves\u2014thus they go forth alone to seek prey in this world\u201d (Z. On the Pale Criminal).<\/p>\n Given this context, it is incumbent to understand how Nietzsche intends to bridge what appears to be a vast chasm between animal instincts and human-like drives. More precisely put, the question is how do drives all by themselves account for the bonanza of capacities seemingly peculiar to the human animal? To answer this question, this article begins by presenting a commonsense view of agency and contrasts this with Nietzsche\u2019s drive theory.<\/p>\n Philosophical psychology is the study of the intersection of philosophy and psychology. Philosophy is concerned with understanding the fundamental nature of things (metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology), and morality (ethics), whereas psychology is the study of the mind. It is concerned in part with explaining what the mind is, along with the furniture contained within the mind (beliefs, feelings, intentions, memories, and so forth); what capacities the mind has along with the functions they serve (language, processing, perception, and so forth); and why people act the way they do (for example, do they have free will?) \u00a0Thus, a philosophical psychology will examine questions relevant to psychology on a meta-level. Typically, it will answer the above questions by translating them into a physicalist key, for example, is the mind nothing more than the brain?, are beliefs representations of the world or constructions, are intentions beyond the causal nexus of forces that are acting on people? Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology attempts to explain all of these components.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most critical aspect of philosophical psychology, at least as it connects to Nietzsche\u2019s project, is its attempt to explain human agency. In thinking about agency, it is typical to discuss what one means by an agent’s actions, the psychic components that make actions possible, and why actions are initiated in the first place. \u00a0A commonsense model would be to think these basic components are beliefs on the one hand and desires on the other. \u00a0Following Elizabeth Anscombe, beliefs have a direction of fit: an agent thinks that the world comprises objects that exist in a particular causal and spatial relationship. For example, the car keys are in the dish, the dish is on the table, and the table is near the front door. This would be an example of mind-to-world fit (Anscombe, 1957). Under this model, beliefs are not just descriptive propositions about the world but are also normatively freighted: one\u2019s mind should <\/em>conform to the way the world is; false beliefs should<\/em> be discarded.<\/p>\n Desires, in contrast, have the opposite direction of fit, where one has a picture of how one wishes the world to be and then attempts to render the world in conformity to the image of it one has in mind. This would be a world-to-mind fit (Anscombe, 1957).\u00a0 For example, Smith wish that his keys were in the dish that sits on the table near the front door. Instead, they are not in the \u201ckey dish\u201d and are presumably lost or perhaps stolen. Desires aim to be realized, and one does not impugn the thrust of a desire just because it does not match the world. Of course, whether one should always act to realize one\u2019s desires is the subject of various criteria depending on the philosophical school: utilitarians might consider potential negative consequences in acting out said desires, existentialists, whether the desire aligns with one\u2019s authentic values, and others like Socrates, with whether the action is truly good or merely appears to be so (See Protagoras<\/em>, 354; A-E and Meno<\/em> 77, A-E).<\/p>\n Finally, there is a connection between beliefs and desires: in modelling the world in accordance with one\u2019s desires, one endeavors to change it to match how one wants it to be, based on one\u2019s beliefs. To help alter the world, one has a suite of tools and latent capabilities to assist (for example, a physical body that enables interaction with objects and other persons, intentions, whether distal or proximal, and freewill understood operationally here as the capacity to do otherwise). However, and perhaps most importantly, subjects have the capacity to reason, broadly construed, which helps to determine what they really want, which of their desires are truly good for them (through a process of deliberation), the normative relationship between their desires and how they match up to their value system, and, perhaps most critically, an instrumental capacity of how to realize their desires given their beliefs about the world.<\/p>\n Nietzsche\u2019s drive theory puts all of the above into question. Drives have both urge-like properties, similar to desires, and representational capabilities, such as beliefs. Furthermore, drives are used to explain both proximal intentions (for example, why John broke his diet by eating a chocolate bar) and distal ones, such as resolutions (for example, why John has lifted weights daily for the past 40 years). Moreover, drives platform and condition one\u2019s emotions both in terms of one\u2019s emotive appraisals of events (for example, John thinks Linda humiliated him) as well as the intensity and valence of the affect itself (for example, John feels deeply hurt by Linda\u2019s action). Indeed, drives even platform values in that one\u2019s most cherished ethical principles are, in reality reflections of one\u2019s drive composition, so Nietzsche asserts.<\/p>\n Before delving into drive theory proper, it is necessary to examine two Nietzschean concepts that are deeply infused into the German philosopher\u2019s psychological model. The first is the revaluation of all values, and the second is the will to power. In both cases, drives are the basic conduits of these notions.<\/p>\n Turning first to the revaluation of all values, Nietzsche seeks to displace what he saw as life-denying attitudes in Western ethics of his day, whether Kantian Deontology or British Utilitarianism, which reclothed elements of older Christian morals in philosophical garb. \u00a0As Brian Leiter understands it, Nietzsche\u2019s reevaluation of values ties together what at first glance seem like separate threads. He writes,<\/p>\n What unifies Nietzsche\u2019s seemingly disparate remarks about\u2013altruism, happiness, pity, equality, Kantian respect for persons, utilitarianism, etc.\u2013is that he thinks a culture in which such norms prevail as morality will be a culture which eliminates the conditions for the realization of human excellence the latter requiring, on his view, concern with the self, suffering, a certain stoic indifference, a sense of hierarchy and difference and the like. (Leiter, 2002, p. 129)<\/p>\n Other scholars, such as Aaron Ridley (2006) and Bernard Williams (2002), place Nietzsche\u2019s emphasis on the revaluation of values, not on objective, naturalistic features of what constitutes human excellence, in contrast to demonstrable mediocre psychic qualities like Leiter, but rather on an internal critique of herd values. In other words, Nietzsche\u2019s project, according to these scholars, is to demonstrate the explicit internal inconsistencies latent in traditional Christian morality. Nietzsche\u2019s moral philosophy, then, is curative, not because it points to an objectively healthier value system, but because it frees his readers, in the words of David Owen, from aperspectival captivity\u2014thinking that the only way to view morality is through a single perspective (Owen, 2002). Once one discovers the internal contradictions inherent in Christian morality (and in the philosophical systems underpinned by it), one is open to investigating other value systems.<\/p>\n In relation to Nietzsche\u2019s reevaluation of values, whether construed externally or internally, philosophical psychology seeks to explain the elements of human agency. In BGE 23, Nietzsche announces that the new psychology, namely Nietzsche’s, will be the new “Queen of the sciences.” As John Richardson remarks in his article, “Nietzsche\u2019s Psychology,\u201d Nietzsche\u2019s declaration on this score is meant to blaze a new path in philosophy, especially moral philosophy, by introducing a more honest approach regarding the origin and adoption of values (Richardson, 2012, p. 315). As Nietzsche sees it, the psychology of his day is na\u00efve because it acts as a surrogate for morality.\u00a0 Morality has infiltrated nineteenth-century musings on psychology, especially those of the English variety (see Nietzsche\u2019s acerbic attacks on Spencer and Mill in this regard in On the Genealogy of Morals<\/em>). Briefly, morality, at least according to Nietzsche, requires three untested assumptions: 1) a singular atomic individual that is responsible for one\u2019s actions, in other words, a person; 2) an entity with the capacity to choose from different alternatives (a will), and 3) for this will to be autonomous, non-natural, and not subject to the principle of sufficient reason (for this article\u2019s purposes, the causal nexus of forces acting on the will). These are not just untested assumptions but are false and therefore serve as impediments to true understanding. As Nietzsche puts it in the same section: \u201cAll psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths\u201d (BGE 23). Nietzsche seeks to question each of the three presuppositions of morality by providing a new ontology of psychology, predicated on drives. Drives explain self-consciousness, behavior, moral instincts, and feelings, especially guilt. It is only by providing a more truthful model, Nietzsche evinces, that a proper diagnosis of life-denying moral values may take place.<\/p>\n More crucially, Nietzsche views his drive model as not only more accurate than that of traditional morality, in that it seeks to unveil and understand the real engines behind human actions, but also conducive to facilitating a healthier moral system for the few individuals who would benefit from it. Different value systems, such as the Roman and the Judaic\u2013\u201cRome against Judea, Judea against Rome\u201d (see GM I; 16) as Nietzsche puts it–are but reflections of the drives of those who espouse them. Accordingly, the different drive systems clash and compete for dominance because each seeks to be the master and philosophizes accordingly:<\/p>\n But anyone who considers the basic drives of man\u2026 will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time\u2014and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all of the other drives. For every drive wants to be master\u2014and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit. (BGE 6)<\/p>\n This notion of agon<\/em>, or struggle, between warring drives is captured by what Nietzsche calls the will to power, which this article next turns to explore in more detail.