1 post tagged “alexander nehamas”

Clear and plausible reading of Nietzsche - nothing wrong with any of that, only I was able to read it awfully fast. (Simultan sez: "Zero grams indigestible fiber." Thanks simultan.) The art comparisons are fine except that he doesn't actually spend much time on a theory of art. Actually the best thing in the whole book was a passing reference to Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, sec. 354, on the problem of consciousness:

Das ganze Leben wäre möglich, ohne dass es sich gleichsam im Spiegel sähe: wie ja thatsächlich auch jetzt noch bei uns der bei weitem überwiegende Theil dieses Lebens sich ohne diese Spiegelung abspielt -, und zwar auch unsres denkenden, fühlenden, wollenden Lebens, so beleidigend dies einem älteren Philosophen klingen mag. Wozu überhaupt Bewusstsein, wenn es in der Hauptsache überflüssig ist? - ... so darf ich zu der Vermuthung weitergehn, dass Bewusstsein überhaupt sich nur unter dem Druck des Mittheilungs-Bedürfnisses entwickelt hat, - dass es von vornherein nur zwischen Mensch und Mensch (zwischen Befehlenden und Gehorchenden in Sonderheit) nöthig war, nützlich war, und auch nur im Verhältniss zum Grade dieser Nützlichkeit sich entwickelt hat.

The whole of life would be possible without it, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive it may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?... I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility.

Obviously this prefigures a lot of later stuff, but what I really like is the setting of consciousness in a very wide field. In very broad terms the linking of self-consciousness and being-with-others seems right to me, and certainly a much better avenue than all the arguments that take a narrow tack on phenomenal experience (zombies! redness!) and thereby seem stipulated as insoluble. A quale of bathood isn't any kind of convertible currency.