The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul

Chapter 43

The Critique of Drive Theory—Against Self-Preservation

Klages considers drive theory one of the most catastrophic errors in the history of thought. His assessment is severe—the state of mere absence of knowledge would be preferable to the prevailing state, which represents such a thorough distortion of drive life that it barely deserves the name psychology.

What passes for drive theory is, in Klages' view, nothing but a heap of nonsense. This is not rhetorical exaggeration but systematic diagnosis. Traditional drive theory commits three fundamental errors:

First, it projects spiritual capacities—purpose, intention, consciousness—into unconscious life processes.

Second, it assumes self-preservation as the fundamental drive motivating all organic activity.

Third, it treats nature itself as a commercial enterprise pursuing profit through efficient resource allocation.

These errors are not independent but compound each other. Once you assume drives pursue purposes like will does, and once you ask what purpose they serve, the answer "self-preservation" appears self-evident. And once self-preservation becomes the measure of all organic activity, nature itself appears as a vast business operation maximizing survival efficiency.

The result is what Klages calls "the religion of self-preservation"—a worldview that reads capitalist rationality into the very structure of life itself.

The Fundamental Error

"Anyone who, blinded to the concept of life, researches drives will interpret them all according to the analogy of will."

This is the root error. Whether done deliberately by consciousness analysts like Theodor Lipps, or conversely by thinkers like Schopenhauer who interpret will according to drive impulses, "the result is the same."

Why? "If one lacks insight into the essential difference between drive impulse and will impulse, then—because humans rarely experience drive impulses without accompanying will impulses—one infallibly projects spirit into the sub-spiritual drives."

Humans experience hunger accompanied by the decision to eat or not eat, the judgment that food is needed, the plan to obtain nourishment. We project this entire complex back into the hunger itself, treating the drive as if it contained purpose, judgment, and planning.

"The effort to interpret willing from mere drive impulses provides the worst misinterpretations of drives."

Trying to reduce will to drive impulses produces bad voluntarism. But trying to elevate drive impulses to will-like purposiveness produces even worse drive theory.

Three Fatal Substitutions

Klages identifies three systematic confusions:

"Because will pursues purposes, the life impulse is also understood as if it pursues something, and the whole of nature as if it were a system of purposes."

First substitution: purposive willing is projected onto purposeless drive. The hunger drive does not pursue the purpose of nutrition. It simply operates. We who understand nutrition purposes attribute them to the drive itself.

"Because the purpose of will is realized in achievements from which we are accustomed to read it, certain consequences of drive activity are examined instead of the drives themselves and thought into the drives as intentions directed towards effects."

Second substitution: consequences are mistaken for intentions. Eating has the consequence of nutrition. We therefore assume nutrition was the intention. But consequences are not intentions unless there exists a purposive agent who intends them.

"Because only a self is capable of willing, which asserts itself in every act of willing, the self-preservation interest of the will-bearer transforms into a self-preservation drive of all living beings."

Third substitution: the self's interest in persisting is projected onto all life as a fundamental drive. But self-preservation as interest requires a self that knows itself as needing preservation. Life as such has no such self-awareness.

The Example of Nutrition

"Our pets eat and drink like us. They do not know it, but we know that one cannot continue to live if one completely abstains from eating and drinking. We therefore know nutritional purposes and can make decisions to nourish ourselves better or refrain from unnecessary indulgences."

We possess knowledge about nutrition's necessity. We can form intentions based on this knowledge. "Consequently, the conclusion follows that eating and drinking originally and generally occurs from a 'nutritional drive,' and the drive of self-preservation is inevitably demonstrated in the nutritional drive."

But this is circular reasoning masked as explanation.

The Absurdity Revealed

"But the animals have not the slightest knowledge that they must take in calories to avoid dying. Even the assumption that they are capable of acquiring such knowledge would not help us over the fact that they already perform so-called purposeful actions beforehand—consider the pecking of grains by the chick just hatched from the egg."

The newly hatched chick pecks at grains without any prior learning, without any knowledge of nutrition, without any concept of self-preservation. The behavior is immediate and spontaneous.

"And not only in terms of food intake, but thousands of other activities—consider the migration of birds in fall."

How do we explain these behaviors if not through purposes? The traditional answer produces what Klages calls absurdity:

"The faithful adherent of the religion of self-preservation, the sacro egoismo, sincerely convinced, prepares those phrases that, stripped of all excuses and obfuscations, proclaim: all this happens from unintended purposes, unthought thoughts, unconscious consciousness."

These are contradictions in terms. Purposes that are unintended are not purposes. Thoughts that are unthought are not thoughts. Consciousness that is unconscious is not consciousness.

"Who thinks here, and who does not? The maintaining being does not think, but its inherent 'nature' is concerned with its preservation."