<\/p>\n The above notion of conflict leads to another central concept in Nietzsche\u2019s philosophy: the will to power. It is a cornerstone of his psychological and moral thought and is therefore closely connected to his account of drives. Yet the will to power has long puzzled scholars and generated extensive debate. Broadly speaking, two overarching interpretations have emerged. On the one hand, some read the will to power as a cosmological doctrine (Grimm, 1977); on the other, some understand it in zoological or psychological terms, restricting it to the domain of living beings, of which humans are a part.<\/p>\n Advocates of the cosmological interpretation\u2014most notably Martin Heidegger\u2014argue that the will to power functions as a metaphysical principle intended to ground and explain all entities, events, and relations in the universe. On this view, Nietzsche seeks to \u201cpermanentize\u201d becoming: once becoming is distilled, what remains is will to power. For Heidegger, this makes Nietzsche the \u201clast metaphysician,\u201d since the will to power purports to articulate the very structure of flux itself. As Heidegger famously puts it, \u201cwill to power is the word for the Being of beings as such, the essentia of beings\u201d (Heidegger, 1987, p. 156). Understood in this way, the will to power reveals an underlying, esoteric essence of the world and thus constitutes a form of metaphysics, despite Nietzsche\u2019s explicit resistance to metaphysical system-building. This secret reading of the world suggests that all things, from the smallest unit of power, what Nietzsche refers to as power-quanta, are composed of and bent on the accumulation of greater units of power.<\/p>\n Other scholars have resisted this reading. Some argue that the cosmological language surrounding the will to power should be understood as parabolic rather than literal, serving as a warning against totalizing explanations of the world (see Porter, 2006). A smaller but vocal group goes further still, claiming that Nietzsche articulated the cosmological doctrine only in order to reject it outright (see Clarke 1990 and BGE 36 in particular).<\/p>\n Most late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarship focuses on the will to power as a psychological doctrine (Clark, 1990; Richardson, 1996; Janaway, 2007; Loeb, 2015). It is of particular importance in relation to Nietzsche\u2019s project of the reevaluation of all values above. As noted, for Nietzsche, history is a contest, or what the Greeks would call an agon<\/em> (struggle, war), not merely between competing groups, each of whom reflects competing values, but between rival drives (GM I, GM III, BGE 9). All clashes in the historical realm between opposing groups, whether between oppressor and oppressed, empires and subjugated peoples, or warriors and priestly types, are really but symptoms of competing drives bent on the accumulation of power. \u00a0Indeed, the will to power explains the struggle within the biological sphere as well, as even the \u201cevolution\u201d of species and organs (Nietzsche\u2019s quotation marks) is merely a sign of one power overcoming another. \u00a0\u00a0The clearest and most detailed analysis of will to power along this axis of interpretation is found in GM II 12:<\/p>\n All events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master<\/em>, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However one has understood the utility<\/em> of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form of art or a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin\u2026. purposes and utilities are only signs<\/em> that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a \u201cthing,\u201d an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of even new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another, but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.\u201d The \u201cevolution\u201d of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus<\/em> toward a goal, even less a logical progressus<\/em> by the shortest route with the smallest expenditure of force\u2013but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. (GM II, 12)<\/p>\n Distilling the upshot of the above dense passage, Nietzsche\u2019s concept of power entails that in all areas of life, events, whether naturally occurring or socially constructed, are dynamic in the strongest possible sense. For Nietzsche, power involves directedness or causation without presupposing a stable, enduring substance that could be separated from that directedness or causation. There is no fixed cause underlying power; rather, power is <\/em>essentially something that \u201cdoes not coincide with itself\u201d (Aydin, 2007, p. 26). It exists only as a continual movement or process\u2014an ongoing \u201cbeing-on-the-way\u201d (Aydin, 2007, p. 26). This dynamic structure further implies that power must be understood as a necessary striving for greater power. Power necessarily seeks to extend and intensify itself. It counts as power only insofar as it can preserve itself in relation to other powers and actively strives to dominate or overcome them.<\/p>\n Given that will to power is always hiding beneath all life events and yet cannot be captured by any biological form (or metaphysical concept for that matter), it makes sense that Nietzsche declares, \u201cThus the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions” (GM II 12). For Nietzsche, drives are the basic conduits of will to power, as these drives manifest different organic and cultural \u201cground forms\u2013organized drives that crystalize into relatively stable entities like the human animal (Aydin, 2007; Lightbody, 2017; Hales & Welshon, 2000). Yet stability, much like for Heraclitus, is both a war and a peace, for every drive within some \u2018thing\u2019 is locked in a battle with all others in order to expand its power-quanta. However, it is this hidden internal agon<\/em> between drives in all things, along with the struggle between all things, that gives rise to new forms and adaptations. Critically for Nietzsche, a more powerful entity grows in power not by obliterating its nemesis but by co-opting and reinterpreting the thing (whether, as Nietzsche says, an organ, practice, or law) for its own purposes. In the Genealogy<\/em>, Nietzsche provides an exemplary historical example, namely the history of punishment, which unequivocally demonstrates how the same somatic tortures have been co-opted and therefore reinterpreted by different regimes of power (GM II 13). As Zarathustra emphatically puts it, \u201cMuch is valued by the living more highly than life itself; but out of this very valuing there speaks\u2014will to power! (Z. Part II, 12 On Self-Overcoming).<\/p>\n With this context in mind, this article turns to Nietzsche\u2019s drive theory.<\/p>\n Mattia Riccardi presents a fivefold model of drive theory in his insightful book, Nietzsche\u2019s Philosophical Psychology<\/i> (2021). This work has distilled much of the discussion of drive theory in the secondary literature into a highly accessible, organized form. The article uses this work as a template and fills in the sketch in more detail when required. Although Riccardi does not further distinguish between somatic and phenomenological elements of drive theory, this article will do so, as it will bring some of the issues of Nietzsche\u2019s psychological theory into sharper focus. Accordingly, the five drive aspects explained by Riccardi may be further divided into somatic and phenomenological aspects. While it is fair to say that this division is not entirely clean, in that most, if not all, components exhibit both features, some aspects will typically lean more towards one extreme than the other.<\/p>\n Somatic, in this context, means aspects and capacities of drives that are beyond conscious awareness. A helpful analogy would be to compare these somatic elements to the body’s involuntary systems. In speaking of the phenomenological aspect of drive theory, it refers to what the drive feels like from the perspective of the \u2018subject\u2019 who is under its influence. The word \u201csubject\u201d is in inverted commas as Nietzsche strives to replace the entire notion of a distinct, individuated subject with special powers of will and self-consciousness entirely as a fiction borne of power. This article examines the ethical and epistemological implications of this view below.<\/p>\n The two somatic aspects of drives are as follows:<\/p>\n (1) they have biological roots;<\/p>\n (2) drives are evaluative in two senses:<\/p>\n (2a) they make things in the world salient<\/p>\n (2b) they are capable of meta-evaluation: that is, evaluating other drives.<\/p>\n On the phenomenological side, there are three key points:<\/p>\n (3) drives have definite aims, phenomenologically speaking (for example, when under the command of the hunger drive, we seek out food); although aims also take up designated biological or cultural channels<\/p>\n (4) They are urgings; they are propulsive in nature<\/p>\n (5) There is a close causal relationship between drives and the affects (Riccardi, 2021, Chapter 1 section 2).<\/p>\n With that summary in mind, this article turns to each aspect.