Three Senses of Selfless Consciousness Nietzsche and Dennett on mind, language and body

In J. Constâncio (ed.), Handbook on Nietzsche on the Self. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2015

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Three Senses of Selfless Consciousness

Nietzsche and Dennett on mind, language and body

Sofia Miguens Department of Philosophy and Institute of Philosophy1

University of Porto

Leib bin Ich ganz und gar, und Nichts ausserdem; und Seele ist nur ein Wort für ein etwas am Leibe.

Der Leib ist eine grosse Vernunft, eine Vielheit mit einem Sinne.

(Also Sprach Zarathustra, Von den Verächtern des Leibes)

Abstract: This paper aims at assessing some of Nietzsche’s views on body, consciousness and the self in the context of contemporary debates. The threads running through the paper are Daniel Dennett’s idea of a ‘dismantling of the Cartesian Theatre’ and the general idea of a ‘selfless consciousness’. Three different meanings of ‘selfless consciousness’ are considered in the three parts of the paper – I will suggest that some of these are fruitful whereas some others not. In Part I (Vielheit and Intermittenzen), I consider what role natural language may play in consciousness. I try to spell out Nietzsche’s proposal (according to which consciousness developed under the pressure of the need for communication) by appealing to Dennett’s conception of the status of the self and the role of high-order mental states in his functionalist models of consciousness (Brainstorms, 1978 and Consciousness Explained, 1991). In Part II (Unterseele), I refer to Nietzsche’s idea of ‘sub-souls’ to characterize Dennett’s response to a criticism by António Damasio regarding the sense of ownership of consciousness. I try to show how Dennett, in his response, steps back from certain traits of the functionalist view of the mind he once defended. In Part III (Is that all? Warheit and Wissenschaft), I draw some conclusions about the different roles for the notions of self and consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognition on the one hand and in metaphysics on the other.

In his description of the Project “Nietzsche and the contemporary debate on the Self”

João Constâncio claims that Nietzsche’s critique of subject and language foreshadows

Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness and the doing away with the

Cartesian Theatre2. I will begin at this point3. The idea is that there is something like a

common anti-Cartesian and naturalizing move, in Nietzsche’s as in Dennett’s theory

of consciousness. The move is towards what I will call a ‘selfless consciousness’.

Nietzsche would certainly agree with Dennett’s claim that although there is

1 MLAG (Mind Language and Action Group; see http://mlag.up.pt) 2 Dennett 1991. 3 This means that I will not consider here the whole cognitivist reception of Nietzsche, a general task João attributed to me in the Project. Although Dennett’s functionalist models of consciousness do classify as proposals within a cognitivist model of mind, a more comprehensive review of the cognitivist reception of Nietzsche should include not only debates on consciousness and the the self but also debates on free will and morality.


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consciousness in nature there is no Central Meaner, no Central Intender, no Observer,

no presence of self to itself or natural unity of a self4. Rejecting the naturalness of an

Einheit of the subject, and endorsing multiplicity (Vielheit) are essential components

of Nietzsche’s own anti-Cartesianism and naturalism. For him, a human being is

body, and consciousness is a phenomenon of body and brain (‘the latest development

of the organic’ (Gay Science, 11))5. Naturally, if consciousness is a phenomenon of

the body, and the body itself is seen as a multiplicity of reasons (Grunde) and drives

(Triebe), something like a unified ‘I’ (the ‘Ich als syntetisches Begriff’6) can only be

regarded as coming into the picture at a later stage. This is precisely the case: the ‘Ich

als syntetisches Begriff’ envolves, for Nietzsche, the use of language, and its status

may in a certain sense be regarded as fictional. Dennett would agree with all this.

In fact, Dennett and Nietzsche share even more: they share an idea of personal

identity as self-creation7. But I will not explore this aspect here, since I am not so

much interested in personal identity as in consciousness and the self. So what I will

do is compare and contrast Nietzsche’s and Dennett’s positions on mind and language

first and then on mind and body.

As I already mentioned, as readers and interpreters of both Nietzsche and Dennett, we

are entitled to see a common move towards a selfless consciousness in their theories

of consciousness. But let us now try to put Nietzsche’s and Dennett’s approaches in

perspective. Why do we want such a selfless consciousness? Do we in fact want it?

