6 Psychology without a Soul, Philosophy without an I

Chapter 3 from 'The Surface and the Abyss'; Walter de Gruyter.

Friedrich Nietzsche has long been recognized as a pivotal thinker in the history of moral philosophy, but until the last quarter century his importance for our understanding of the concepts of truth and knowledge had been largely ignored in English-language scholarship. In my dissertation, I add to the growing discussion on Nietzsche’s theory of human cognition. While more attention has recently been given to this dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, several key aspects have been largely ignored or insufficiently treated including the effects that the ethical or evaluative domain have on the way we cognize the world, the role that radical skepticism plays in motivating Nietzsche’s theory, and the connections between Nietzsche’s views on cognition and his larger philosophical project. What is distinctive about my project is the connection I draw between Nietzsche’s critique of the unconditional will to truth in On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil and his treatments of epistemological issues. Without understanding this connection, one cannot understand how Nietzsche’s distinctive positions on truth, knowledge, and cognition relate his overall project. My dissertation sets out to answer four main questions regarding Nietzsche’s theory of cognition, each question corresponding to a chapter of the completed work. In Chapter One I ask what the relationship is between Nietzsche’s views on truth, knowledge, and cognition and his larger philosophical project of overcoming nihilism. Here I argue that Nietzsche’s views on cognition follow directly from his analysis of the nihilism of post-Christian Europe and that his project of overcoming that nihilism requires a complete revaluation of human knowing. Chapter Two asks what Nietzsche’s viii relationship is with skepticism and to what extent can Nietzsche be labeled a skeptic. I show that Nietzsche can be squarely placed in the skeptical tradition in philosophy that includes the Ancient Greek skeptics and the modern heuristic skeptic, Descartes. Nietzsche, however, rejects Descartes attempts to escape radical skepticism, and so can be properly labeled a radical skeptic himself. The next chapter asks what Nietzsche’s model is for how human cognition functions given that it is not designed to aim for truth (as it is traditionally understood, i.e. correspondence). I explore the ways that his favored metaphors of textual interpretation and optical perspective function in elucidating what goes on when we think, highlighting these metaphors strengths and weaknesses. I ultimately conclude that cognition is a practical endeavor with theoretical objects, leading Nietzsche to reject the Kantian distinction between the practical and theoretical employments of reason. Finally I ask, given Nietzsche’s model of how human cognition functions, how should we evaluate competing knowledge claims between individuals? It has been argued that Nietzsche’s pespectivism leads to an unacceptable global relativism regarding, if not truth, then at least epistemic justification. I argue that Nietzsche does not need to abandon the most radical of his conclusions, and he can still account for how and why some positions on theoretical and philosophical matters are better than others, and so an unacceptable “anything goes” kind of relativism does not follow from his views. After answering these four main questions regarding Nietzsche’s views on truth, knowledge, and cognition, I look at how a metaphysics is possible for Nietzsche given his skepticism. I argue that one of the ways a philosopher can create the conditions for overcoming nihilism and affirming life is to create a metaphysics that is both ruthlessly honest to one’s cognitive commitments and an artistically creative outpouring of one’s abundant, healthy drives. I show in this final chapter how a metaphysics that is self-aware of its epistemic limitations fits into some of the contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche’s positive project.

The Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche, John Richardson and Ken Gemes (eds.), Oxford University Press

Freud claimed that the concept of drive is "at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research." It is hard to think of a better proof of Freud's claim than the work of Nietzsche, which provides ample support for the idea that the drive concept is both tremendously important and terribly obscure. Although Nietzsche's accounts of agency and value everywhere appeal to drives, the concept has not been adequately explicated. I remedy this situation by providing an account of drives. I argue that Nietzschean drives are dispositions that generate evaluative orientations, in part by affecting perceptual saliences. In addition, I show that drive psychology has important implications for contemporary accounts of reflective agency. Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche's drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent's action by influencing the course of the agent's reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting. I show how this point complicates traditional models of the role of reflection in agency.

2012

Friedrich Nietzsche has long been recognized as a pivotal thinker in the history of moral philosophy, but until the last quarter century his importance for our understanding of the concepts of truth and knowledge had been largely ignored in English-language scholarship. In my dissertation, I add to the growing discussion on Nietzsche\u27s theory of human cognition. While more attention has recently been given to this dimension of Nietzsche\u27s thought, several key aspects have been largely ignored or insufficiently treated including the effects that the ethical or evaluative domain have on the way we cognize the world, the role that radical skepticism plays in motivating Nietzsche\u27s theory, and the connections between Nietzsche\u27s views on cognition and his larger philosophical project. What is distinctive about my project is the connection I draw between Nietzsche\u27s critique of the unconditional will to truth in On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil and his t...

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."

The Review of Metaphysics, 1996

Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 2015

The parallels of Nietzsche with Freud are a matter of common knowledge; much less well appreciated are their differences. My aim in this paper is to underscore and arrive at a better understanding of the latter. I will suggest that the agreement of Nietzsche with Freud regarding certain fundamental matters of human psychology coexists with very deep philosophical disagreement. From one angle Nietzsche and Freud can fairly be described as engaged on a common project. Closer examination reveals that their shared territory is better viewed as the result of a crossing of paths, on the way to different and mutually exclusive destinations. The disagreement of Nietzsche and Freud with one another is, I will suggest, ultimately no less intense than their argument with arch-rationalists such as Kant. 1 See, famously, BGE 23, regarding the demand that "psychology again be recognized as the queen of the sciences, and that the rest of the sciences exist to serve and prepare for it. Because, from now on, psychology is again the path to the most fundamental problems" (Nietzsche 2002: 24 [KGW VI/2: 33]); and BGE 230: "To translate humanity back into nature; to gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far; to make sure that, from now on, the human being will stand before the human being, just as he already stands before the rest of nature today, hardened by the discipline of science […]" (Nietzsche 2002: 123 [KGW VI/2: 175]).

This paper investigates Nietzsche's conceptualization and problematization of the mind with reference to his critique of Cartesian dualism and subjectivism. In this context, a cluster of concepts such as ego, subject, etc. through which Nietzsche understands the mind will be examined in the context of his pluralistic understanding of the body and will to power.