<\/p>\n The first aspect posits that drives are, to some extent, rooted in human biological makeup. John Richardson has made significant contributions emphasizing the physiological foundation of drives. In his work Nietzsche\u2019s New Darwinism<\/em>, Richardson asserts, \u201cI claim that we can\u2019t understand [Nietzsche\u2019s] views on our values without seeing first and precisely how he thinks we are animals with drives\u201d (Richardson, 2004, pp. 11-12). There is considerable evidence to support the claim that human drives have an animal basis. Consider Nietzsche\u2019s famous passage in Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>: \u201cWe must translate man back into nature\u201d (Nietzsche, 2000, BGE 230) or the start of On the Genealogy of Morals,<\/em> where Nietzsche intimates that his entire genealogical project may be construed as providing a naturalistic account of how the promise-making animal, humanity, came to be (Nietzsche 2000, GM I: 1). Other passages that support this reading are GM II 16, where Nietzsche discusses how self-consciousness was created through \u2018inpsychation\u2019: the blocking of natural animal drives. He writes, \u201cMy idea, as you see is that consciousness does not really belong to man\u2019s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtly only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility\u201d (GM II 16). (This reading supposes that GM II, chronologically speaking, precedes the events captured in GM I, an interpretation well-supported in the secondary literature; see Leiter, 2002, Conway, 2008, Hatab, 2008, Morrison, 2021.) Or Gay Science<\/em> Section 354, where Nietzsche discusses how our thoughts are the products of our evolutionary heritage): \u201cOur thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness by the genius of the species that commands it and translated back in the perspective of the herd\u201d (GS 354).<\/p>\n Just as there are two sides to drives (their mental representation and their physiological platforming), there are also two sides to understanding this first aspect. Biological rootedness could refer to the relationship between drives and animal behaviors (for example, instincts or biologically determined behavior) or the somatic components required to facilitate the drive itself, but it is more likely to encompass both. Turning to the first interpretation, the literature is divided on whether drives are transformed animal instincts or whether instincts themselves are a subset of drives. \u00a0Mark Alfano, in his Nietzsche\u2019s Moral Psychology<\/em>, makes a persuasive case that instincts are a subset of drives (Alfano, 69).\u00a0 For Alfano, there are two kinds of drives: first-nature drives, such as animal instincts, which seem to favor pre-programmed responses to the features of one\u2019s particular environment (for example, rabbits will run at the sight of a potential predator), and drives that form part of one\u2019s second nature, such as learned dispositions. Others have maintained that drives must be transformed for this reading to make more sense of what Nietzsche has to say about the evolution of human beings in the Genealogy of Morals<\/em>\u2014his most sustained argument detailing the emergence of civilization and self-consciousness (Risse, 2011; Conway, 2008; Hatab, 2008; Lightbody, 2010). Whatever the real case, Richardson presents a compelling argument that a comprehensive understanding of drive theory is unattainable without considering Nietzsche\u2019s views on breeding (z\u00fcchten<\/em>)\u2013a term used by Nietzsche to denote cultural assimilation and<\/em> biological inheritance (Richardson, 2004). Such a construal makes Nietzsche\u2019s biology for drive theory possibly incoherent, as he seems at times to subscribe to Lamarckianism (See Schacht, 2013, and Lightbody, 2019 for more on Nietzsche\u2019s connection to Lamarckianism).<\/p>\n One way to put flesh on Richardson\u2019s interpretation and to demonstrate how Nietzsche\u2019s drive theory attempts to naturalize morality is to examine the instinctual nature of particular drives as a key to understanding human behavior. Consider such behavior as self-rifice, especially in relation to the need to do one\u2019s duty, self-police desires, or ascetic practices. \u00a0Such behavior, along with the values that they seemingly platform (though for Nietzsche this assessment would be a mistake!) are closely identified with Christian morality and include a stifling of individuality by promoting the survival of the group over the creativity of the singular subject, an avoidance of danger and a preference for safety along with the suspicion of individuals who present themselves as higher types (AC, 3). These values and practices are not consciously chosen but rather denote ancient herd instincts that were helpful for human survival and have been exapted and transformed by cultural institutions. A representative passage, which accounts for such behavior as a result of humanity\u2019s animal past, is found in BGE 199. There, Nietzsche refers to the herd instinct as an inherent part of human nature, which compels people to follow authority and adopt moral values without critical thought. This “formal conscience” drives individuals to obey commands without question, and Nietzsche links this instinct to the need for obedience that is often seen in society.<\/p>\n The second interpretation charges that drives are physiologically inheritable and are based on physiological systems. \u00a0Richardson strives to present a plausible explanation of how humans evolved into so-called conscious beings with seemingly real and definite aims that are unique. \u00a0In Richardson\u2019s interpretation, drives remain the fundamental channel of lineage for Nietzsche, but they can be repurposed for various objectives:<\/p>\n \u00a0Thus drives can retain an end, but this end need not be conscious; nor is the end non-revisable. In better moments he [Nietzsche] treats drives as designed by selection. They are so designed simply qua drives, in that organisms are crucially rendered fit by being equipped with plastic dispositions (drives) physical set ups with causal tendencies that are plastic toward certain ends. (Richardson, 2004, p. 40).<\/p>\n In less favorable instances, which Richardson admits occur more frequently, Nietzsche perceives drives as little homunculi or small agents) – an issue that this article examines more closely when it turns to the evaluative aspect of drives.<\/p>\n Problems: In considering some problems with this first aspect, it is challenging to understand how drives are connected to the early twenty-first century\u2019s understanding of physiology and biology. To begin with, it is not easy to envision drives as biological replacements for genes. Drives are inherently dynamic entities and inherently relational; therefore, they do not lend themselves to atomic analysis. \u00a0Second, a related point on the biological front is that Nietzsche was not a Darwinist, at least regarding natural selection, and instead considered the will to power as the biological mechanism responsible for organismal change. As he states,<\/p>\n Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength\u2014life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. (BGE 13)<\/p>\n Obviously, the battle between these two explanations for the evolution of species was won by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, buttressed by the discovery of genes by Mendel. These two, natural selection on the one hand and genetics on the other, form the foundation for the early twenty-first century\u2019s biological understanding. Nowhere, it seems, is there room for drives. To be sure, there have been attempts to reconcile Darwin and Nietzsche (see Richardson, 2004 and 2020, and Lightbody, 2019 and 2023), but such attempts are philosophically and scientifically deeply problematic (see Johnson, 2009).<\/p>\n Drives take up an evaluation of the world. They evaluate some object or action as good and direct the subject, which serves as the drive\u2019s bearer, as it were, to acquire or eventuate the aim of the drive (Riccardi, 2018, 2021). In this way, drives replace a seemingly fundamental component of the mind, namely beliefs. This dimension of drive theory is arguably the most contentious among the claims advanced thus far. The assertion is not merely that drives present the world from a particular perspective, but that they also imbue this perspective with evaluative significance\u2014that is, they regard certain aspects of the world as good and therefore worthy of pursuit. The theoretical difficulty here is multifaceted and can be articulated in four interrelated problems. First, under a strong interpretation, drives are representational: they are said to structure or cognize the world into discrete objects. Second, drives are evaluative; they ascribe positive or negative valence to the very objects they represent. Third, they are purportedly capable of mobilizing the body\u2014including its emotional and physiological systems\u2014in order to pursue or avoid these evaluated objects. Fourth, drives are organized hierarchically and engage in relations of dominance and subordination. They possess the capacity for meta-evaluation, that is, for assessing the relative strength or \u201cpower quanta\u201d of other drives.<\/p>\n This final point is frequently underdeveloped in the secondary literature, yet it warrants closer scrutiny. If, as Katsafanas suggests, drives serve as the fundamental explanatory unit in Nietzsche\u2019s psychology\u2014accounting for all actions, thoughts, desires, and beliefs\u2014then a critical question arises: how do drives exert causal influence over the subject\u2019s somatic systems, including the lymphatic, endocrine, nervous, and, perhaps most crucially, the muscular and skeletal systems, in order to effect behavior in accordance with thoughts and beliefs oriented toward particular objects of desire?<\/p>\n Thus, a central problem confronting drive theory, particularly in its stronger formulations, is its apparent inability to provide a coherent account of psychological causation\u2014specifically, how representational and evaluative states associated with drives translate into coordinated physiological action. They appear, in the words of Riccardi, \u201cas obsolete remnants of 19th century-theorizing\u201d\u00a0 (Riccardi, 2021, p. 67). The real problem is in bridging this gap between a commonsensical belief\/desire account of mind (see section 2), where an individual pursues what they desire following what they believe about the object they crave (for example, that it is good for them, that the series of steps they are taking will allow them to get the object, that the obtaining of the object aligns with their value system, and so forth), with Nietzsche\u2019s view that the subject is nothing more than a container of dynamic and competing drives. While of course the former model of behavioral action is not without its own problems (for example, mind\/body dualism), it does not appear that a drive account, despite being more parsimonious, is superior, explanatory speaking.