Self-Knowledge

This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s scepticism about introspective knowledge. More precisely, it is claimed that Nietzsche rejects the traditional conception of introspective self-knowledge as something that is direct and privileged. To the contrary, he argues that self-knowledge is interpretive, for it is obtained by applying to oneself the same folk-psychological framework we apply in order to read the mind of other people. Furthermore, and relatedly, Nietzsche claims that introspective self-knowledge involves a falsification of what we actually think and do. Finally, it is argued that Nietzsche does not conclude from this that self-knowledge is impossible, but rather that third-person psychological and genealogical inquiry about oneself is a more reliable source of self-knowledge than introspection.

The Will

This chapter shows that Nietzsche’s model of the will is largely indebted to that worked out by the late 19th-century French psychologist Théodule Ribot. Both Nietzsche and Ribot see the will as resulting from the hierarchical coordination of affective states and behavioural inclinations. The chapter also includes a detailed interpretation of aphorism 19 of Beyond Good and Evil (where Nietzsche puts forward his most detailed analysis of volition) and of other late passages, arguing that he sees the act of willing as determined by command-obedience relations among the drives and that he views volitional phenomenology as a partially illusory accompanying phenomenon.

Affects

This chapter is concerned with affects. It argues that Nietzsche conceives of affects as having a distinct phenomenology, a somatic dimension consisting in their immediate effect on the motor system, and a (positively or negatively) valenced representational content. After discussing the nature of affects, the chapter turns to consider the work of Chris Fowles and Peter Poellner on this subject. It registers its agreement with the reading of Nietzsche’s view on affects recently put forward by Fowles, albeit with a minor modification. However, it argues that the alternative account proposed by Poellner fails to capture Nietzsche’s own position. Finally, it offers a preliminary sketch of how, according to Nietzsche, drives and affects are supposed to work together.

The Soul’s Order

This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s conception of the soul (human psychology) as constituted by the hierarchical order or structure among drives and affects. After a demonstration that that conception raises the spectre of the homunculus fallacy, it is argued that the two major interpretations of the Nietzschean soul’s order—the vitalistic one proposed by P. Wotling and the normative one proposed by M. Clark and D. Dudrick—should be rejected because they commit Nietzsche to that fallacy. The author’s own dispositional reading frees Nietzsche’s psychology of drives from any charge of fallacious homuncularism. In the light of this reading, the chapter investigates how the interaction between drives and affects should be understood.

The Self

This chapter argues that Nietzsche distinguishes (in particular, in his Zarathustra) between the bodily self that is constituted by the drives and affects and the reflectively conscious self. According to the reading proposed by the author, the latter depends on the former. More precisely, the reflectively conscious self is just the personal-level upshot of the subpersonal order among drives and affects. The chapter also addresses Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the intuitive but mistaken conception of the conscious self as independent from our bodily constitution, and his belief that the sui generis usage of the first-person pronoun is among the sources of this illusion.

Nietzsche’s Epiphenomenalism about RConsciousness

This chapter argues for an epiphenomenal reading of Nietzsche’s view of reflective consciousness. The position ascribed to Nietzsche is that no reflectively conscious state is among the causally efficacious antecedents of token actions. This reading is defended by showing it is compellingly supported by textual evidence. The chapter also argues that reflective consciousness’s proper function is in the realm of social coordination. More precisely, Rconscious states play a crucial role in the acquisition of social norms. That role, however, is not sufficient for the relevant norm to become behaviourally efficacious and, thus, cause our actions. For only internalized norms are behaviourally efficacious in that sense. In turn, though Rconscious states are often the channel through which we are presented with social norms, it depends on the arrangement of our drives and affects whether we internalize them or not. The chapter ends by surveying and rebutting a range of objections to epiphenomenal readings of Nietzsche.

More (Kinds of) Consciousness

This chapter argues that Nietzsche allows for other forms of consciousness besides reflective consciousness. In order to demonstrate this thesis, it introduces and discusses Nietzsche’s claim that reflective consciousness involves ‘falsification’. It identifies perceptual consciousness as a second kind of consciousness which is language-independent and characterized by pictorial content, and qualitative consciousness as a third kind of consciousness which Nietzsche only ascribes to pure sensations and raw feelings. It is argued that qualitative consciousness is the only kind of consciousness that does not involve ‘falsification’. It is further argued that affects are always conscious at least in the qualitative and, arguably, also in the perceptual sense, while drives—qua dispositions—are typically strictly unconscious.

Introduction

Chapter 1 clarifies which parts of Nietzsche’s thought belong to his philosophical psychology and what role his philosophical psychology plays within his overall project, in particular, his critique of morality. Whereas some scholars have been primarily interested in Nietzsche’s specific claims about moral psychology, this book is primarily interested in Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology understood as a body of claims about more basic and more general psychological phenomena. The chapter also discusses methodological issues regarding the use of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes, and argues that unpublished materials may be an essential tool when one is interested in investigating how Nietzsche came to adopt a certain concept or formulate a certain view. The chapter ends by offering a brief overview of the book’s content.

The Ideal Type

This chapter considers Nietzsche’s picture of the ideal human being. It defends the thesis that Nietzsche’s ideal type possesses three essential features: psychological stability (understood as strength of will), psychological unity (understood, roughly, as lack of self-alienation), and the capacity to create one’s own values. The author contends that Nietzsche builds value creation into his picture of the ideal human because of the particular condition of his late-modern European readers, whom he perceives as being in the grip of the values of Judaeo-Christian morality, which causes the self to be divided. Hence, Nietzsche believes that the only way for late-modern Europeans to regain the kind of unity required for them to approximate, if not fully embody, his ideal type consists in rejecting those self-alienating values and creating new ones.

The Surface Revealed

This chapter works out some of the key features of the notion of consciousness usually discussed by Nietzsche (most notably, in aphorism 354 of The Gay Science). Given such features (which include reflexivity, dependence on language and communication, and higher-order nature), it is argued that this notion of consciousness corresponds to reflective consciousness, i.e. the capacity for verbally articulated thought, the emergence of which is ultimately explained as a by-product of linguistic communication. The chapter shows how Nietzsche’s picture of reflective consciousness develops from Daybreak to Gay Science. Finally, it explores the link that Nietzsche draws between the emergence of consciousness and that of mind-reading capacities.