Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, ed. Manuel Dries

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2019

European Journal of Philosophy, 2005

I show that Nietzsche's puzzling and seemingly inconsistent claims about consciousness constitute a coherent and philosophically fruitful theory. Drawing on some ideas from Schopenhauer and F.A. Lange, Nietzsche argues that conscious mental states are mental states with conceptually articulated content, whereas unconscious mental states are mental states with non-conceptually articulated content. Nietzsche's views on concepts imply that conceptually articulated mental states will be superficial and in some cases distorting analogues of non-conceptually articulated mental states. Thus, the claim that conscious states have a conceptual articulation renders comprehensible Nietzsche's claim that consciousness is "superficial" and "falsifying."

Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, 2018

Minerva an Internet Journal of Philosophy, 2003

2021

This is a philosophy essay I wrote during my high school senior year. It is wonderfully written (a bit biased), but it is not as fleshed out as I would like it to me. Maybe I will return to it someday and give it the treatment it deserved. To keep it short, this essay is about Nietzsche's epiphenomenal theory of consciousness. In particular, it derives from his comments on consciousness from The Will To Power.

forthcoming in M Dries (ed.). Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter

The importance of unconscious drives is a central theme of much of Nietzsche’s work. A corollary of this theme is his disparagement of the traditional high estimation of the importance of consciousness. On these issues he is clearly a follower of Schopenhauer and a precursor of Freud. These facts naturally lead to the question of how Nietzsche conceived of the relation between conscious and unconscious mental activity. Part I below looks at how we might conceive of the Nietzschean self. It argues for a pronounced distinction between the self and the I or ego. In the extreme, Nietzsche is sceptical about the I’s or ego's very existence, though we will argue that his considered view involves only scepticism about its importance for self, action and agency. It is argued that for Nietzsche the self and the core of one’s agency are to be located primarily in the activity of the unconscious drives, and that Nietzsche has a largely deflationary account of the role of consciousness. Part II considers what the Nietzschean self looks like through examining two alternative models of unity: unity according to the predominance model – achieved when a ‘master drive’ organises or sublimates the other drives into hierarchical relations to itself – and unity as a harmony between the drives and conscious reflection. We conclude that the predominance model best captures the Nietzschean position. On this reading Nietzsche’s overriding concern is to re-establish the drives in what he took to be their rightful pre-eminent place. We go on to elaborate some implications of this view of the importance of the drives over conscious thought for mental activity such as the process of deciding between competing motives . We will argue that for Nietzsche it is always the drives rather than consciousness that are the root causal determinants of our actions and the formation of the self, and that where consciousness does have a role, it is essentially as a tool of the drives.

This paper addresses the following questions from the point of view of Nietzsche's philosophy: What is the mind, and which kind of relationship does it hold to the body? Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to show that Nietzsche's philosophy suggested a view of the mind that allows to outline an alternative stance to both mentalism and physicalism, as well as to both dualism and reductionism. It is argued that Nietzsche's rehabilitation of the body as the specific seat of the mind in opposition to the Cartesian supremacy of the Ego still is of a great interest for contemporary philosophy, since it is not equivalent either to a reversed form of Cartesian dualism or to a physicalist reductionism. It is argued that Nietzsche did restrict the concept of the mind but in order not to eliminate it, rather to "de-substantialise" it. As the body is described as "Leib-Organisation", the mind becomes the course of various and manifold mental states that depend on a bodily basis.