<\/p>\n To draw out the main features of this aspect, it is incumbent to examine some of the most cited passages in Nietzsche\u2019s writings where the aspect seems to be supported, \u00a0beginning with GS 333:<\/p>\n For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit\u2019s activity remains unconscious and unfelt. But I suppose that these instincts [Instinkt<\/em>; Nietzsche does not often distinguish the difference between Trieb<\/em> (drive) and Instinkt<\/em> in his work] which are here contending against one another understand very well how to make themselves felt by, and how to hurt one another<\/em>\u2026. Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.\u00a0 (GS 333, italics added)<\/p>\n This passage portrays drives as a distinctive mode of cognition\u2014indeed, as a more vital, elemental, and invigorating form of thought. It advances two key claims. First, it suggests that drives themselves constitute a kind of thinking, which may be understood to imply that they are representational in nature. That is, they are not merely reactive impulses but possess a reflective capacity: they can monitor, track, and potentially adjust their own aims (Welshon, 2014, p. 138).<\/p>\n If Nietzsche\u2019s theory of mind is interpreted through the framework of a Higher-Order Theory (HOT) of consciousness\u2014according to which a mental state is conscious only if the subject is capable of taking that state as an object of higher-order cognition (that is, the subject not only feels pain but is aware that he feels pain)\u2014then Nietzschean drives may be said to meet this condition. On such a reading, drives are capable of attending to and recognizing their own aims; they possess a form of self-directed representational awareness. This interpretation suggests a significant degree of cognitive sophistication attributed to instinctual states within Nietzsche\u2019s psychological model. They have the capacity to recognize what these aims are. As Nietzsche elsewhere writes, \u201cThe drive toward \u2018something good\u2019 thus involves some kind of \u2018valuation\u2019 (KSA 11, 167<\/em>).<\/p>\n The second and more troubling point to consider is that these same instincts are in a constant state of agon<\/em> or tension with each other and understand \u201chow to be felt by and hurt one another.\u201d This passage may suggest that drives are not merely reflective\u2014that is, capable of recognizing that they possess aims\u2014but are also reflexive in nature. Reflexivity, in this context, is typically associated not only with conscious awareness but with a more robust form of self-conscious awareness. That is, drives may be understood as capable of not simply representing their own aims, but of representing themselves as having those aims, thereby exhibiting a form of self-referential cognition. As Rex Welshon explains the difference, \u201cIn reflexive conscious states, the self is disclosed as a relatum of conscious states and as the owner of other conscious psychological states\u201d (Welshon, 2014, p. 138). \u00a0Drives, then, are not merely cognizant of the objects that would satisfy their respective aims; they also appear to possess an awareness of themselves as entities oriented toward such aims. Moreover, drives recognize the existence of other drives, each with its own distinct set of motivations. Beyond this, drives seem capable of understanding how they might influence the aims or expressions of other drives in ways that ultimately serve their own ends. Taken collectively, these features suggest a level of cognitive complexity that warrants describing drives as reflexive. For the purposes of this analysis, this article refers to this cluster of capacities\u2014self-recognition, awareness of others, and strategic influence\u2014as \u201cdrive-consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n In most passages, these two attributes of drives, namely, the evaluative component and drive-consciousness aspect, respectively, are united within the same extract. For example, Nietzsche writes in BGE 19,<\/p>\n For our body is only a social structure composed of many souls\u2014to his sensations of pleasure as commander. L\u2019effet, c\u2019est moi<\/em>: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy common wealth: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing, it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as I have said already, of a social structure composed of many \u201csouls.\u201d<\/p>\n Another section to consider where Nietzsche fuses the evaluative and agonic components of drives is found in section 6 of Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>:<\/p>\n For every drive wants to be master\u2013and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit\u2026 In the philosopher, conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is<\/em>\u2014that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.\u00a0 (BGE 6, italics in original)<\/p>\n This passage once again conjoins the two points previously highlighted: first, that each drive is oriented toward the realization of a specific state of affairs; and second, that every instinct exhibits a striving for dominance over other instincts, aiming to subordinate and instrumentalize them in the service of its own ends. As noted earlier, this hierarchical organization among drives is ultimately directed toward the fulfillment of each drive\u2019s particular aim.<\/p>\n A final passage that again melds these two points can be found in section 481 of Will to Power <\/em>(Nietzsche\u2019s Nachlass<\/em>): \u201cEvery drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.\u201d<\/p>\n Interpreted according to a straightforward or natural reading, the agonic dimension of Nietzschean drives implies that drives possess not only awareness that their aims conflict with those of other instincts, but also an understanding of how to render their own aims salient or persuasive to competing drives. Moreover, a particular drive\u2014for instance, the aggression drive\u2014appears to recognize that the very drives it seeks to dominate by adopting a perspective on them are simultaneously engaged in similar strategies of influence and resistance.<\/p>\n To flesh out this reflexive capacity, consider a primal drive such as aggression.\u00a0 Consider when the aggressive drive requires satiation, but no external object is suitable. In GM II 16, Nietzsche suggests that the aggressive drive is both powerful and incredibly active in humans. Still, because of the strictures of civilization (for example, laws against harming others with severe punishments), aggression cannot often be adequately expressed and therefore becomes internalized cruelty. Given this psychological understanding, it becomes easier to see how the need to express aggression can harness the hunger drive as a channel for self-injury (Washburn and others, 2023). For example, suppose someone binge eats to the point of deliberately attempting to harm themselves both in the short and long term, to quell violent urges for harm that do not have an external means of expression. Such actions later lead to shame, which induces more intense means of self-harm, such as cutting and so on (Claes, L., & Muehlenkamp, J. J., 2014). If that example seems plausible, then under Nietzsche\u2019s framework, a drive does not merely represent an object as desirable and thereby motivate the subject to pursue it; rather, it is also capable of what might be termed \u201cdrive-reading.\u201d That is, it registers the existence of other drives, discerns their aims, and navigates its expression in light of this broader motivational landscape. In the words of Katsafanas, \u201cThe aggressive drive may find expression in harming others, but it may also change direction finding expression in self-inflicted cruelty. The drive motivates a variety of behaviors that may appear distinct, but which serve a common goal\u201d (Katsafanas, 2015, p. 167). This dynamic struggle between drives suggests the presence of a form of second-order cognition, which this article calls reflexive or \u201cdrive-conscious\u201d thinking.<\/p>\n One of the issues of this radical view of Nietzsche\u2019s that regards drives as expressions of will to power with self-reflective goals pertains to what some scholars call Nietzsche\u2019s vitalism– it is hard not to think that Nietzsche has anthropomorphized the world; at bottom, all things are composed of little subjects or \u201cunderwills\u201d (see Lightbody, 2017). Indeed what is perhaps most troubling is that Nietzsche acknowledges that:<\/p>\n While ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining<\/em> about another; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides. (Daybreak, 109, italics added).<\/p>\n This symbolic interpretation then extends to other aspects of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophy, including his zoology and moral psychology. Consider what Nietzsche writes in relation to the animal:<\/p>\n Every animal therefore\u2014la bete philosophe<\/em> too\u2013instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors, just as instinctively and with the subtlety of discernment that is \u2018higher than all reason\u2019, every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum. (GM III 7)<\/p>\n In the secondary literature, the problem of attributing mind to all things is called the homunculi problem (see Richardson 2004, p. 6 and Janaway, 2007, p. 160 for stipulations of the problem). Although this article cannot examine this issue in detail, there are two main points to address. Firstly, in attributing mind to all things, Nietzsche has presumably given up his much-vaunted naturalism. One way to formulate naturalism is to say that it attempts to eliminate supernatural explanations for occurrences in the world. However, holding that drives are at bottom responsible for all activity in the organic world, and have irreducible cognitive and conative capacities, does little to clarify the basic objects and laws that direct them in the world. Surely, any naturalism worth its salt seeks to answer such questions.<\/p>\n The second problem is a more precise formulation of the first. It charges that a reading of the above passages commits Nietzsche to the homuncular fallacy. There are two versions of this fallacy in the literature. The first one to be discussed is Riccardi’s explanatory fallacy.