Self and responsibility: Nietzsche's thought in the light of current philosophy of mind
Description
In this dissertation, I will argue that recent work in philosophy of mind helps to illuminate the positive ethical doctrine of Friedrich Nietzsche. The point of contact between the two lies in their respective accounts of consciousness, which can be read as complementary to one another. The first two chapters deal with Nietzsche's concepts of the eternal return and amor fati, respectively. Rather than being a statement of traditional fate, I argue that the fate of amor fati is the self, conceived as the alternative to the rejected 'soul-hypothesis.' The eternal return, in a similar manner, is shown not to be a statement of determinism, but a way of situating the self. The alternative to the 'soul-hypothesis' is a narrative conception of the self; one's fate is constituted by both one's past and one's heredity. The self is not given, however; for Nietzsche, interpretation of these elements is an important creative act. The third chapter deals with the substrate of the self, the body, and how the interpretive process is understood at this level. The work of Paul Churchland provides an important link: his State-Space Semantics shares all the relevant presuppositions of Nietzsche's account of interpretation. The subsequent chapter deals with Churchland's Moral Network Theory, an extension of his State-Space Semantics. I show that the weaknesses of the Moral Network Theory can be addressed by precisely the account of the self presented in the second chapter. Daniel Dennett's account of the self used at this point, because it is both explicitly compatible with many of the details of Churchland's conception of the mind/brain, and similar in all important respects with Nietzsche's account of the self. In the final chapter, I address the weaknesses of Dennett's account: while taking a similar attitude towards the free will/determinism debate as Nietzsche, Dennett ultimately fails to produce a robust ethical theory. Using the insights gained from Dennett and Churchland, I construct Nietzsche's positive ethical position around the notion of taking responsibility as an active, non-consequentialist part of the interpretation of one's narrative self