Drives

Abstract This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s mature notion of drives. After some preliminary considerations on Nietzsche’s usage of the term ‘drive’, it considers the conception of drives held by Schopenhauer and by Georg Schneider, whose work is the most important scientific source on which Nietzsche relies to elaborate his psychology of drives. It then moves on to Nietzsche’s own views about drives, investigating how such views emerge by the time he was working on Daybreak and how he later attempts to refine them by engaging with Schneider’s work in 1883. This refinement results in the notion of drives that Nietzsche employs more or less consistently in his mature works: drives are behavioural dispositions; they are genuinely psychological/mental (evaluative); and due to their urging nature Nietzsche conceives of them according to a proto-Freudian discharge model. The chapter also addresses the relation Nietzsche sometimes attempts to draw between the notion of ‘drive’ and that of ‘will to power’.