\u00a0 The problem here is that the so-called explanation for the emergence of the mind from non-mental physical systems is not an explanation at all. Consider that the capacity to represent an internal state to oneself is one of the characteristics of consciousness. Yet drives, which are sub-personal units, also possess exactly the same ability to the same degree. Thus, the same feature that drove the introduction of the homunculus remains a mystery (Riccardi, 2018, 2021; Stern, 2015). This is but one aspect of the homunculus fallacy. Riccardi sums up the position well: \u201cThe problem here is that any account of this form is simply explanatorily idle, for it presupposes the very capacity it is supposed to elucidate\u201d (Riccadari, 2018, p. 24).<\/p>\n Riccardi calls the second version the mereological fallacy. This fallacy is committed when one attributes qualities to subconscious, sub-personal units, namely drives, that can only be applied to the whole embodied subject. A good example of such a fallacy is in thinking that pain may be reduced in its entirety to more basic biological units, such as A-delta fibers, C-fibers, and so forth. However, such a reduction is an example of a mereological fallacy because to make sense of pain, one must ascribe it to the person or creature who has it, not to the process that transmits it (Riccardi, 2021; Lightbody, 2023).<\/p>\n Many solutions to the homuncular problem have been proposed in the literature, and it would be well beyond the scope of this article to articulate them here. For different solutions, see Richardson (2004), Janaway (2007), Riccardi (2021), and Lightbody (2023, 2024).<\/p>\n Drives function as the primary motivators that prompt individuals to engage in a sequence of actions aimed at achieving a specific goal. The phenomenology of a drive is typically characterized by a compelling urge to seek expression. The underlying thesis is that individuals act either because they are directly compelled by a drive or because their behavior is significantly influenced by it. Irrespective of the degree of determinism attributed to the operation of drives, it is evident that they serve as a primary stimulus for action. Scholars such as Brian Leiter maintain that drives alone are sufficient to account for human behavior, thereby suggesting that deliberation plays no causally efficacious role in the agent\u2019s decision-making process (Leiter, 2007, 2019). Leiter\u2019s argument primarily draws on Nietzsche\u2019s late work, such as Twilight of the Idols<\/em> and the Anti-Christ.<\/em> One much-quoted passage from the earlier work suggests that the capacity of determination\u2014the ability agents have to come up with reasons when deciding which course of action they should choose\u2014is causally inert. There is substantial textual support for this claim in section I of \u2018Improvers of Mankind\u2019 in Twilight. <\/em>There,<\/em> Nietzsche makes clear that \u201cthere are no moral facts\u201d and argues that \u201cmorality is merely a sign-language, symptomatology.\u201d What do moral codes signify, one might ask? Nietzsche again is clear: \u201cdegenerating signs of life.\u201d In physiological terms, Nietzsche explains in the very next section, \u201cin the struggle with the beast (the blond beast of prey), making it sick can<\/em> be the only means of making it weak. This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him\u2014but it claimed to have \u2018improved\u2019 him\u201d (Twilight<\/em>, Improvers of Mankind, section 2).<\/p>\n In aphorism 56 of the Anti-Christ<\/em>, Nietzsche continues his attack on traditional morality that posits a free subject, remarking that,<\/p>\n In every healthy society, there can be distinguished three types of man of divergent physiological tendency which mutually condition one another and each of which possesses its own hygiene, its own realm of work, its own sort of mastery and feeling of perfection. Nature, not Manu, separates from one another the predominately spiritual type, the muscular and temperamental type and the third type distinguished neither in one or the other, the mediocre type\u2014the last as the great majority. (AC, 56)<\/p>\n Drawing on such quotes, Leiter argues for a type-fact position which holds that \u201cEach person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person\u201d (Leiter, 1998). Since Leiter\u2019s position is dominant in the literature, this section will briefly examine it with respect to the urgings of drives and more extensively in the next section, where the discussion turns on how drives have fixed aims. In returning to the aspect itself, one would presume that one of the defining characteristics of the strong type would be the robustness of his urges. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to intimate that the difference between a Napoleon or Caesar and a criminal is not the power of the need to express their respective drives, but instead how their drives are channeled, or, as Freud might put it, sublimated (Gemes, 2009, 2015). Turning to a much-cited passage of Twilight,<\/em> Nietzsche writes:<\/p>\n The criminal type, this is a strong type of person under unfavourable conditions, a strong person made ill. He needs a wilderness, a nature and form of existence that is somehow freer and more dangerous; this is where all the arms and armour of a strong person\u2019s instincts rightfully belong. His virtues are ostracized by society, his liveliest drives quickly fused with depressive affects, with suspicion, fear and dishonour. (TI Skirmishes, 45 see also Z. On the Pale criminal)<\/p>\n It is also important to note in this quote that drives themselves are not the only causal factors leading to the criminal\u2019s illness, which is the inability to express the powerful demands of his drives in the appropriate way. The affects, too, are also causal components. The relation between Nietzsche\u2019s view of emotion and drives will be explored in the last section.<\/p>\n Others, notably Katsafanas, adopt a more subtle stance, arguing that drives sway choice, but not vice versa. Elaborating on this milder position, one can say that once a drive, such as the sex drive, is activated, people are under its overpowering influence. They have the liberty to express and fulfill the drive through their actions. However, they cannot retract and nullify the drive through a deliberate intention. \u201cThis is the problem that Nietzsche\u2019s drive psychology raises: choice may control action, but agents do not control choice\u201d (Katsafanas, 2013, p. 752). This argument in the secondary literature as to whether Nietzsche is a strict determinist is one that this article will examine in more detail when it looks at aspect 4: Drives have fixed aims, as the question of whether humans have free will is connected to whether one can choose which goals to pursue, as well as whether one in fact is responsible for holding such aims.<\/p>\n One component of this aspect that can be addressed here pertains once more to bridging the body-mind connection. What this aspect affirms is the propulsive nature of drives that seemingly can override a subject\u2019s best intentions. More provocatively, Nietzsche suggests that the subject\u2019s aims are nothing more than disguised intentions of these drives, as he writes in two much-quoted passages. The first is found in Daybreak<\/em> 109, where Nietzsche analyzes the \u201cvehemence\u201d of drives:<\/p>\n That<\/em> one desires<\/em> to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another<\/em> drive<\/em> which is a rival<\/em> of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us: whether it be the drive to restfulness, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. While ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about another<\/em>; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle<\/em> is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides. (Daybreak<\/em> 109, italics in original)<\/p>\n The second comes from Daybreak<\/em> 119:<\/p>\n However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives<\/em> which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment<\/em> remain wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold\u2014the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. (Daybreak<\/em>, 119)<\/p>\n These quotations emphasize the urge side of this equation (what a drive feels like when it is active, rather than what the drive makes salient, its evaluative component), as presumably, the tensions one feels (should one run today or binge-watch TV?) express this underground battle taking place at all times between competing drives. One crucial point to bring to the reader\u2019s attention is Hollingdale\u2019s translation of ‘Heftigkeit<\/em>‘ as ‘vehemence’. Heftigkeit <\/em>is also translated as \u2018intensity\u2019 and even \u2018violence\u2019. These different translations capture not only the phenomenological yearning one might experience when one finds oneself under the influence of a drive, but also the alignment one feels with the drive: for example, one might crave a hamburger and assess this yearning as something good. But it is also the case that one\u2019s subjective evaluations of a craving are under tension. For example, one might consider an extreme craving for sweets as something alienating; something that does not conform to one\u2019s true, authentic desires. In this sense, the drive violently dismantles one\u2019s sense of self.<\/p>\n Problems: Is there a need for a drive model to explain this tension, and is Nietzsche\u2019s model in keeping with naturalism? Take, for example, the phenomenological tension contained in the example above: should John run today or binge-watch TV? John knows that at some point during a run, he feels good about being out there, exercising. Indeed, after John runs, he often feels euphoric. In contrast, while John may enjoy watching TV, there can be a part of him that feels guilty because John feels unproductive. This is especially true if John knows that he had the time and energy to do something meaningful, like running, but chose not to. With this feeling comes a judgment\u2014John thinks, “I am lazy,” which will likely decrease his enjoyment of watching TV in the present. The problem here is twofold: 1) If John knows these facts about how he will feel by not running, then why is there such a battle? Why not just run?; and 2) how do these drives, all by themselves, create a platform for such negative feelings and judgments? These are questions that are examined in detail in this article\u2019s last two sections.