Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind

Manuel Dries

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110391657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Nietzsche's thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in both the Anglo- American and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind presents 16 essays from analytic and continental perspectives. Appealing to both international communities of scholars, the volume seeks to deepen the appreciation of Nietzsche's contribution to our understanding of consciousness and the mind. Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have engaged with Nietzsche's thought, including anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, to name just a few. His rich and perspicacious treatment of consciousness, mind, and body cannot be reduced to any single discipline, and has the potential to speak to many. And, as several contributors make clear, Nietzsche's investigations into consciousness and the embodied mind are integral to his wider ethical concerns.

This volume contains contributions by international experts such as Christa Davis Acampora (Emory University), Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick University), João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University), Manuel Dries (The Open University; Oxford University), Christian J. Emden (Rice University), Maria Cristina Fornari (University of Salento), Anthony K. Jensen (Providence College), Helmut Heit (Tongji University), Charlie Huenemann (Utah State University), Vanessa Lemm (Flinders University), Lawrence J. Hatab (Old Dominion University), Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen (New York University and EGS), and Benedetta Zavatta (CNRS).

Manuel Dries

1 Introduction to Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind

This collection of essays aims to widen our understanding of the possible contributions Nietzsche can make to current debates on consciousness and the mind, both of which he conceived as fundamentally embodied. Nietzsche’s philosophy has at times been brought into fruitful dialogue with a large number of different disciplines, such as anthropology, history, neuroscience, biology, psychology, and linguistics, to name just a few. His rich and unsystematic treatment of consciousness and the body cannot be reduced to any single discipline and has the potential to speak to all of the above, and more. In the famous note at the end of the first essay of GM, Nietzsche proposes an interdisciplinary research programme for the study of morality, and moral values in particular. His recommendation is to study morality from all possible perspectives, with the wider goal of better understanding human flourishing. His investigations into consciousness and the embodied mind are also not free-standing philosophical analyses but should be seen as part and parcel of what we could call his larger ethical concerns. We learn from Nietzsche’s sympathetic and yet always critical perspective on the natural and other sciences (I am thinking here, for example, of GM III 23) that he supports specialized scientific enquiries (and presumably this would include research into consciousness and the mind e. g. by contemporary neuroscience) never merely as an end in itself, but rather guided by broadly ethical concerns. This volume offers a treatment of Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind from a number of different analytic and continental perspectives and aims to show its connection to Nietzsche’s broader ethical concerns.

It is commonly accepted that Nietzsche regards the body very highly. No passage better captures Nietzsche’s admiration and shift towards a more correct, adualistic embodied self-conception than the well-known passage from Z:

the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body. The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd. Your small reason, what you call “mind” is also a tool of your body, my brother, a small work- and plaything of your great reason. “I” you say and are proud of this word. But what is greater is that in which you do not want to believe – your body and its great reason. It does not say I, but does I. (Z I Despisers)

What is perhaps still less well established, despite a lot of excellent work that has been done on the subject in recent years (cf. e. g. Schlimgen 1999, Abel 2015 [2001], Emden 2005, Richardson 2004, Constâncio et al 2012 and 2015, Leiter 2015, Gemes/Le Patourel 2015, Katsafanas 2016), is Nietzsche’s position on reflective consciousness or self-consciousness. Nietzsche does not differentiate explicitly between the many different types of consciousness that we currently distinguish in contemporary philosophy of mind (cf. Riccardi 2016). His remarks are mostly focused on what we call today reflective consciousness or self-consciousness (cf. e. g. Katsafanas 2005 and 2016, Riccardi (this volume)). At first sight, much of what he says about self-consciousness is quite clearly deflationary, part of a sustained attempt to debunk the supreme importance that humankind, and in particular philosophers, have attributed to the self-conscious, rational parts of the human mind (cf. Deleuze 1983 [1962]: 39). As he famously put it in GS:

