Nietzsche’s Kind of Consciousness

Abstract This article critically examines two claims Mattia Riccardi ascribes to Nietzsche in his 2021 book Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. The first is that Nietzsche’s main notion of consciousness should be interpreted as Rconsciousness. Rconsciousness is an awareness of a mental state or process that is achieved when that state is linguistically interpreted by another state. This article finds that Riccardi’s account commits to two instances of states becoming conscious and to two kinds of consciousness. The second claim is that Nietzsche advances a pluralism about consciousness, endorsing a perceptual form of consciousness, Pconsciousness, and a qualitative consciousness of sensations, Qconsciousness. As Riccardi’s account offers no criteria for what it takes to be conscious per se, it is unclear what the pluralism he ascribes to Nietzsche amounts to. Moreover, this article finds that Nietzsche offers no positive reason to conceive any candidate mental phenomena as conscious other than those that are linguistically-reflexively conscious.