<\/p>\n Drives seek to express themselves but do so in designated channels. As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science<\/em>: Drives are \u201ca quantum of dammed up energy waiting to be used up somehow\u201d (GS, 360). Aspect three illuminated the expressive dimension of the assertion under consideration. In this section, the focus shifts to the “somehow” component. Existing scholarship suggests that the expression of a drive entails both a purposive aim and an object or target. While the purpose of a drive is generally regarded as stable or invariant, the target is understood by most scholars to be variable. For example, the sexual drive motivates an individual to seek a suitable partner. However, within the prevailing academic consensus, the specific target\u2014namely, the chosen partner\u2014is not considered essential to the drive’s function or nature. As Mark Alfano puts it, \u201ca drive is a disposition to activate behavior of a particular type though not necessarily with respect to any particular intentional object\u201d (Alfano, 2019, p. 51). Alfano\u2019s example of the expression of the sex drive is constructive in enlarging this detail.\u00a0 He continues: \u201csomeone’s sex drive might lead them to engage in sexual congress with one person today to perform a different sex act with a different person tomorrow or to masturbate alone the next day\u201d (Alfano, 2019, p. 51).<\/p>\n Paul Katsafanas echoes a similar viewpoint. He contends that drives are not directed toward achieving a specific state of affairs. Expanding on this idea, Katsafanas asserts that \u201cdrives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli; they actively seek opportunities for expression sometimes distorting the agent\u2019s perception of the environment in order to incline the agent to act in ways that give the drives expression\u201d (Katsafanas, 2013, p. 752).<\/p>\n Katsafanas\u2019 account is notably intricate, as it seeks to reconcile the apparent tension between the fixed character of a drive\u2019s expression and the variability of its aim. Consider basic animalistic drives such as thirst, the need for shelter, sexual desire, and hunger: while each drive manifests through a distinct mode of pursuing its objects, the specific aim may fluctuate in response to environmental contingencies and inducements.<\/p>\n It is essential to remain attuned to the primal, instinctual origins of drives when reflecting on their objectives. The analytical separation of a drive\u2019s aim from its expression serves to facilitate an account of human behavior that does not presuppose conscious deliberation. In this framework, drives function as mechanisms for disclosing the underlying forces that shape human action. The particular object that satisfies a drive\u2019s aim is of minimal intrinsic significance; it is not genuinely chosen for its own value, but rather serves as a vehicle for the realization of an unconscious impulse.<\/p>\n Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology, on this view, is concerned with exposing the authentic motivational structures that underlie the ostensibly rational justifications individuals offer for their actions. His work strongly supports the thesis that purposive behavior is ultimately explicable through the operation of drives alone. This idea that drives and drives alone explains all that there is behind purposive behavior is well-supported in Nietzsche\u2019s writings.<\/em> A representative passage from Gay Science<\/em> 354, \u201cThe Problem of Consciousness,\u201d articulates Nietzsche\u2019s position well:<\/p>\n The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror: as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. (GS 354)<\/p>\n However, this way of thinking about drives as revealing the true purposes behind decisions raises some thorny problems regarding free will. For if drives induce an agent\u2019s behavior such that that behavior is an expression of simply a drive, and drives are unconscious, then it would seem, at first glance, that one cannot act otherwise.<\/p>\n To address this issue, the article now examines two dominant anti-podal interpretations in the literature: a hard-determinist position championed by Brian Leiter and a softer deterministic standpoint advocated by Katsafanas.<\/p>\n As noted above, some scholars, such as Brian Leiter, have fully embraced the consequences of the line of thought that treats the will as epiphenomenal or, in other words, causally ineffacious. It was noted in the previous section that Leiter holds a type-fact position regarding Nietzsche\u2019s moral psychology. That section examined Leiter\u2019s type-fact theory in relation to the urge component of drives. This section focuses on the aims of drives.<\/p>\n To recap, the type-fact theory argues that human beings belong to fixed and immutable psycho-physiological types, which determine and, if understood correctly, explain individuals’ cognitive faculties, actions, and behavior (Leiter, 2002, p. 91).<\/p>\n What determines one\u2019s type-facts is not always clear for Leiter, as he sometimes oscillates between a more rigid somatic construal and a more fluid, drive position. This ambivalence is clearly seen in the following quote: \u201cCall the relevant psycho-physical facts here type facts. Type-facts, for Nietzsche, are either physiological facts about the person or facts about the person\u2019s unconscious drives or affects\u201d (Leiter, 2019, p. 3). In any case, there are two types, according to Leiter\u2019s interpretation. There are weak types, who are impotent, reactive, prone to harboring grudges, and intriguingly, desire to create values that serve their interests. In contrast, there are strong types, who are active, exuberant, and healthy, and express their values outwardly. Also, in contrast to the weak type, the strong construct values that come to serve their instincts<\/em> (Leiter, 2002, 8)<\/p>\n It is important to underscore that, according to the early Brian Leiter, the aforementioned type-facts are immutable. These type-facts refer to the underlying physiological and psychological characteristics that define an individual and categorize them as either belonging to the “strong” or “weak” type, as previously outlined. Such type-facts, in Leiter\u2019s interpretation, serve as a basis for predicting\u2014at least to some extent\u2014the moral and theoretical commitments of individuals. That is, one’s evaluative outlook and philosophical predispositions are, in part, determined by these stable, constitutive traits. \u201cA \u2018person\u2019 [Leiter proclaims and his inverted commas] is the arena in which the struggle of drives (type-facts) is played out; how they play out determines what he believes, what he values, what he becomes\u201d (Leiter, 2002, p. 100).<\/p>\n As in his earlier view, the individual is conceived primarily as the unconscious expression of these type-facts in Leiter\u2019s most recent work on Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology, Moral Psychology with Nietzsche<\/em>. Should type-facts undergo transformation, such changes are attributed to external influences\u2014most notably cultural forces\u2014which may operate by modulating the expression of particular drives, either activating or suppressing them. What remains consistent across both iterations of Leiter\u2019s interpretation is the assertion of the individual’s causal inefficacy: the self is not an autonomous agent but rather a passive site through which type-facts manifest. As Leiter puts it in his recent book, \u201cNietzsche holds that heritable type-facts are central determinants of personality and morally significant behaviors, a claim well-supported by extensive empirical findings in behavioral genetics\u201d (Leiter, 2019, p. 9).<\/p>\n Particularly noteworthy in Leiter\u2019s later work is his effort to establish a continuity between Nietzsche\u2019s nineteenth-century reflections on the relationship between physiology and conscious agency and the findings of contemporary neuroscience\u2014specifically, the experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet. Libet\u2019s research, which suggests that the readiness potential preceding voluntary action occurs prior to conscious awareness or deliberation, has been widely interpreted as evidence against the existence of free will (Wegner, 2002). Leiter contends that Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical framework, which emphasizes the primacy of unconscious physiological processes in shaping action, anticipates and aligns with these empirical results (see Leiter\u2019s discussion of Daniel Wegner\u2019s The Illusion of Conscious Will<\/em> in Leiter, 2019, pp. 141-142).<\/p>\n Turning to the soft-determinist view, Katsafanas, by contrast, advocates for a weaker interpretation of the causal relationship between drives and conscious thought. He argues that Nietzsche challenges the Kantian and Lockean models of motivation, both of which maintain that reflective deliberation can function as a causal mechanism for modifying an individual’s motivational structure in two distinct ways: First, \u201cself-conscious reflection enables us to distance ourselves from our motives thereby making these motives cease to \u2018dominate\u2019 us,\u201d and second, \u201cthere is a claim about normativity: once we have suspended a motive, we \u2018consider\u2019 the motive, \u2018weigh\u2019 it, ask if it is \u2018really a reason to act\u2019\u201d (Katsafanas, 2013, p. 750). According to Katsafanas, Nietzsche does not repudiate the efficacy of self-conscious reflection, in contrast to Leiter\u2019s interpretation. On this view, deliberation retains a functional role in guiding action selection. More precisely, deliberation enables the individual to choose among alternatives perceived as most conducive to satisfying a particular drive. What Nietzsche rejects, however\u2014following Katsafanas\u2019s reading\u2014is the Kantian\/Lockean claim that individuals possess the capacity to suspend or override their motivational states through rational reflection alone. Rather, the process of deliberation itself is shaped and constrained by the operative drive, such that the range of considered options and the final decision are ultimately filtered through that drive’s motivational force.