The problem of consciousness (or rather, of becoming conscious of something) first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it […] For we could think, feel, will, remember, and also ‘act’ in every sense of the term, and yet none of all this would have to ‘enter our consciousness’ (as one says figuratively). All of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in the mirror; and still today, the predominant part of our lives actually unfolds without this mirroring of – course also our thinking, feeling, and willing lives, insulting as it may sound to an older philosopher. (GS 354)

I want to emphasize that, just because there is “much” that can be done without self-consciousness, and just because “predominant parts of our lives” may indeed happen without self-consciousness, this by no means commits Nietzsche to a conception of self-consciousness that strips it of all importance and function. In the same passage, Nietzsche presents what I want to call his developmental thesis of social self-consciousness. He regards self-consciousness as a late development and addition to the human being, an animal that could up to that point rely exclusively on her animal drives and instincts (cf. Constâncio 2012a). His hypothesis is that consciousness was adaptive, arising due to the increased need to communicate, under circumstances of early group formation. This is how Nietzsche puts it:

I may go on to conjecture that consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to communicate; that at the outset, consciousness was necessary, was useful, only between persons (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it has developed only in proportion to that usefulness. Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person with another – only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements – at least some of them – even enter into consciousness is the result of a terrible ‘must’ which has ruled over man for a long time: as the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection […]. (GS 354)

It is clear that Nietzsche seeks to give an account that aims to debunk many of the features commonly associated with self-consciousness, e. g. that it has been permanent, reliable and transparent, the cornerstone of the individual rational capacities of our own and of other minds. A hypothesis like Nietzsche’s can help us to make sense of the overwhelming evidence that conscious reports are far from reliable, are often biased, and at times are mere confabulations. In D, well ahead of today's experimental evidence, Nietzsche already asked if “all our so-called consciousness [is] a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text?” (D 119). But, again, what do we make of the “more or less” in this passage? Just because something has only developed “in proportion to its usefulness,” primarily with a social function, does this necessarily limit its entire scope?

In GM II, to give another example, Nietzsche describes the development of bad conscience (schlechtes Gewissen) among early humans: under the imposed order of early violent rulers, they were no longer allowed to express freely their natural drives, such as cruelty, enmity, or joy (in pursuit, in attack, in change, in destruction) (cf. GM II 16). Instead of being guided by their drives, Nietzsche conjectures that early humans were forced to turn against themselves to repress their drives, at the hands of their oppressors, who forced them into early forms of society. As a result, some human animals began to feel, and eventually to think, negatively about many of its antisocial drives and instincts. Nietzsche believes that these developments weakened the motivational force of the drives that had hitherto guided action “more or less” unselfconsciously, and increasingly “disengaged” them. It is from then on, Nietzsche thinks, that humans had to rely more and more on their most “error-prone” organ, their self-conscious minds, which were, from very early on, pitted against the “great reason” of their drive-driven bodies. It is clear that Nietzsche thinks this development of increased reliance on self-consciousness had far-reaching psycho-physiological consequences. He writes in GM:

Just like the things water animals must have gone through when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure – suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.” From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leaders, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely – these unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and error-prone organ! (GM II 16)

Nietzsche’s primary purpose, as already mentioned at the start, is to debunk humankind’s deeply held illusions. Misconceptions regarding the scope and function of self-consciousness is one of them. An illustration of what we could call this superlative metaphysical view of self-consciousness can be found in A:

People used to see consciousness, ‘spirit’, as proof that humanity is descended from something higher, that humanity is divine; people were advised to become perfect by acting like turtles and pulling their senses inside themselves, cutting off contact with worldly things and shedding their mortal shrouds: after this, the essential element would remain, the ‘pure spirit’. We are more sensible about all this too: we see the development of consciousness, ‘spirit’, as a symptom of precisely the relative imperfection of the organism, as an experimenting, a groping, a mistaking, as an exertion that is sapping an unnecessarily large amount of strength away from the nervous system, – we deny that anything can be made perfect as long as it is still being made conscious. (A 14)

