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If it is certainly Freud who took the initiative of a drive theory, the concept of the drive itself has marked the history of philosophy: It always appears as the indeterminate motion that supports the desiring activity, including in the form of intellectual activity. This concerns not only the philosophers who inspired Freud, such as Schopenhauer, who calls it “will to live,” or Nietzsche, who thinks of it as “will to power”; but also metaphysicians as decisive as Kant, who speaks explicitly of the “drive” of reason in its necessary but illusory tendency to rise to the absolute unconditioned, or even Plato, for whom the drive, as the principle of the act of philosophizing, is of an essentially erotic nature.