<\/p>\n Problems: Setting aside the philological dispute between Katsafanas and Leiter, a conceptual challenge emerges if drives are understood as expressions of fixed and determinate aims\u2014for instance, as Richardson observes, the hunger drive does not manifest as the sexual drive, even if certain objects (for example, food) may become sexualized. Under such a conception, it becomes increasingly unclear what explanatory role drives are meant to play in accounting for the complexity of human behavior. Consider Alfano\u2019s illustrative example involving sexual activity. Across the various iterations of this example, it is evident that the subject is not merely a passive conduit of drive expression but an agent who reflects upon, and offers reasons for, the specific form the drive takes. On one day, the individual engages in sexual activity with a particular partner out of attraction; on the next, he performs a different act with the same partner, perhaps driven by novelty or excitement; on the third, he masturbates while thinking of that person. These variations suggest that while drives may orient behavior, they do not fully determine its concrete expression, which remains mediated by reflection, context, and individual reasoning.<\/p>\n In now returning to GS 354, where Nietzsche declares that much of a person\u2019s psychic life would continue just as it is without consciousness, it is hard to accept this idea in relation to Alfano\u2019s example given the above, as it is natural to think that consciousness defined here (that is, as the ability to reflect on objects of cognition) is required to in order make sense to the subject who chooses which acts to pursue and, most importantly, why. \u00a0Several solutions to this problem have been proposed in the literature. One dominant reading is by Katsafanas. As indicated, he argues that Nietzsche rejects the idea that a subject stands outside their action; deliberation, as the capacity to deactivate the urging of a drive, is disabled in the Nietzschean model. Moreover, the subject is simply the name given to the container of active drives seeking ways to express themselves.<\/p>\n However, so much the worse for the standard view of subjectivity, or so Katsafanas argues. What Katsafanas proposes is a constitutivist view influenced by Korsgaard and others, which stipulates that subjectivity is a constitutive activity, much like the game of chess (Katsafanas, 2013, 2016). To elaborate, just as chess is not reducible to its pieces but rather to how these pieces are played in accordance with specific rules, so too with subjectivity: subjectivity is in the making. Constitutivism also declares that there are different ways of constituting subjectivity, but that one way is clearly preferred according to the model of self-constitution defended. Again, this is analogous to chess in that there are superior strategies a player may employ over others, but all strategies aim at check-mating the king of one\u2019s opponent. According to Katasafanas, Nietzsche identifies a clear goal for human life: the will to power. Putting will to power into practice would mean overcoming obstacles. The more difficult and challenging these obstacles are, the greater the self becomes (Katsafanas, 2016).<\/p>\n Other means of addressing the question of when conscious deliberation comes into play in one\u2019s actions are advocated by expressivist interpretations put forward by Pippin and Ridley, respectively. For them, Katsafanas\u2019s solution is not radical enough, for there is still a division between what the self wishes to become and the means and attitude by which the self does it. In contrast, they take Nietzsche’s statement in GM 1:13 more literally: \u201cthere is no doer behind the deed, the deed is everything\u201d \u2014 the self is fully manifested only in its expression. As Ridley puts it, expressivism is the position where \u201cthe content of our will becomes fully determinate only in the states of affairs it realizes\u201d (Ridley, 2018, p. 12). To cash this out, Ridley makes a distinction between basic and non-basic actions. Making coffee for Ridley is basic in that, even though several steps are required to constitute the action, making coffee does not express anything about one\u2019s agency or personhood.<\/p>\n The same is not true for undertakings like Ridley\u2019s example of Beethoven\u2019s writing of a coda, where Beethoven\u2019s intention is only fully expressed at the completion of such a piece. This is a non-basic action for Ridley. Moving down from such exalted heights, consider a more mundane example, such as writing an undergraduate paper in philosophy. While a student might have a sense of what the paper’s thesis should be and how to structure its arguments before the student even begins to write, it is only the completed paper that reveals a fully expressed idea regarding the essay topic. Such an idea is a reflection of the attitude of the self, but that attitude was impossible to capture prior to the writing exercise.<\/p>\n One problem with Ridley\u2019s model, as noted by Peter Kail, pertains to his Beethoven Coda example.\u00a0 For Kail, the example is too simplistic in one respect and too complex in another. It is too simplistic because, if the content of the will is merely \u201cto complete a coda,\u201d then at this thin level of description, one can straightforwardly specify both the intention and its object independently of one another, thereby refuting the profundity of the expressivist thesis (Kail, 2019). Yet it is also too complex because, as Kail avers, once one considers the finished musical work itself, the fact that Beethoven\u2019s goal may have been describable only in very general terms\u2014and that its precise realization became determinate only after the fact\u2014does not particularly support expressivism. After all, the overarching goal is pursued through many intermediate actions, and these seem far more plausibly guided by intentions with relatively determinate contents (Kail, 2019).<\/p>\n Robert Pippin also supports an expressivist position, but advocates a weaker type with different emphasis than Ridley\u2014the separation between doer and deed cannot be entirely erased because on many occasions Nietzsche wants the agent to experience agential regret\u2013the deeds of agents often and unequivocally demonstrate that agents are not the sort of selves they thought they were. He provides for consideration the process of creating a poem:<\/p>\n Thus if I start out to write a poem, I might find that it does not go as I expected, and think that this is because the material resists my execution, my inner poem and so what I get is a \u201cpoorly expressed poem\u201d\u2026 The poem is a perfect expression of what your intention turned out to be<\/em>. If the poem failed; everything failed. It\u2026 just turned out to be a bad poem; not a bad expression of a good poem<\/em>. As Nietzsche keeps insisting, our egos are wedded to the latter account; but the former correctly expresses what happened\u201d (Pippin, 2006, pp.140-141, italics in original).<\/p>\n What Pippin emphasizes, against Ridley, is the under-analysis that agents place on the space within the ego (a creation of one\u2019s drive hierarchy, to be sure), which is too committed to the intention prior to the act rather than to the process that the ego undergoes during the act itself. What Nietzsche wants one to think about, so Pippin argues, is the in-between, as it were, of the doer and deed dyad (Pippin, 2013). Nietzsche wants subjects to sit within the motivational landscape they occupy as they commit to and execute the action in question, and to delve into the real reasons for committing it. For example, is this action motivated by a desire to overcome oneself or by ressentiment?<\/p>\n There are several problems with this view, which, incidentally, Pippin acknowledges but did not address here. Whether such an interpretation resolves the difficulties posed by the connection between self-conscious deliberation and drive theory is a much-debated topic in the secondary literature (Leiter, 1998, 2019; Kail, 2019).<\/p>\n Given what has been said thus far about drives, there is a significant and intimate connection between drives and affects. Indeed there is speculation in early twenty-first century literature as to whether a model of emotion can perform the same role as drive theory. Take the hunger drive as an example. The hunger drive causes one to seek out the appropriate object to satisfy one\u2019s craving. It is expressed with a fixed aim, but the food item may not be determined: one may have a hankering for a burger, a Cobb salad, or pizza; each would satisfy one\u2019s craving. However, one is indifferent as to which option one\u2019s partner chooses to order for delivery.<\/p>\n Moreover, hunger is biologically rooted, and there is a distinct mental urge that pushes one to fulfill the drive. Here is where the hunger drive becomes connected to affect: the urge of the drive is accompanied by a negative valence, especially when one is famished. One experiences an unpleasant feeling. In addition, the drive, when unsatisfied for too long, may produce other feelings, such as irritability. The word \u201changry\u201d captures this sentiment well. Also, one\u2019s negative feelings may stimulate one\u2019s drive towards hostility. Such feelings are formed by the embodied experience of one\u2019s surroundings. As Nietzsche claims on many occasions, affect colors all things: \u201cThere is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing and the more affects<\/em> we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this, our objectivity be\u201d (GM III: 12). Consider 187 BGE, where Nietzsche declares that \u201cIn short, moralities are also merely a sign language of the affects.<\/em>\u201d The perspectival language of GM III: 12 is also echoed earlier in GM 1 10:<\/p>\n One should remember that even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies<\/em> the image of what it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent\u2026 by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent. (GM 1 10, italics in original)<\/p>\n Similar perspectival interpretations of the affects are given in GS 7, 139, 152, and 301.