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.On the other hand, Nietzsche’s theory suffers from a paucity of drives.This is, perhaps, the place to make a first foray into Nietzsche’s infamousnotion of “the will to power.” Nietzsche often indicates that the will topower is a drive; indeed, it is the prototype for all drives.Sometimes, hesuggests that it is one among several (or many), but the most powerfuldrive.Other times, he suggests that it lies at the basis of every drive.Else-where, it is a feature of drives, and thus not a particular drive of its own.For example, he writes that each drive has its own will to power and thusincludes a drive to overcome all of the other drives.I find this jumble of hypotheses incoherent.What would it mean to sayof a drive that it has a drive? To be sure, Nietzsche often personifies emotions, passions, and drives in this way.It is harmless enough to say that “pity wants.” or “resentment needs.” so long as we keep clearly in mind that this is shorthand for saying that “a person who pities wants.” or “the resentful man needs.” But when Nietzsche suggests (for the most part in hisunpublished notes) that drives have drives it does not look as if he is saying“a person with two drives will act on the stronger of the two.” It ratherlooks as if there is a struggle going on in a person between two animateand independent beings, the one drive that wants x and another drive that wants y.The real model is Darwin, and a sort of “survival of the fittest”(not Darwin’s term) of the drives.To be sure, Freud was mightily influencedby similar metaphors (and toward the end of his career he started talkingN I E T Z S C H E ’ S P A S S I O N Sexplicitly about different psychic “agencies”).But this undermines Nietzsche’s most basic intent, to get rid of such explicit, deliberate, consciousagencies and return to the more impersonal structures of biological expla-nation.Moreover, this attempt to explain all drives as manifestations of the onedrive—the will to power—demands that we thus further inquire whatmakes the manifestations so different, and how they can come into conflict.This will probably result in our distinguishing those manifestations of thewill to power that seek pleasure from those that seek status from those thatseek domination from those that seek to avoid humiliation from those thatseek self-esteem, and so on.So what have we gained? What we have lost isNietzsche’s keen eye for the particular motives and emotions that move us in this or that situation.I think that Nietzsche’s pressing the will to power in an account of thevarious motives that explain our “moral” behavior is an extremely fruitfuland interesting contribution to “moral psychology.” It is an excellentcounter to the often mindless hedonism that is assumed in so much of ethi-cal theory.But his tendency to elevate the will to power to absolute status,in addition to betraying the residual (and unwanted) influence of Schopen-hauer, undercuts the very genius of Nietzsche’s hypothesis that some (not all) behavior is motivated by desires that we would rather not recognize.And as for his emphasis on drives and instincts, I think we can appreciateand accept Nietzsche’s Darwinian attempt to explain human behavior incontinuity with animal behavior without either becoming reductionist ordismissing the dramatic complications of consciousness and culture in allof this.In most cases, Nietzsche’s use of “drive” can simply be replaced by“passion” or “emotion” or “desire,” and his thin theory of the drives thusreturns to a rich theory of the multiplicity and complexity of the motives ofhuman behavior.One must admit that the hydraulic model or metaphor and with it theimage of mindless drives has taken a firm hold on our language.To be sure,it “feels as if ” emotions “flow” through us, “rise up” in us, are “about toexplode” in us.But this only pushes the question one step back: why doesit feel that way? Why does the language of flow seem to fit “the stream ofconsciousness” so well? Or is it the other way around, that we cannot thinkof our psychic life in any other terms because we now have no other terms?(Cf.“We believe in God because we have grammar.”) Between Nietzscheand Freud, one might argue that the drive theory of emotions has gainedhegemony in our self-understanding, but I would argue that they both alsosuggested something far more promising, best represented, perhaps, by Freud’s“talking cure”: What if having an emotion were more like “having some-thing to say”? No spatial metaphors there, and insofar as the “flow” imag-ery is the least bit applicable, it applies only to the results of saying—theflow of parole—rather than to forces going on “in a person’s mind.” LIVING WITH NIETZSCHEOr consider some of Nietzsche’s own scattered suggestions about “harmonizing” the mind, aimed at Plato, derived from his own love of music and no doubt inherited from Schopenhauer and Buddhism (although moreakin to Taoism).That, too, is a truly nonspatial model for emotions, andthough one might talk of “flow” in the rather minimalist sense of “the flowof the music” (i.e., the flow of time) this model certainly doesn’t recommendeither an engineer or an economist.It requires a musician, or, followingGraham Parkes, a composer.But Nietzsche’s model of emotions, despite hismore semioticist and musical inclinations, remains firmly tied to physio-and physical imagery.This might be argued to betray a reductionist impulsethat even the greatest of thinkers find all too tempting.Nietzsche on the Emotionsas StrategiesIn short, in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changesits relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities
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