What difference would the ‘full naturalization’8 of consciousness, resulting in a

selfless consciousness, make for philosophical pursuits in general? One might as well

ask directly: What is a theory of consciousness a theory of, after all? Now, this is a

quite difficult question to answer9. Not necessarily only because there are so many

competing theories of content and consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind and

4 See Dennett 1991, in particular Chapters 5 (Multiple Drafts versus the Cartesian Theater), 8 (How Words Do Things With Us), 9 (The Architecture of the Human Mind) and 13 (The Reality of Selves). 5 « Das Bewusstsein. — Die Bewusstheit ist die letzte und späteste Entwickelung des Organischen (…) » 6« insofern wir andererseits die Gewohnheit haben, uns über diese Zweiheit vermöge des synthetischen Begriffs „ich“ hinwegzusetzen » (Jenseits von Gut und Böse 19) 7 Dennett’s views on self-creation are built around a notion of the self as ‘narrative centre of gravity’. His non-absolutist conception of personhood, which he formulates in terms of ‘conditions of personhood’, involves a condition of ‘nietzschean self-evaluation’ (he was influenced by Charles Taylor here) (cf. Miguens 2002, 4.4.3 Do eu à personalidade [From self to personhood]) and 4.4.4. Quererei eu realmente ser aquilo que sou ? [Do I really want to be what I am ?]). 8 This is João Constâncio’s term. See Constâncio (forthcoming), On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer. 9 See Miguens & Preyer 2012.


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language, and philosophy of perception, but especially if we think of how plausible

different answers may be. We may, for instance, take a theory of consciousness to be

about the brain. Or we may take it to be about the self, or about thoughts and thinking,

and thought’s relation to the world. So, which one is it? Is consciousness a specific

topic for philosophy of mind, and cognitive science? Is a theory of consciousness

ultimately a position on mind-brain-body relations in a human being? Or is that a

position on consciousness bears in a much stronger way on one’s general

metaphysical conception of thought-world relations? I believe one problem with both

Nietzsche and Dennett is that they seem to want it all here. It is with this in mind that

I will try to put forward some distinctions.

1. Vielheit and Intermittenzen10. How does natural language make for a conscious

mind? Nietzsche and Dennett on mind and language: a deflationary view of the

self

I assume Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness11 is better known to Nietzsche scholars,

so I first will give more attention to Dennett’s. I should say that I think Niezsche’s

‘critique of the subject’ is a more general and ambitious project than a mere view of

the self in relation to consciousness and the body. But let us start with the fact that it

involves a deflationary view of the self. By this I mean that Nietzsche – after Leibniz

and Schopenhauer – conceives of our minds as not essentially conscious, and also as

not essentially unified or centered. Consciousness is not the kernel of our being. This

means, for him, among many other things, that humans could think and act without

consciouness. The question then becomes why did consciousness come into existence,

if it seems superfluous. One answer to this question is to be found in The Gay Science

§354. Here, Nietzsche puts forward the idea that consciousness developed under the

pressure of the need for communication. In saying that, he acknowledges that

language, and the publicity associated with it, is a necessary condition for there to be

consciousness and selves in beings such as ourselves. Yet such beings could think and

10 « Man hält die Bewusstheit für eine feste gegebene Grösse! Leugnet ihr Wachsthum, ihre Intermittenzen! Nimmt sie als „Einheit des Organismus“!» [One takes consciousness to be a given determinate magnitude ! One denies its growth and intermittences ! One takes it to be the ‘unity of the organism’ !»] (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 11). 11 Here I relied mostly on Katsafanas (2005), Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: consciousness and conceptualization, Constâncio (forthcoming) On Consciousness – Nietzsche’s departure from Schopenhauer, and Riccardi (forthcoming), Nietzsche on the superficiality of consciousness.


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act in their absence12. Not suprisingly, it is precisely this very well known aphorism

from The Gay Science that Dennett quotes more than once in his work on

consciousness13. So the first thing I want to do is to show that Dennett’s reference to

Nietzsche makes sense. I believe their approaches do converge, so I will try to explore

how is it exactly that they might be seen as converging. My main idea in what

follows, then, is that they converge in relating the very unity of a conscious mind, as

well as the nature of particular conscious mental states, to language and thus to

publicity (in the sense that a language, in contrast with a brain, or a body, is public

and shared).

I will consider the functionalist models of consciousness of Brainstorms (1978) and

Consciousness Explained (1991). The fact that the first model14 is relatively crude

helps to bring out what matters in the discussion. One thing to keep in mind is that

such models – which are a fundamental part of Dennett’s approach to consciousness

although definitely not all there is to it15 – are closer to cognitive science (e.g. to B.