<\/p>\n However, another aspect of affect brings it closer to some of the characteristics previously noted: affects often have either a positive or a negative valence. They induce inclinations or aversions. Nietzsche highlights this notion not just in GM III: 12 but most clearly in BGE 19:<\/p>\n Third, the will is a complex of sensation and thinking but above all an affect, and specifically the affect of command. That which is freedom of the will is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey\u2026 A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience. (BGE 19)<\/p>\n Similar sentiments are widely available in Nietzsche\u2019s unpublished work. Consider the following: \u201cEvery ideal presupposes love and hatred, admiration and contempt. Either the positive emotion is the primum mobile or the negative emotion. For example, in all ressentiment, ideals hatred and contempt are the primum mobile\u201d (KGWB VIII.2.10.9).<\/p>\n If affect both imbues objects in the world with evaluative significance\u2014as discussed in the second aspect of drive theory above\u2014and simultaneously engenders an orientation toward the realization of those objects (or, conversely, an aversion to those it seeks to avoid), then the question arises: what, precisely, distinguishes affect from drive? Do these terms refer to the same underlying phenomenon? Is there a substantive conceptual distinction to be drawn between them, or does Nietzsche\u2019s usage of drive (Trieb)<\/em> and affect (Affekt<\/em>) amount to a pleonasm?<\/p>\n This pleonastic concern is highlighted in the secondary literature. Lanier Anderson suggests that \u201cmany readers take Nietzsche\u2019s frequent talk of drives and affects as pleonastic such that \u2018affect\u2019 does not add anything to drives\u201d (Anderson, 2012, p. 216).\u00a0 In some scholarly works, drive and affect are not distinguished and are used interchangeably. For example, in Peter Poellner\u2019s Nietzsche and Metaphysics,<\/em> under the entry index \u201caffect,\u201d it states, \u201csee drive, desire.\u201d Poellner uses these terms interchangeably in his work. To wit, he writes, \u201cThe mode in which the striving for the experience of power manifests itself is designated by Nietzsche as \u2018drives\u2019 or affects\u201d (Poellner, 1995, p. 174).<\/p>\n Moreover, in Poellner\u2019s later article, \u201cAffect, Value and Objectivity,\u201d he uses affect to cover ground that drives might also map. Notice, in the following introduction, just how much territory affects circumscribe:<\/p>\n In the discussion that follows, I shall focus primarily on emotions, but it will be convenient to retain Nietzsche\u2019s broad usage of \u2018affect\u2019 for any mental episode<\/em> which constitutively involves a pro- or con-attitude<\/em> (or as I shall say, a favouring or disfavouring) with a distinctive phenomenology\u2014some experience of attraction or repulsion.<\/em> \u2018Affects\u2019 in this sense may include, for example, a feeling of shame, an occurrent desire for something absent, as well as a bodily sensation experienced unquali\ufb01edly as painful or pleasant. (Poellner, 2007, p. 229)<\/p>\n Christopher Janaway fully recognizes the potential problems in conflating affects with drives. He mentions that \u201cWe may wonder whether drives and affects are even properly distinguishable kinds\u201d (Janaway, 2009, p. 55). In an earlier piece, Janaway offers a very helpful explanation that highlights the connection between the two and their respective differences: \u201cA drive is relatively stable to activate behavior of some kind, while an affect, put roughly is what it feels like when a drive is active within oneself.\u201d In contrast, \u201cAn affect would then be a positive or negative feeling that occurs in response to a particular drive in its striving\u201d (Janaway, 2007, p. 214).<\/p>\n Katsafanas agrees with Janaway on this point and further develops his own idea: \u201cDrives are dispositions that induce affective orientations\u201d (Katsafanas, 2016, p. 94). According to Katsafanas, Schopenhauer\u2019s account of affect and drive bears a significant resemblance to Nietzsche\u2019s. Using Schopenhauer\u2019s example, Katsafanas considers the case of an individual who seeks to express his affection for a romantic partner by planning an elaborate date intended to impress her. The individual is consciously aware of his intentions, deliberates over possible venues, and derives excitement from the planning process itself\u2014an excitement that further reinforces his motivation to continue deliberating (Katsafanas, 2016, pp. 90-92). However, Schopenhauer contends that the true source of this excitement lies not in the conscious acts of deliberation but in an unconscious reproductive drive. According to Katsafanas, Nietzsche adopts Schopenhauer\u2019s view\u2014at least on this score\u2014and thus within Katsafanas\u2019s Nietzschean framework, such planning is not epiphenomenal; rather, it is shaped and energized by an unconscious drive that motivates the individual to identify effective means for satisfying a desire, even if the deeper origins of that desire remain inaccessible to conscious awareness.<\/p>\n In evaluating Katsafanas\u2019s interpretation, it is essential to recall the foundational distinction introduced at the outset of this discussion\u2014namely, the distinction between the phenomenological and somatic dimensions of drives. From the phenomenological perspective, Katsafanas\u2019s account becomes more intelligible: drives recruit affective states to facilitate their own satisfaction. However, from the somatic standpoint, two notable explanatory challenges emerge. First, the precise etiological mechanism by which drives come to harness affect remains obscure. While it is assumed that affect has an evolutionary or animalistic basis, the process by which drives appropriate and direct these emotional states is underdetermined. Second, the somatic nature of affect itself remains ambiguous; it is still unclear what, in physiological or neurological terms, an affect is.<\/p>\n An article to explore these questions is Christopher Fowles\u2019 \u201cThe Heart of the Flesh.\u201d Indeed, Fowles raises an incisive question in this regard:<\/p>\n This suggestion [Katsafanas\u2019s] has much to recommend it, but it does make Poellner\u2019s concern all the more pressing. If drives are dispositions that generate affective orientations, the explanatory efficacy of the concept of a drive is in no small part dependent on the understanding of affect we take Nietzsche to be employing. This places affects at the heart of Nietzsche\u2019s often celebrated moral psychology but leaves us needing to say more about what they are supposed to be. (Fowles, 2020, p. 114)<\/p>\n Fowles\u2019s solution to these two problems is to accord affects more powers than they otherwise would have in most scholars\u2019 interpretations of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology. To wit, affects are subject to new mechanisms, one of which is the causal extraction mechanism (hereafter CEM), a millennia-old capacity that unconsciously searches for an external cause that generated the often negatively valenced affect (Fowles, 2020). Another component of Fowle\u2019s model of Nietzschean affects is the exteroception triggering claim (hereafter ETC). The ETC claim suggests that very often a powerful, negatively valenced feeling is produced by an intense external stimulus (for example, a wolf approaches a person hiking along a forest trail). This perception generates a flood of physiological interoceptions (increased heart rate, sweating, rapid breathing, and so forth). These interoceptions are then appraised by the CEM, whereby a cause-and-effect analysis of the situation is conducted (run, fight, and so forth) (Fowles, 2020). The constellation of drives that make up the subject in question will determine the response to this stimulus.<\/p>\n Although this article cannot delve into the specifics of this solution, Fowles\u2019 solution posits that both drives and affects are the basic tokens of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology, mutually influencing one another.<\/p>\n Problems:<\/p>\n The connection between drives and affects is an ongoing discussion in the literature that is difficult to resolve for the same reasons concerning drives above: under some models, such as Damasio\u2019s somatic feedback system theory, affects can do the same work as drives and yet are more easily groundable in the natural sciences, thereby making them experimentally viable (Damasio, 1996). This does not appear to be the case for drives. (For more on somatic feedback systems of affects, and Damasio\u2019s in particular, see the IEP article Theories of Emotion Section<\/em> 4 c.) The same question that has been raised concerning the four aspects above, namely, what explanatory purpose do drives serve, raises its head here once again.<\/p>\n This article examined Nietzsche\u2019s philosophical psychology as a representation of drive theory. It examined the dispositional account of Nietzsche\u2019s psychology, which holds that drives are the fundamental tokens of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophy of mind and have five aspects: they are biologically rooted, they evaluate, they have urge-like qualities, they have fixed aims, and they are connected to the affects. In addition, this article examined several problems with this construal of psychology. In sum, most of these problems stem from a difficulty in bridging the mind\/body connection. Drives were brought in to explain more clearly what this connection is, but at times, it is unclear what explanatory advantage they have in answering some of the core problems and questions of mind-body dualism.<\/p>\nTable of Contents<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>1. Nietzsche\u2019s Naturalism<\/h2>\n
<\/a>2. Philosophical Psychology<\/h2>\n
<\/a>3. Two Key Nietzschean Concepts: Revaluation of All Values and Will to Power<\/h2>\n
<\/a>a. The Revaluation of All Values<\/h3>\n
<\/a>b. The Will to Power<\/h3>\n
<\/a>4. Nietzsche\u2019s Drive Theory: Five Aspects<\/h2>\n
<\/a>a. Aspect 1: Drives Are Biologically Rooted<\/h3>\n
<\/a>b. Aspect 2: Drives Evaluate<\/h3>\n
<\/a>c. Aspect 3: Drives Are Urgings<\/h3>\n
<\/a>d. Aspect 4: Drives Have Fixed Aims<\/h3>\n
<\/a>e. Aspect 5: The Drives Are Related to Affects<\/h3>\n
<\/a>5. Conclusion<\/h2>\n
<\/a>6. References and Further Reading<\/h2>\n
<\/a>a. Primary Sources<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>b. Secondary Sources<\/h3>\n
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