Chapter 44
Drive as Vital Movement—The Polarity of Soul and Image
The key insight: Drives are not purposes projected onto unconscious organisms. Drives are the vital cause of movement arising from polar tension between an embodied soul and a living image.
Think of it simply: A drive is an impulse to move. Every impulse is a movement impulse. We experience drives as urges—to move toward something or away from something. The drive has both strength (how intense it is) and direction (what it aims toward).
We proceed through four movements:
First, what drives actually are—vital causes of movement, not self-preservation mechanisms.
Second, how drives structure experience through polarity—the separation of soul and image creates the pull.
Third, what Romantic philosophers glimpsed about this structure.
Fourth, how vital causation differs fundamentally from mechanical causation.
The Basic Definition
"The concept of drive was developed because one was able to experience impulses, and one cannot experience an impulse that is not also an impulse of the body."
You can feel an impulse only through a body. A bodiless consciousness—if such a thing existed—could not experience drives.
"Whether we say a horse is driven or we ourselves feel internally driven to do or refrain from something, we always mean by the word 'impulse' the cause of movements."
A drive is fundamentally this: a cause of movement. When you feel hungry, hungry causes you to move toward food. When you feel thirsty, thirst causes you to move toward water.
This is straightforward. A drive is the vital cause that makes you move.
"Therefore, instead of defining drive as the permanent basis of drive experiences, we may briefly call it the vital cause of movement."
Contrast this with will. We said will creates purpose. Drives are not like that. Drives are causes of movement. They're the energetic force that produces motion.
Two Sides: Strength and Direction
Drives have two sides: strength and type (or direction).
Intense hunger differs from weak hunger—that's strength.
But hunger differs from thirst—that's type. The direction changes what the impulse aims toward.
More precisely: "The other side being the directional cause."
Here's the crucial point: You cannot understand a drive by strength alone. A strong impulse is not enough to explain drive. You must know what the drive aims at—its direction.
The Multiplication of Drive Types
The types of drives multiply indefinitely.
"Hunger differs in type from thirst, but also the pleasure of drinking water from drinking milk or wine, and indeed the pleasure of Bordeaux from that of Rhine wine or Tokaj."
The more refined your perception, the more drive-types you recognize. Not just "hunger" but hunger-for-bread, hunger-for-meat, hunger-for-fruit. Each is genuinely different.
This matters because "within the general nature of thirst, which corresponds to the character of the liquid, there are as many special types of thirst as there are image-different liquids that could satisfy the thirst."
The drive types multiply according to the images that can satisfy them. Different images = different drive-types.
The Example of Love
Consider love. "Everyone loves everything they can possibly love in a different way during each of the first four seven-year cycles of their life."
You love your father differently than your mother. You love your friend differently than your colleague. You love your profession differently than you love your country.
"Even more diverse are love-emphasized things—souvenirs—and completely different animals, plants, regions, homeland, youth, not to mention entirely abstract love objects like profession, science, art, religion, fatherland."
Each love is a distinct drive-type. Each aims at a different image, creating a different vital impulse.
"Because apart from the fact that with rich impulse formation, they could experience mutually far different processes as pleasurable, their love inclination towards one person will differ in nature from love inclination towards another, as the love-inspiring images of both differ from each other."
The drive-type follows the image. Different images mean different drives.
Connection and Alienation
Here is the fundamental structure of drive: "We have claimed the same polarity for the drive impulse and its goal that we established for viewing: the polarity consists of the mutual belonging of alienation and connection."
The soul and the image are both connected and alienated. They belong together but are separated.
The drive exists precisely in this tension between connection and separation.
"The drive is connected with the complementary image and is by no means related only to the image in the way the personal life carrier relates to the purpose set by will."
This is crucial. The drive is not like the will's relation to its purpose. In willing, I set a goal and pursue it. In drive, there is a primordial connection to the image that pulls on me.
Why the Image Pulls: The Body Separates
"If the soul is embodied, so that in its experience physical processes also participate, there would now be no experience that was not, among other things, an encountered drive."
