Nietzsche also thought that life wasn’t only about self-preservation and mere survival (a position he took Darwinists to be arguing for) but that life was intrinsically aiming toward multiplication and extension, that it was governed by fundamental “a will to power” (here we have another very problematic concept of Nietzsche which no one really seems to understand).
“What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous?”
“where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired, as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally.“
“consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication “
Furthermore, consciousness is mainly necessary in social settings:
“consciousness is properly only a connecting net between man an man, - it is only as such that it has had to develop, the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it.”
Humans are seen as the “most endangered animal” in need of help and protection. This is also eched in famous German philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen's concept of humans as "Mängelwesen" (deficient creatures), i.e. organisms with deficient instincitve capacities which leave them ill-prepared to respond to challenges from their environment. I think formulated in the way Gehlen does it the notion is crap, but it is certainly true that human are adapted for the "cognitive niche" and do not rely on predatory skills such as lions, etc, and are much more fragile and helpless to such attacks.
In order to express and coordinate this need, they needed to make themselves understood, and they needed to have a capacity for conscious introspection in order to know and communicate what they needed and wanted. In modern terminology, this would probably be called metacognition. To be more precise, given modern terminology, Nietzsche would probably hold that animals may display metacognitive regulation, e.g. higher-order sub-conscious uncertainty monitoring, as it has been shown in macaques and dolphins (Smith et al. 2003). This sort of higher-order subconscious thought would probably be what Nietzsche would refer to as unconscious thinking. However, together with other modern philosophers, he would probably hold that only humans display metacognitive knowledge (a distinction introduced by Flavell 1979, see also Hurford 2007: 23ff.).
“The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious, it is only as a social animal that man as learned to become conscious of himself“”
“consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; […] as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communcal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of “knowing himself”, will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his “averageness.”"
But Nietzsche goes even further: given that conscious is essentially something that develops in group interactions, if we translate our actions into conscious decisions, they all have to adhere to the same conscious group format, and thus lose their personality, uniqueness, and individuality:
“The nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarized world; […] everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid, a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; […] with becoming conscious of something there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation.”
Nietzsche’s closes with a sceptically remark that is very similar to the viewpoint of modern, evolutionary epistemology, and which is also close to the following fear espressed by Charles Darwin:
"But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”
Nietzsche also shares this scepticism. If consciousness is merely a group function and not responsible for higher-order thought, then
“we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “usefulness,” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined”
P.S.
References:
Flavell, John. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist 34, 906–911.
Hurford, James M. (2007): The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford: OUP.
Metzinger, Thomas (2000): The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective. In: Thomas Metzinger (ed.): Neural Correlates of Consciousness – Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, AM: MIT Press
Pinker, Steven 1994. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Lane Penguin Press.Smith, J. D., W. E. Shields, and D. A. Washburn (2003a). The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26, 317–339.
5 comments:
Thanks for the link, but your confidence is unwarranted. The last time I read Nietzsche, I was an undergraduate.
Although you may not know much about Nietzsche anymore (and neither do I, at least that's the impression I get when I'm listening toi the other bright people in my Nietzsche-Course.
I'm sorry if I didn't get that across, but I was trying to express the fact that I don't have any real idea about the state of evolutionary theory in Darwin's time, and that you're surely a greater authority on the topic than me, for example regarding the question whether 19th Century Darwinism didn't take into account internal selection sufficiently, or whether Darwinians really claimed that the life of an organism was basically about a very conservative kind of self-preservation and nothing elese
In that case, let me say that philosophers in general are a very bad guide to the state of biological evolution theory at the time Nietzsche was writing. Josiah Royce, for example, relies on Schopenhauer more than Darwin and mostly philosophy engaged Spencer or Huxley rather than Darwin or the Darwinians. It's a bit like Midgley engaging Ayer or Dawkins rather than, say, Lewontin or Maynard Smith.
From this page, and also this paper it is clear to me that Nietzsche simply didn't understand natural selection, because he thought that the better types were those that would lose out in selection. He was not alone at that time; many people had confused ideas about selection, and many philosophers still do (e.g., David Stove). This is largely because, I believe, the eugenic notion of selection is based on the common experience of selective breeding (which Darwin called "artificial selection") leading to fragile and sensitive types, such as thoroughbred horses. Nietzsche appears to think that the intellectual will lose out. On Darwin's view, if that were true, then too bad - the less intellectual types would simply be fitter.
Huxley's Evolution and Ethics also makes this point forcefully - we should not rely on evolution to give us the moral or ethical types, but by an act of will seek to manufacture the civilisation we most value. Maybe that is what Nietzsche was trying to say, in his own inimitable style.
I would also suggest you investigate the views of James Mark Baldwin and the Baldwin Effect which has had a long history as either anti-Darwinian or more recently something that, although "internal" is Darwinian after all.
The origin of language, and it's many variations has always fascinated me..I am 72 years old, speak only North American English, but have met some people that are fluent in several languages, some of them very different..for example a good friend from Iran, speaks his native tongue, also English, French and some Russian...all with some accent and inability to fully pronounce each and every word...but still with full meaning of the thought behind each communication...Now in trying to remember part of what I had read..it seemed that Nietzsche was saying that as part of human evolution we had to become a social and gregarious group..I assume to hunt, and find breeding mates..yet other animals, lion prides, wolf packs, and others appear to enjoy the same aspects of a social group... there is no language as we know it..yet they act in harmony with each other in hunting prey and there is a definite "pecking order" in the group...I still don't find any correlation between language and evolution and our specie.
Elliot, you make a very valid point and thanks for the interest in my site.
We have to bear in mind that Nietzsche wrote this more than 120 years ago and much of evolutionary research was not even in its infancy.
You might want to have a look at my posts on Brain Evolution, Language Evolution, or Social Cognition, where some of these ideas are laid out in more detailed. (Or go to the excellent blog, Babel's Dawn, which is written much clearer and more down-to-earth than my blog).
Essentially, the argument for a relationship between language and social groups goes like this: Humans live in so special kinds of social groups and were subject to special kinds of selection pressure (e.g. in the Pleistocene Savanna), that new cognitive and communicational capacities had to emerge to deal with these new problems.
Lion and other social groups, especially that of other primates, are indeed coordinated and complex (see my Book Reviews on Baboon Metaphysics for example).
But human social groups are much, much more sophisticated. We reason about other people's mental states, adhere to abstract social contracts, create institutions, etc.
These unique aspects of human culture have to be regulated by a unique sets of mental adaptations, and, so the argument goes, these mental adaptations enabled us to survive in an extremely dangerous habitat with lots of predators - we had survival advantages through having a very special kind of complex social group that no other animal has.
I hope that cleared some things up, If you're interested do have a look at blogs like Babel's Dawn or take a look at some of the excellent books on the topic, such as Christine Kennealy's "The First Word," or Mihcael Tomasello's "The Origins of Human Communication"
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