Nietzsche's Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization

Judging from what has been made of it so far, Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness consists of a number of theses which fit together uncomfortably. According to commentators as diverse as Gilles Deleuze and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche argues that consciousness is epiphenomenal. Yet, in a variety of ways and a range of places, Nietzsche seems to commit himself to the claim that conscious states are causally efficacious. Consciousness is dangerous, he writes, which is an odd thing to say of an epiphenomenon; if a thing is dangerous, then it surely does something. To make matters worse, Nietzsche repeatedly warns us that consciousness falsifies; in a characteristic passage, he writes, ‘all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization’ (GS 354). Whatever the precise meaning of this claim may be, the regularity of its occurrence and the stress which Nietzsche places upon it make it obvious that the claim deeply troubles him. If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, though, why should we care whether it falsifies? What difference could this falsification possibly make? Indeed, in what sense could an epiphenomenon falsify anything in the first place? And, to add even more obscurity to the mix, Nietzsche sometimes claims that consciousness is nothing more than a ‘relation of drives’. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon; consciousness is dangerous; consciousness falsifies; consciousness is a relation of drives. With claims that seem as inconsistent, muddled, and obscure as these, it is no surprise that Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness has not received much sustained attention. What may be surprising, though, is that Nietzsche actually does have a coherent and novel account of consciousness. This essay aims to explicate the account and examine its motivations, by clarifying the distinction between conscious and unconscious states in Nietzsche’s work, and by exploring the way in which these conscious and unconscious states relate. Nietzsche’s account has four principal components. First, Nietzsche claims that consciousness is not an essential property of the mental; the majority of mental states are unconscious. It might be natural to suppose that these unconscious states will be things such as dispositions, drives, and urges. Not so: Nietzsche claims that there are unconscious thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. What, then, distinguishes conscious states from unconscious ones? This brings us to the second and most fundamental component of Nietzsche’s account: a mental state is conscious if its content is conceptually articulated, whereas a state is unconscious if its content is nonconceptually articulated. We will have to spend