Every experience of an embodied soul involves drive. Why? Because the body separates the soul from what it is connected to.
"In the state of purely psychic vision, there is a balance between alienation and connection between soul and image. If the soul did not experience the image as something foreign to it, it could not experience an image. If it were not connected with the image, it would be over with their experience."
In pure vision—consciousness without body—there's balance. The image is foreign enough to be seen but connected enough to be experienced.
"But if we clothe both image and soul with corporeality, the essence of alienation remains, while the connection appears fundamentally changed. Because where one body is, no other is, the embodied image seems so separated from the body of the living soul that we fully understand the alienation, but hardly more to what extent there is still connection."
Here's the key: The body creates distance. A thirsty body is separated from water. This separation creates the pull.
The Pull of the Image
"For the sake of clarity, we explain the guiding principle at seeking drives: both the connection and the incompleteness of the connection are now shown by the fact that a pull emanates from the image, which acts in the embodied soul as a drive to perform movements aimed at touching or even incorporating the embodied image."
The image pulls on you. Water—as an image, as a living presence—pulls on the thirsty soul. This pull manifests as the drive to move toward water.
"If we ask what it actually is that moves a person or animal to seek water in a state of thirst, we will get no answer unless we decide to explain that it is the image of water in the form of a pull towards water."
This is simple but revolutionary. The thirsty being moves toward water because water-as-image pulls it. The pull is real. It's not mechanical force. It's vital causation.
Against the Phantasm Theory
Some thinkers say: "The animal must imagine or fantasize the water before it can be pulled toward it."
Klages rejects this: "If someone asks why the drive of thirst contains an image of water when in the soul of the thirsty being there is not just the thought of water, but even the water phantasm, we counter: how do you intend to describe thirst without including what thirst aims for as its fulfillment?"
The drive already contains the image it aims at. You don't need a separate mental phantasm. The image itself—as a living presence—is part of the drive experience.
Consider: "What treasure of prophetic phantasms would we attribute to the ants cultivating aphids, if we wanted to understand it from insight when they carefully drag larvae to the roots of grain in spring!"
Ants do this without any mental picture of what will happen. Yet the drive is directed. The image of nourishment pulls on them, though they have no phantasm of future benefit.
"What phantasms prompt young nightingales, starlings, and hoopoes to set off for Africa in autumn without guidance, though they have never been to the south before?"
Young birds migrate without phantasms. Yet they're driven. The image pulls them even though they've never experienced it.
The drive contains its own directedness. No phantasm needed.
Images as Living Reality
"We consider images as something real, more precisely as the weaving power of all reality, just as real on the level of facts as physical forces."
This is the metaphysical foundation. Images are not mental representations. They are real forces. They have power.
"The pull from the image may be compared to the pull of a magnet on iron filings."
The comparison is exact. A magnet pulls iron. An image pulls consciousness. Both are real forces.
"It is fundamentally indifferent whether one prefers to say that the pull of the liquid image acts in the thirsty one, or to say that the pull of the water being, the liquid being, acts in them."
Water, as a living image, as a being, pulls on thirst. The liquid essence itself is what acts.
Romantic Philosophy's Achievement
"The deep philosophy of Romanticism, despite repeatedly confusing spirit and soul, nevertheless courted an understanding of drive that at least comes close to ours, and has left us magnificent residues of thought."
The Romantics grasped something crucial about drives that mechanistic thought missed.
Consider Passavant (1837): "The drive towards world consciousness is itself merely an expression of the most general drive, the supplementary drive. The drive and its object behave like two complementary poles. If the North Pole of the Earth had a sensation of magnetism, it would have to have an inkling of the South Pole."
Drive and image are complementary poles. They belong together. The drive "senses" or is pulled by its complementary image.
"Desire excites the idea of its complement. This idea is a premonition until it becomes experience through the finding of the desired object."
Before you possess the object, you experience the pull—a kind of foreknowledge that the image is there, calling to you.
Treviranus called instinct "productive imagination." The animal, perceiving food, gains "a premonition that the object is the means to quench thirst and hunger."