Baars’ 1988 global workspace model) than to philosophers’ discussions. These are

models of cognitive architecture, not arguments. And philosophers, in particular 12 I take two of the most important aphorisms on consciousness to be Beyond Good and Evil 268 and Gay Science 354 («Wir könnten nämlich denken, fühlen, wollen, uns erinnern, wir könnten ebenfalls «handeln » in jedem Sinne des Wortes: und trotzdem brauchte das Alles nicht uns « in’s Bewusstsein zu treten » (wie man im Bilde sagt). 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? — Nun scheint mir, wenn man meiner Antwort auf diese Frage und ihrer vielleicht ausschweifenden Vermuthung Gehör geben will, die Feinheit und Stärke des Bewusstseins immer im Verhältniss zur Mittheilungs-Fähigkeit eines Menschen (oder Thiers) zu stehn, die Mittheilungs-Fähigkeit wiederum im Verhältniss zur Mittheilungs-Bedürftigkeit: letzteres nicht so verstanden, als ob gerade der einzelne Mensch selbst, welcher gerade Meister in der Mittheilung und Verständlichmachung seiner Bedürfnisse ist, zugleich auch mit seinen Bedürfnissen am meisten auf die Andern angewiesen sein müsste. Wohl aber scheint es mir so in Bezug auf ganze Rassen und Geschlechter-Ketten zu stehn: wo das Bedürfniss, die Noth die Menschen lange gezwungen hat, sich mitzutheilen, sich gegenseitig rasch und fein zu verstehen, da ist endlich ein Ueberschuss dieser Kraft und Kunst der Mittheilung da, gleichsam ein Vermögen, das sich allmählich aufgehäuft hat und nun eines Erben wartet, der es verschwenderisch ausgiebt (…) Gesetzt, diese Beobachtung ist richtig, 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. Bewusstsein ist eigentlich nur ein Verbindungsnetz zwischen Mensch und Mensch». See also Emden and Gerhardt. Dennett quotes GS 354; Dennett’s focus is on cognitive architecture and evolution, but the point is similar to Nietzsche’s. 13 See namely Dennett 1978 (Brainstorms): 285 and Dennett 1991 (Consciousness Explained): 227. 14 See Baars 1988, Towards a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. 15 In order to be fully charitable to Dennett, one should consider at least three different components in his approach to consciousness: the functionalist models of cognitive architecture, a higher-order theory of the status of conscious states in a cognitive system and, finally, his (more well known) arguments for ‘quining’ (i.e. eliminating) qualia. See Miguens 2002.


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analytic philosophers, are much more likely to approach the issue of consciouness by

means of arguments, e. g. arguments about phenomenal consciousness or

epiphenomenalism. Yet it is in the context of the funtionalist models that one should

understand Dennett’s proposals about the status of the self and of higher-order mental

states. The two aspects are essential for understanding consciouness’ relation to

language and publicity and to understand the convergence with Nietzsche’s claims.

Figure 1 Brainstoms, Toward a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, p. 155

The six boxes in the 1978 model stand for the functional subcomponents of a

cognitive system such as a human being – the subcomponents are perception,

memory, problem solving, attention, control and ’public relations’. The arrows

represent computational accesses among these subcomponents as well ass the

system’s output. Dennett’s proposal is that being a self simply is being this functional

organization. In other words, a self is nothing but the global access that a cognitive

system which has such functional organization (at the sub-personal level) has to itself

(at the so-called ‘personal level’). That there be a self in such a system is thus a matter

of what we may regard as global self-monitoring by the system. What makes

Dennett’s model close to Baars’ conception of consciousness as a global workspace is

the idea that what is globally accessible to the system is ‘publicly available’, i.e. it is

available to the system as a whole. This contrasts with information processing going

on in the subsystems, which is available for controlling the behaviour of the system,

but is not ‘centrally’ available, i.e. it is not available to the self. Let us now take

Nagel’s question about consciousness and ask ‘what is it like to be such a system?’


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One might be skeptical here and doubt that it could be like anything – nothing is

being captured in the model about the ‘essence of consciousness’, only cognitive

workings, one might think. This is in fact the position most analytic philosophers

dealing with consciousness take towards Dennett’s type of approach. Yet Dennett’s

claim is that there is no other way to get something in nature for which ‘it is like

something to be’. Having an inner life is a matter of functional organization16, nothing

else. Being a self simply is appearing to oneself by means of self-monitoring within

such a cognitive architecture. This means, of course, that much more is going on in

the system that is not accessible to the self.

In Dennett’s own words what he is doing is, thus, the following:“I propose to

construct a full-fledged ‘I’ from sub-personal parts, by exploiting the notion of

access”17. Let me be then more specific about this notion of access. The notion has to

be conceived in relation to Dennett’s uses of ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ (he

distinguishes them). There are three types of access involved in the construction of a

full-fledged ‘I’, according to the model: besides the so-called personal access (the

global access the system has to itself) there are two types of sub-personal access,

computational access and so-called ‘public access’. ‘Personal access’ is Dennett’s

term for global access, for that of which I am aware (i.e. that of which I am aware).

This (and only this) is what he calls ‘consciousness’, i.e. proper consciousness. The

‘I’, the self, is the subject of consciousness, i.e. the subject of personal level

awareness. This type of awareness (proper consciousness) is characteristic of human

beings only. Human beings, because they have such personal level access to

themselves, are capable of a kind of awareness very different from any other animal’s.

