Manuel Dries (editor) - Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind

Manuel Dries (Ed.)
Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind

Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung

Herausgegeben von
Christian J. Emden
Helmut Heit
Vanessa Lemm
Claus Zittel

Begrndet von
Mazzino Montinari, Wolfgang Mller-Lauter, Heinz Wenzel

Advisory Board: Gnter Abel, R. Lanier Anderson, Keith Ansell-Pearson,
Rebecca Bamford, Christian Benne, Jessica Berry, Marco Brusotti, Joo Constancio,
Daniel Conway, Carlo Gentili, Oswaldo Giacoia Junior, Wolfram Groddeck,
Anthony Jensen, Scarlett Marton, John Richardson, Martin Saar, Herman Siemens,
Andreas Urs Sommer, Werner Stegmaier, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir,
Paul van Tongeren, Aldo Venturelli, Isabelle Wienand, Patrick Wotling

Band 70

ISBN 978-3-11-024652-0

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-024653-7

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039165-7

ISSN 1862-1260

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950639

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

Contributors cite Nietzsche using standard acronyms for his works, usually followed by a Roman numeral for a part or chapter (if any), with separately numbered or named sections, e.g. GM I 1, or BGE 19, or EH Clever, or Z III Tablets. For Nietzsches Nachlass (NL), if a note is included in The Will to Power (a selection not made by Nietzsche but by later editors, English translation by W. Kauffmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968) the contributors often cite it as WP, followed by its number, as WEN (Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks , ed. R. Geuss and A. Nehamas, trans. L. Lb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), followed by page numbers, or as WLN (Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks , ed. R. Bittner, trans. K. Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), followed by page numbers. For all notes from NL, they further provide the year and KSA volume number, followed by notebook number, and in square brackets the note number, e.g. WP 626 = NL 18834, KSA 10, 24[10]. Translations of Nietzsches works and notes are either by the contributors, who have consulted and amended existing translations, or as noted separately in each essay.

Manuel Dries

This collection of essays aims to widen our understanding of the possible contributions can make to current debates on consciousness and the mind, both of which he conceived as fundamentally embodied. Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches philosophy of mind from a number of different analytic and continental perspectives and aims to show its connection to Nietzsches broader ethical concerns.

It is commonly accepted that regards the body very highly. No passage better captures Nietzsches 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)