Tanner Hammond, PhD,LCSW 

In this paper, I reconstruct Max Scheler’s intensive engagement with Nietzsche’s drive psychology in Scheler’s later philosophical anthropology. Here we find a critical encounter between what Scheler will see as Nietzsche’s “one-sided” drive psychology and Scheler’s own bipartite account of human nature as the “mutual interpenetration” of drive-determined life and a higher-order form of consciousness - what Scheler terms “mind” or “spirit” [Geist] - which is uniquely marked by the intentional act of love. I begin by examining the fundamental tenets of Nietzsche’s drive psychology and its attendant thesis of the “will to power,” according to which all human action is generated by certain impulsive psychological forces - namely, drives [Treib]. I then turn to examine a tension between Nietzsche’s drive psychology and the possibility of explaining certain forms of love – in particular, love directed towards higher-order datives like persons, including the love of one’s own person central to Nietzsche’s ideal of self-affirmation. As we will see, Nietzsche attempts to explain the freedom from the drives necessary for self-affirmation by appeal to a process of drive sublimation he terms the “spiritualization” of drives. Here I argue that the kind of higher-order reflective consciousness necessary for drive sublimation stands in conflict with Nietzsche’s reductively naturalist understanding of the self. It is this conflict, I argue, that Scheler’s account of human agency promises to overcome. Like Nietzsche, Scheler maintains that all human action is generated through the activity of drives, which alone provide the productive powers necessary to realize actions. Nevertheless, through a process Scheler terms “sublimation,” the productive powers of the drives come to be guided by a higher-order form of consciousness which is uniquely capable of love for intentional datives like self, world, and other persons. After showing how this model overcomes key problems in Nietzsche’s drive psychology, I attempt to show how Scheler’s account of human agency is corroborated by recent neurobiological research into the mechanisms of “cognitive penetration” and “cognitive elaboration” in craving and impulse regulation.