So "nature" thinks—or more precisely, a personified abstraction performs the cognitive work the organism cannot perform. "In the non-thinking being resides a planning, calculating, indeed undoubtedly financially-technically educated 'nature' that plans its undertakings for the long term."

This is mythology disguised as science. We hypostatize "nature" as an agent possessing foresight, calculation, and financial planning—all to avoid admitting that purposive explanations fail when applied to unconscious processes.

Reproduction as Paradox

"The purpose of self-preservation alone is not enough. Like humans, animals also mate, and one does not fail to consider the quite frequent reproduction in animals as a mating instinct, to call it a 'reproductive drive.'"

But reproduction creates a problem for self-preservation theory. "Humans know about themselves and find it easily confirmed by animal behavior that the young brood causes the parents various inconveniences that would certainly not be endured by a drive for self-assertion alone."

Parents sacrifice time, energy, resources, and safety for offspring. How is this self-preservation?

The standard answer: species preservation. The individual sacrifices for the species. But this creates new problems.

"And that's not all: the mating process is life-threatening for quite a few animals. The male spider exposes himself to the danger of being devoured by the female spider through mating!"

Sexual cannibalism directly contradicts individual self-preservation. The organism knowingly (or unknowingly—the theory cannot decide) risks death for reproduction.

The Ultimate Proof

"There may be no better proof of the self-assertive nature of the ego than that a thinking alienated from life by spirit even felt irresistibly compelled to explain the so-called reproductive drive, which it contrasts with the 'nourishment drive,' from a preservation purpose!"

The very fact that theorists insist on explaining reproduction through preservation reveals how deeply the ego-logic of self-assertion dominates their thinking.

"If nature in its entirety has already been individualized and personalized, why shouldn't it, like a bank director, have an entire army of department heads, managers, financial advisors, arbitrageurs, advertising chiefs as there are genera, species, varieties?"

This is Klages' most biting observation. The theory treats nature as a corporate hierarchy. Species are department heads reporting to genera, which report to higher taxonomic categories, all serving the ultimate purpose of preservation.

"Unaware of the consequences and sometimes thereby putting themselves at extreme risk, the animals nevertheless mate according to the preservation purposes of the foresightful species, to which they can in no way avoid belonging."

Individual organisms serve as instruments of species purposes they neither understand nor chose. "One notices the conceptual pattern of the human state!"

The biological theory mirrors political organization. Just as citizens serve state purposes, organisms serve species purposes.

The Species as Person

"We are in the midst of a drive conception that, without even asking about the drives, without ever having examined them itself, revolves around answering a single question: what is the use of the drives and consequently who do they benefit?"

The question "who benefits?" presupposes agents with interests. But species are not agents. They are abstractions—classifications we impose on natural diversity.

"If an uninvited doubter were to remind us that every purpose must have a purposeful self, since no one has ever experienced the opposite, the conclusion would follow that a person is the bearer of species characteristics."

If species have purposes, species must be persons. But "with whose disappearance—the disappearance of all individual entities belonging to the species—the species itself would vanish."

Species exist only as collections of individuals. When all individuals die, the species disappears. So how can species-purposes explain individual behavior?

"The representative of 'scientific' experience would not hesitate to deny the species person and dissolve the personal self into nothing but natural drives."

The theory oscillates incoherently. When pressed, it denies species are persons. But then it cannot explain how species-purposes motivate individual organisms.

The Utility Logic

"The sense of utility is never at a loss for an answer, no matter how much useless or superfluous one may present to it."

Every phenomenon can be explained through utility once you adopt the framework. Feelings and pleasures? "The species achieves its purposes better if it takes the individual entities into service with various 'pleasure bonuses.'"

Other drives beyond nutrition and reproduction? "It discovers profit in each of them, always having the advantage of bringing the species into the field when the individual is of no use, and the individual when the species is of no use."

The theory is unfalsifiable because it can always shift between individual and species benefit depending on which explains the phenomenon at hand.

The Rowan Berry Objection

Klages provides a concrete counterexample. "If we counted the rowan berries together that a rowan tree produces annually and compared them with the number of rowan trees that usually arise anew from them, we would find that thousands, even tens of thousands of fruits continually decay without a 'useful effect.'"

This massive waste contradicts efficiency. How does the preservation-theorist respond?

"Our purpose apostle would prove to us that in this world of competing individual beings, the spirit of the species must rely on tremendous obstacles and resistances, and therefore scatter a great abundance of seeds to ensure the survival of its house."

Waste becomes prudent investment. Inefficiency becomes efficient strategy. The theory absorbs every counterexample by expanding its explanatory framework.

The Unbiased Observer

"Any unbiased observer readily sees that here—naively to astonishment—the 'competitive struggles' of 'business life' in a society enslaved by mammon have been transferred to what is called nature."

