Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology

Abstract

Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." 1 It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure.Nietzsche tells us that psychology is "the path to the fundamental problems" (BGE 23).Included among these "fundamental problems" are the nature of agency, freedom, selfhood, morality, and evaluation. The psychological concept that is the key to these notions, Nietzsche's principal explanatory token within psychology, is the drive (Trieb, Instinkt). 2 For example, Nietzsche tells us that the self is a relation of drives (BGE 6, 9, 12), and he claims that willing should be understood in terms of the operations of drives (BGE 19). If we are to understand these central elements of Nietzsche's thought, we will need an account of his concept of drive.However, it is far from clear what exactly a drive is. Talk of drives conjures up images of very basic motivational states, such as urges or cravings; it can also bring to mind physiological states. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a drive is "any internal mechanism which sets an organism moving or sustains its activity in a certain direction, or causes it to pursue a certain satisfaction… esp. one of the recognized physiological tensions or conditions of need, such as hunger and thirst." Hunger and thirst are indeed what spring to mind when we think of 1 "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Standard Edition vol. 18, p. 34. 2 Nietzsche seems to regard Instinkt and Trieb as terminological variants; he will sometimes alternate between the two in the same sentence (see, for example, GS 1). Here, I will simply use the term drive to translate both Instinkt and Trieb. (I use drive instead of instinct because, we will soon see, the English term "instinct" has misleading connotations.) Daniel Conway claims that Nietzsche distinguishes Instinkt and Trieb beginning in his works of 1888. According to Conway, beginning in Twilight, Instinkt refers to a Trieb that has been "organized" or "trained to discharge" in a specific way (1997,(30)(31)(32)(33)(34). I find Conway's textual evidence for this alleged distinction unpersuasive; however, we need not resolve the issue here, for this distinction would not affect the points that I make in the text.2 drives. Many commentators assume that Nietzsche has the same understanding of drives, and consequently treat drives either as simple urges and cravings or as physiological states.But these interpretations cannot be correct. Nietzsche does not identify drives with physiological states or mere causal forces. On the contrary, he explicitly contrasts his drive psychology with certain "materialistic" explanations of human behavior (BGE 12). 3 Moreover, he tells us that drives "adopt perspectives," "interpret the world," and "evaluate." 4 Clearly, physiological states and urges do not do that.The language o...

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