This captures it: The animal doesn't reason about food. But it experiences the food as pulling it, calling to it, complementing it.
Schubert's Vision
Schubert (1833) saw nature itself as this polarity: "The individual thing does not exist for its own sake, it exists for the sake of other things, lives and dies for the sake of a higher whole."
Beings exist in relationship. Each is pulled by and pulls other beings.
"That wonderful instinct which leads the bee over mountains and valleys to its food in the blooming linden... the movement of a universal life working through everything akin to it."
The bee doesn't calculate routes. A universal life moves through it. The image of the linden pulls the bee. The bee is the vehicle of this universal pulling.
"The life and essence of the soul consist no less than the life and flourishing of the body through breathing of air alone, but only through the community with a supplement that fills the lack of the individual."
Every being needs its complement. The soul needs the image it's driven toward. The life of the soul is precisely this pulling and being pulled.
Deficiency Suffering
Here's the experience you must have to understand drives: deficiency suffering.
"We need only consider the disturbance of the connection between soul and image to find it plausible that, for example, thirst as immediate experience contains a particularly specific deficiency suffering."
When separated from its complement, the soul suffers. This suffering is the drive.
"Just as thirst cannot be thought of without concomitant deficiency suffering, so there is no desire or longing that does not involve deficiency suffering, deprivation, or need."
Every drive involves the feeling of lack. You lack what the image offers.
"With the feeling of deprivation, lack, or need, we denote in the characteristic of the drive impulse itself what has been added to the experienced connection with the fulfilling aim of the drive in the soul of the individual, whenever the total experience takes the form of an impulse."
The lack is not separate from the drive. It is part of the drive's character. The drive is the pain of separation plus the pull of the image.
The Fundamental Difference
Now the crucial distinction: How does vital causation differ from mechanical causation?
"For the piece of chalk that falls from the ceiling to the floor due to Earth's attraction, the cause of falling was not lying on the floor. For the movable magnetic needle that changes direction due to magnetic disturbance, the new position is not the cause of its deflection."
In mechanical causation, the cause is in the past. The chalk falls because gravity pulls it downward. The cause (gravity) precedes the effect (falling).
"In contrast, for the animal that, because it is thirsty, performs countless movements until it finds drinking water somewhere, drinking water is truly the vital cause of those movements."
Here the cause is in the future. Water—not yet possessed—causes the present movements toward water.
"Only by integrating an experience can we determine the cause of movements in a situation that is not yet present at the moment the movement begins or throughout its entire course until immediately before it ends."
The vital cause exists only in the pull of the image. The image acts backward through time, so to speak, drawing the present movements toward the future.
Vital Time
But how can a future event cause a present event? This seems impossible.
Klages explains: "The vital time that comes into play does not mean a measurable distance from now to later, but the generative reason for what we objectify as the future."
Vital time is not clock time. It is the lived sense of direction—the way the image calls from ahead, pulling the soul forward.
"Direction" in physics means an angle. But "direction" in vital experience means something pulled by a goal.
The magnetic needle doesn't know where north is. But thirst knows water is needed. The knowing is part of the pull itself.
Five essential points emerge:
First: In drive, you experience the compelling force of living beings. Images pull on you. The resulting need for movement is directed by these images.
Second: Drive has two poles: the bodily need (the pain of separation) and the image promising fulfillment (the pull). Movement develops from the tension between them.
Third: The strength of drive is the magnitude of necessity fused with the depth of vision. Desperate thirst plus vivid image of water = intense drive.
Fourth: Drives follow rhythm. They grow and decline with the rhythms of life itself.
Fifth: There is no single drive. Each being has many drives, each corresponding to a different image, a different complement, a different lack.
What emerges is a vision wholly alien to purposive biology. Drives are not mechanisms of self-preservation. They are poles of living reality itself—embodied souls pulled by living images across the abyss created by corporeality.
This is why vital causation fundamentally differs from mechanism. It is ensouled force. It is directed not by angles but by goals. It is caused not by past impact but by future fulfillment that acts as present pull.
The image does not merely represent something distant. The image is alive. It is real. It pulls.