The theory projects capitalist rationality onto nature itself. Traditional pseudo-wisdom proclaims:

Nature becomes a vast utility serving human purposes, organized according to commercial logic.

The Socratic Origin

"It was in the monetary era of the Greeks that the 'common man Socrates'—as Nietzsche calls him—began with a slander of life, which was later spiritualized to the extreme by countless 'teleologies.'"

Klages traces the error to Socratic rationalism arising in Athens' commercial age. The teleological worldview reflects merchant thinking applied to cosmos.

"One need only delve a little beneath the surface to find 'idealism' and 'materialism,' despite their fierce contention over words, secretly arm in arm."

Both strive to uphold "belief in this downright petty rationality of the world's arrangement." Whether purposes come from divine ideas or material forces, both assume purposive organization.

The Platonic Version

"If talk of so-called natural purposes is to be more than an entertaining metaphor, there must be a person who thinks the purposes of species for individual beings and ultimately a leader or monarch who thinks the species again."

Teleology requires a cosmic thinker. "Individual beings would thus become thoughts—or intentions—of varieties, varieties thoughts of species, species thoughts of genus, genera thoughts of God. And so we arrive at the creative Logos."

This is Platonic idealism: organisms as divine ideas realized in matter. "Because our thoughts lack the ability to bring forth something without physical mediation, it uses, in distinction to this, for the thoughts of the creative Logos, the Platonic word 'idea.'"

The Idea is supposedly different from human thought—creative rather than merely representative. But this distinction cannot be maintained coherently.

Schiller's Stanza

Klages provides a telling example. Schiller, "an extreme idealist in his intellectual achievements," wrote:

"Meanwhile, until philosophy holds together the structure of the world,

It maintains the machinery through hunger and love."

"'Hunger' here means 'drive for food,' 'love' means 'reproductive drive'—otherwise it would not be apparent why these two should actually maintain the structure of the world."

Idealist Schiller and materialist Darwin converge: both reduce life to nutrition and reproduction drives motivated by preservation purposes.

The Darwinian Reduction

"The means used by the will to preserve in the Darwinian sense could be paraphrased as: 'You must tailor yourself to your blanket.'"

Survival through adaptation. "The surviving and supposedly stronger being in the competitive struggle for existence always buys such advantage by being able to adapt to God knows what constraints, at the astonishing expense of its uniqueness."

Organisms become means to survival ends, valued only for competitive efficiency. "What emerges candidly in Darwinism—the devaluation of all drives and other characteristics of the organism according to their competitive efficiency and classification-conscious reactivity—is only less obvious in all life teachings."

This has "devastated the conception of drives to this day in an unmatched degree."

"By far most life teachings proceed 'optimistically.'" But this optimism easily inverts. "The 'struggle of all against all,' as Hobbes established it for human societies and Darwin extended it to organisms, is not exactly suitable to nourish confidence in world-shaping powers."

Consider: "One need only emphasize regarding the 'drive for nourishment'—hunger—that according to it every living being devours other living beings as much as it can. If one wishes, it can just as well be called a murder drive."

Thus armed, one could "prove that at least this planet with its millions of teeming lives is the spawn of a Satan who wanted to indulge in the sadistic spectacle of relentlessly devouring egos."

"What hellish prospect opens up when one considers that everything and everyone is always just a means, never an end."

Under self-preservation logic, organisms exist only as means to reproduction, reproduction only as means to species continuation, species only as means to... what? "Without an ultimate purpose even being conceivable that would impart sense to the dreadful expenditure—unless it be the annihilation of the whole machinery!"

Yet Klages ends hopefully. The "glowing germs of a new doctrine of life from the unprecedented volcanic eruption bearing the name 'Nietzsche's Works'" promise transformation. "The beginning of a piece of completely new natural science" emerges.

But the actual task remains: "Understanding how the drive comes into effect in drive experience, what handle it offers the intervention of mind, and what befalls it through the spiritual act."

  1. The Fundamental Projection: Traditional drive theory interprets unconscious drives according to the analogy of purposive will, projecting spirit into life.
  2. Three Fatal Substitutions: Purposes replace impulses, consequences replace drives, self-preservation interests replace organic processes.
  3. Contradictions in Terms: "Unintended purposes, unthought thoughts, unconscious consciousness"—the theory requires logical impossibilities.
  4. The Species-Person Problem: Species-purposes require species as agents, but species are abstractions existing only through individuals.
  5. Unfalsifiable Utility: Every phenomenon can be explained through individual or species benefit depending on convenience.
  6. Teleology as Commercialism: The worldview projects capitalist rationality onto nature—organisms as means, nature as business.
  7. Idealism and Materialism Converge: Despite apparent opposition, both uphold purposive rationality—through divine ideas or material forces.
  8. The Pessimistic Inversion: "Hunger drive" becomes "murder drive"—the optimistic preservation theology inverts into Satanic machinery of devouring egos.