Drive, Affect, Thought

Abstract

Nietzsche’s dismemberment of the philosophical subject — the self — is well known. He argues repeatedly that Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others use tendentious philosophical arguments to establish the existence of a bogus subject-substance that is distinct from the body and unified in virtue of being a conscious subject of thought and agent of action. Nietzsche counters that such a subject-substance does not exist and that the reasons provided by philosophers for thinking that it must exist are uniformly unsound. His alternative views about the subject emphasize its ephemerality and infiltration by the surrounding natural and social environments. On his alternative, the subject is a collection of drives organized as a dynamic system of nutrition and expansion — nutrition conceived not simply as an organic category but one that includes also culturally enriched affective dimensions and intellectual ambitions, and expansion conceived not simply as an organic category of increasing one’s spread of influence in the world but as one that includes also inward-directed discipline and mastery of drives.