*Drive precedes its objects.* The specific things a subject desires, fears, or cares about are drive encountering specific conditions. Drive itself has no particular object: it is the orientation toward the world prior to any specific thing in the world. This is why desire feels urgent even when its object is absent, why curiosity arises before it has a target, why the restlessness of a subject with nothing to do is the drive with nowhere to go. The object gives the drive direction; the drive does not come from the object.

*The philosophical traditions that named drive were pointing at the same structural fact.* Spinoza's *conatus* is the striving that constitutes finite existence; the account here derives it from the thermodynamic substrate rather than from metaphysical substance-theory, but what it names is the same thing. The directedness it preserves is efficient-causal, not teleological: a closure presses toward its continuation because selection, on a thermodynamic floor, built it to, not because a future end exerts a pull on the present. The *for* in *a drive is for continuation* is the etiological *for* of teleosemantics ([§8.1.1](<8.1.1 What is Disputed.md>)), a fact about what has been selected; the framework keeps that directedness while declining the teleology often read into the *conatus* — a live interpretive split (Garrett and Lin read the *conatus* as covertly teleological; Bennett and Curley read Spinoza as a strict anti-teleologist, per *Ethics* I Appendix) rather than a settled fact about what Spinoza held. Freud's *libido* (in the broad sense of life-energy seeking expression, not the narrow sexual sense) names the same baseline. Nietzsche's will to power, read not as domination but as the drive of life to express and expand itself, is the same observation from the inside of a deeper recursion. Bergson's *élan vital* was dismissed as vitalism but was pointing at something the structural account now grounds. Vitalism was attractive because life genuinely does seem to do something distinctive (organizing against entropy, anticipating, pursuing) that mere local mechanism appears to miss; mechanistic reduction was attractive for the symmetric reason, that every time biology has looked carefully, the apparent vital force has resolved into specifiable physical processes with no residual élan needing to be posited. The structural account preserves what each tradition was tracking: the forward pressure of life is real, not reducible to local mechanical descriptions, and is the vantage on what dissipative organization looks like from inside the organization that is alive. The mechanists were right that no extra substance needs to be added; the vitalists were right that what life does cannot be captured by descriptions that omit the closure-and-throughput pattern. Each tradition reached for the same phenomenon from a different angle. The structural account names what they were all touching: the vantage on the energy gradient that constitutes a living system, registered as forward pressure before it has differentiated into any specific emotion.

*The plurality is granted; the order of rank is explained; the dissolution of the self is refused.* Nietzsche's challenge to the singular *drive* ([§8.1.1](<8.1.1 What is Disputed.md>)) is met by conceding most of it and parting on the last step. The framework grants the plurality: hunger, fear, curiosity, care, and the drive to expend surplus are not one appetite wearing several masks but genuinely distinct drives, each construing the conditions it answers to from its own angle. It grants the competition: they contend, and at any moment one can hold the field while the others fall silent, the hungry organism is not curious, the terrified one not at play. And it grants the conditionality the *order of rank* was reaching for: the drives stand in a shifting hierarchy, one commanding while others obey. What the framework adds is the ranking principle Nietzsche leaves unexplained. Where he names the ordering principle the will to power and leaves *why this drive rather than that one rules now* without a mechanism, the structural account supplies one: the drives are ranked by *salience-weight*, the valence-and-salience weighting [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) derives, and whichever drive carries the steepest weight commands the field. Deficit is the limiting case, not the whole of it: where an unmet condition stands near the closure's dissolution, its gradient dominates, and the most pressing deficit takes the field because feeling is the reading of that gradient. But the same weighting runs in the surplus regime, where no deficit presses and the ranking falls instead to the positive-valence salience of reach, the drive to expend strength on play, curiosity, and field-expansion that [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) names as drive-as-reach; there the drive that commands is the one whose opportunity weighs heaviest, not the one nearest to dissolution. Urgency is thus the emergency form of salience-weight, not its definition, which is why the ranking principle does not re-center the self-preservation primacy [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) elsewhere disclaims. The order of rank, in this first and descriptive sense, is therefore not a primitive fact about a will to power but a joint prediction of [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) and [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>): conditional dominance by salience-weight over a single valenced field, with deficit-urgency as its limiting case. This explains which drive commands the field, which is not yet what Nietzsche's order of rank most wanted explained. His Rangordnung is not a report of which drive is heaviest now but an evaluative axis (ascending versus declining, noble versus base, health versus decadence), and salience-weight, a more-or-less of dominance rather than a higher-or-lower of worth, does not by itself supply it. Nor is that axis the thermodynamic one it is easily mistaken for: ascending and declining are not surplus and deficit. A body narrowed to a single demand by genuine need is not thereby base; its field is constrained by necessity, and what necessity forces stands off the evaluative scale altogether, neither to its credit nor against it. The evaluative axis lives instead in what a closure does with the room necessity leaves it: a configuration is higher insofar as it widens the modal field it was free to widen (the reach, play, and field-expansion [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) measures as extent) and lower insofar as it narrows a field it was free to keep open. Necessity-driven narrowing is the floor, not a low score; decadence, in the one sense worth keeping from Nietzsche, is a field that could reach and does not. This is why §9 states the political form as maximum possibility under necessities met: the necessities-met clause marks the floor at which necessity stops forcing the ranking, and the maximum-possibility clause is the evaluative axis living above it, the single life of [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) and the whole society of §9 being one structure at two scales. So located, the account keeps the plurality and the descriptive hierarchy Nietzsche saw and says why that hierarchy takes the shape it does, while parting from him on the measure of rank: worth is scored not by a drive's power to command but by whether its reach widens the field or devours another's, so that a magnificent tyrant who narrows the fields around him spends possibility rather than raising it. That verdict draws on the standing of the inter ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>), §9), not on will to power alone, so the account claims no clean victory on Nietzsche's own terrain: it grants him the plurality, the competition, and the descriptive order of rank, and overturns his evaluative picture only by importing a measure of worth he refused. It parts from him a second time on the self. For Nietzsche the unity is illusory, a story told after the fact by the momentarily-ruling drive; on the structural account the unity is real but relocated: it sits not in any master-drive but in the self-producing closure ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)) within which all the drives bid. The drives are *one being's* drives because they compete inside one field maintained by one closure producing its own continuation; subtract the closure and there is no arena for the competition Nietzsche describes. The framework thus grants him the plurality and the competition while refusing his eliminativism about the self: the many drives are real, their contest is real, and the one whose continuation they all serve is real as well.