Again, it seems as if Nietzsche wholeheartedly criticizes self-consciousness. And as far as self-consciousness is taken as evidence for one of humanity’s self-aggrandizing fantasies, he clearly is. And yet, in the second half of A 14, which culminates in what I will call Nietzsche's unconscious perfection hypothesis, does he not leave ample room for self-consciousness to be—or, perhaps better, become or develop into—a very important tool, if correctly understood? Let’s take the well-known example of the pianist who, whenever she makes a mistake, starts reflecting on what it is that she actually does with her fingers on the keyboard. The natural flow of the play needs to be interrupted in order to figure out the best fingering combinations for mastering a certain complex musical sequence. Once this has happened, it will take a while until she eventually becomes habituated to the new fingering and it no longer demands her conscious attention. The pianist will have reached the kind of unconscious perfection that Nietzsche describes only once she can play the piece without error and without any self-conscious, reflective monitoring. Perfection, in the sense Nietzsche uses it in A 14, cannot coincide with the slow, self-conscious working out of the fingering combination. But who would want to claim that self-consciousness did not play a vital role in the process?

The problem with self-consciousness, then, in the ʻacquirement readingʼ I only hint at but won't try to defend here, is not that it is necessarily deficient. Many of Nietzsche’s remarks are consistent with a reading that aims to debunk the superlative metaphysical conception of self-consciousness (as “higher,” or “divine,” “fully transparent,” “error-free”etc.) but without succumbing to the kind of fallacious inversion that Nietzsche identifies in his well-known debunking of “‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense” (BGE 21). Just as he regards the inference to an utterly “‘un-free will’” as pure “mythology,” he may well regard the inference to the inefficacy or epiphenomenality of consciousness as “mythology” (BGE 21) (on the question of epiphenomenality, see e. g. Leiter (2015: xi, 72 – 74) on Katsafanas (2005) and Riccardi (this volume), and Katsafanas 2016; for an expressivist account, see Pippin 2015; on intention and action, see Nehamas 2018). Just as it may be better to think of willing not as some sort of faculty, that is either free or unfree, but as something that comes in degrees, it may be better to think of self-consciousness as something that has developed under specific circumstances, to a certain degree, and awaits further acquiring. This thought is actually quite clearly expressed in GS where Nietzsche asserts:

Since they thought they already possessed consciousness, human beings did not take much trouble to acquire it—and things are no different today! (GS 11, my emphasis)

Nietzsche often seems to privilege what he calls “becoming” over “being” – that is, he assumes non-teleological evolutionary and historical development, rather than the existence of any ahistorical essences that can be discovered once and for all. It is consistent with this commitment that Nietzsche leaves ample room for self-consciousness to develop further, i. e. that quite possibly once the human animal came to understand its complex embodied nature better, it could come to acquire, augment, and shape its self-conscious capacities as well as appreciate its unconscious strengths and weaknesses.

Nietzsche conceives of self-consciousness not only no longer in isolation and as anything privileged, he quite clearly sees it as part of a larger, dynamic, embodied and embedded system of drives, affects, and unconscious and conscious mental states (with nonconceptual and conceptual content). Paul Katsafanas (2016) has recently proposed an account that is committed to Nietzsche's drive psychology and allows room for conscious thoughts and values as causally effective. Another account that has yet to receive the attention it deserves is Rex Welshon's (2014 and 2015). Welshon also offers an account that combines Nietzsche’s strong commitment to the drives and leaves room for the efficacy of self-conscious intentionality. One of the crucial passages on which Welshon's account is based is foun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction to Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind
• Part I: Embodied Cognition and Eliminative Materialism
• Part II: Consciousness and Freedom of the Will
• Part III: Mind, Metaphysics, and Will to Power
• Part IV: Consciousness, Language, and Metaphor
• Part V: Towards Naturalism
• Part VI: Ethics and “Life”
• Part VII: Redlichkeit and Embodied Wisdom
• Index
• Notes on Contributors