If you are a Nietzschean and you ascribe to the egoist theory of how the body operates via reflexes, without necessary aid of the mind, then you are not a Nietzschean. You are most likely someone like Laughing Man/Joker/HaHaHa.
To surrender to your drives is to decentrate. When you surrender to your drives, you lose form. Your drives lose form. They become deformed. Think of Batman’s Joker and how deformed he is.
There must be a resistance to your drives in order to keep them in shape, and this resistance, how is it administrated? It is administrated through will.
Will is the force of concentration.
It is religious people, such as Christians and Buddhists, who surrender to drives, not Nietzsche. Nietzsche spoke against such a surrender. Indeed, his entire philosophy is directed against these reactive people.
The difference with Eastern thinkers is that their decentration – their reactivity – is feminine, which means, it is soft and silent, rather than hard and loud. (Though in certain cases, such as that of Osho, it is not exactly silent, since these people still take part in worldly affairs.)
Indeed, Nietzsche also spoke against those who spoke against drives, such as for example Christians, but only because they promoted repression, not control.
Repression is decentered concentration. It is not proper concentration. It occurs when one tries hard to concentrate in another direction in order to avoid facing unpleasant stimulus.
Nietzsche did not preach “return to our animal nature”. Rather, he preached mastery of our nature, which really amounts to nothing other than to concentration of our energies.
It is useful to think of a man as composed of multiple flows of energy. Man’s entire body should be thought of as nothing but a multiplicity of energy flows. This is what defines his being.
What we call drives refers to a subset of these energy flows. Namely, it refers to psychological flows.
Breathing, heartbeat, digestion, blood circulation and all other biological and psychological processess can each be identified by the common denominator that is energy flow. (This is also consistent with the notion that the universe is nothing but motion.)
These energy flows are our biological inheritance. They are given to us, and thus, they are separate from our will.
The process of growing up is the process of becoming aware of these energy flows. These energy flows are introduced in a disorganized manner, and thus, the process of growing up must also a process of learning how to master these flows.
This period of immaturity is characterized, or should be characterized, by preponderance of will (nurture) over instinct (nature.)
Children must restrain themselves a lot in order to master their randomly occuring energy flows.
Will is sort of like a commander who is mobilizing instincts that are his army.
Then at some point comes the peak of maturity when all of one’s energy flows are properly mobilized thus reducing the need for will (i.e. restraint) and increasing the efficiency of instinctive action. (There is still the involvement of the will, it’s just that one becomes less dependent on it.)
This is what the phrase “power over oneself” means: to concentrate one’s motion, not to decentrate it.
Mystics are masters at substituting one form of decentration (masculine hard-and-loud form of decentration) with another form of decentration (feminine soft-and-silent form of decentration.)
Finally, one becomes old, and the period of decline of willpower kicks in, leading to complete surrender to instincts.
It’s useful to learn to make a difference between centrifugal will (which is instinct-driven will) and centripetal will (which is will-driven instinct.) The former is egoistic, the latter is not.
Nietzsche was not an egoist.
Christians are. Buddhists are. Mystics are. Women are.
But not Nietzsche.