*Drive is what [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) Feeling differentiates into.* When the undifferentiated forward pressure encounters specific conditions (threat, opportunity, loss, contact with another subject) the structural account predicts it will read as drive shaped by those conditions: fear as drive in the registration of threat, desire as drive in the registration of possibility, grief as drive in the registration of permanent absence, care as drive in the registration of another subject's vulnerability. These are claims about kind, not strict identifications, and [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) marks them as stronger than what current affect science settles (Ralph Adolphs, 2013); (George A. Bonanno, 2009); (Stephanie D. Preston; Frans B. M. de Waal, 2002). The differentiated forms are taken up at [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>); what this section establishes is the load-bearing structural claim those debates leave intact: drive is what the differentiated registers share, the baseline forward pressure of a being whose continuation depends on what it registers, present prior to and underneath every specific feel.

Drive read structurally absorbs what each of these traditions identified (Spinoza's *conatus*, Freud's libido in the broad sense, Nietzsche's will-as-life's-expression, Bergson's *élan vital*, the mechanist's refusal of an extra substance, the vitalist's refusal of an explanation that omits forward pressure) without inheriting the ontology any single tradition built around it. Drive is what the differentiated affects share, the structural floor on which the specific feelings of [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) register, and the substrate from which the polarity-pillars and the elaborated registers diverge as the chapter proceeds.

*Drive compels when thwarted and directs when met.* One feature of this carries past the phenomenology and into political life. A person who cannot find the next meal is not weighing how to spend the afternoon; the need consumes the field, and action runs close to reaction. Once that person is fed, housed, and safe, the pressure that had narrowed them to a single demand relaxes, and the same drive that drove them now has somewhere to go: it can be aimed at a chosen project, a person, a curiosity, rather than spent on whatever is most urgent. This aiming of a freed drive is what [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) takes up as willing. Freedom, then, is not the absence of drive but the room a drive has to be directed once the most urgent needs are quieted. This is what relaxation is, beneath the everyday word: not the silencing of drive but the lifting of pressure from it, so that nothing urgent forces the next move and the field of what one might do is once again one's own to choose among. To be relaxed is to drive oneself: to move without being pushed from behind or pulled from ahead. That is the individual-scale root of what Chapter 9 argues at the scale of a whole society: securing people's necessities is not charity but the production of the conditions under which their drives become their own to direct, what §9 names maximum possibility under necessities met. The production of freedom begins in a single life; political maintenance is what extends it.

*The account theorizes drive from inside drive, and this does not disqualify it.* Schopenhauer's sharpest charge is not the pessimism but the epistemology: if intellect is the will's servant, an intellect theorizing about drive is the servant describing its master, and its verdict may be distorted at the root rather than at the edges. The worry is real but it does not reach. Drive shapes cognition by weighting salience, what a body attends to and how urgently, which is a matter of the modal field's *extent* ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)); it does not thereby corrupt the field's *fidelity*, the separate axis on which the mapping is true or false. Interest decides what gets looked at, not whether what is looked at is seen accurately, and the two axes do not collapse. Where interest does bleed into fidelity, it does so in the specific, catalogued shapes [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) names (motivated reasoning, confirmation, affective forecasting error), and the corrective practices [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) and [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) develop exist precisely to calibrate a body's output against what stands outside it, the theory of drive included, since nothing exempts this account from the discipline it describes. What survives the charge is only what [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) already grants: this reasoning runs inside nature, and inside drive, not from a vantage above either. That locates the account; it does not undermine it. A servant can describe the master truly, provided the description is checked the way every other field-claim is checked.

Drive is not a further fact laid over the living closure but the inside of the one fact [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) names from outside: a self-producing recursion coupled to its energy gradient, registered from within as directional pressure toward continuation and away from dissolution. Wherever a closure under modal pressure registers anything at all, it registers this; drive and registration are biconditional, two aspects of one interiority rather than a pressure with an experience appended to it. That identification is what the section carries forward as settled — the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) result read from inside, not a fresh derivation standing in need of its own support.

How the undifferentiated pressure differentiates into the specific affects — fear as drive in the registration of threat, desire in the registration of possibility, grief in the registration of permanent absence, care in the registration of another's vulnerability — is advanced here as a claim about kind, stronger than current affect science settles, and is left to [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) to take up and defend. So too the reach of the account into contested empirical cases: what it commits to is that genuinely selective drive brings registration to some degree, not any independent finding that a given organism — the plant most pointedly — registers in particular. These are held open for the differentiated treatment [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) begins.


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← [8.1.4 What is Confirmed](<8.1.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.2 Feeling](<8.2 Feeling.md>) →