When personal access takes place, the ‘subject’ of awareness is the person, not ‘parts

of the person’. Now, awareness in general (as it is involved in behaviour control, and

which humans have in common with other animals) exceeds this, and consists in sub-

personal accesses (i.e. forms of computational access, i.e. access among information–

processing sub-personal parts of the agent). In the case of humans, because they are

linguistic creatures, there is also, according to Dennett, another type of access, a sub-

personal access, which connects computational acesses and personal access. In the

1978 model he calls it ‘public access’. This is sub-personal access for (linguistic)

16 Dennett 1978: 164-165, 171. As John McDowell once put it, it would be quite unexpected to find jelly in the inside. 17 Dennett 1978 : 71.


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publicizing by the cognitive system as whole of some of its dealings with ‘content’.

Sub-personal public access makes available that which is available for being reported,

as the system uses language. Now, besides being a matter of (global) personal access

of the system to itself, proper consciousness requires language, i.e. it happens only

when and if there are such linguistic reports by human agents. Then the global agent

might speak (i.e. perform personal level speech acts) and say for instance “I am

Sofia”, or “This is a bottle”. And this is a kind of awareness very different from that

of other (non-linguistic) animals. It is important to underline the fact that the so-called

public access is, for Dennett, also sub-personal. In other words, it concerns the role of

language in the cognitive architecture of humans. In the terms of the 1978 model, it

concerns the Public Relations component in the model. The Public Relations

component “takes as input orders to perform speech acts (…) and executes these

orders”18. This means, of course, that the ‘subject’ of such sub-personal public access

is not the person, the ‘I’. In fact, there is no subject at this level – the idea is that

something like a sub-personal role of language is needed to make for a subject, a

person, a conscious human, as a linguistic creature. The subject, a person, an ‘I’, is

something which exists only at the personal level, for the system, as it takes itself

globally. Nietzsche’s Ich als syntetisches Begriff is simply not there at the sub-

personal level.

One immediate consequence of this is that we ourselves do not have access to

‘content-bearers’ at the sub-personal level19. Whichever selection of sub-personal

information I become aware of (e.g. in order to say “I am Sofia“ or “This is a bottle”)

this is not something I can search and find out through introspection. What goes on at

the sub-personal level is not within reach for ‘me’, for the ‘I’ – it is rather a topic for

cognitive theory. What goes on in the brain, or within the cognitive architecture, is not

accessible from a first-person perspective. When I find myself saying “This is a

bottle”, I am not reporting on something that I observe inside myself. What happens is

rather that if I am consciously aware of something, the Public Relations, i.e. the sub-

personal component for language, must have made such content available for me.

And only when there is such global availability I am there.

18 Dennett 1978: 156. This PR component is on par with the Perception, Memory, Control and Problem Solving components in the description of the architecture of the agent. 19 In his 1994 article on Dennett, John McDowell praises this view.


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Thus, ‘consciousness’ (proper consciousness) is not an on-off, all or nothing, question

but rather a question of Intermittenzen. It is explained in the context of a functionalist

model in terms of awarenesses and accesses. There is one more important point here,

which ultimately paves the way for Dennett’s elimination of qualia (i.e. for his well-

known rejection of the very idea of phenomenal consciousness20). In Dennett’s

terminology from the period I am considering, there is awareness-1 (availability for

behavioral control) and awareness-2 (availability for linguistic reporting). Both are

sub-personal. Awareness-2 makes ‘personal access’ (i.e. consciousness, the personal

access a linguistic creature has to herself) possible and marks its conceptual

shape. According to this picture, there is continuity between (unconscious) awareness

involved in sub-personal accesses and consciousness. And, one should add, this

exhausts consciousness; this is all there is to it. There is no ’Awareness-3’, which

would be something completely different from awareness-1, awareness-2 and of a on-

off nature, and ‘phenomenal’. All there is besides availability for behavioral control

and availability for linguistic reporting is the linguistic reporting itself, by a self, if

and when it takes place. In other words, proper consciousness is personal access and

personal access only. In other words, it is just another type of access, not the

‘something completely different’ that the defenders of qualia and phenomenal

consciouness have in mind.

So, where am I or what, as David Hume would ask? Am I real21? How can I be real if

it is language that somehow makes up the important characteristics of the self I

conceive of myself as being ? How can I be real if it is language that makes for

myself as a unity ? How can my being conscious be ‘real’ if it is language that makes

for my conceptual awareness of the ways things are in the world? Dennett’s answer to

Hume’s question would be the following. I am an entity which conceives of itself as

one, from a global point of view upon itself, at the personal level. There a self exists ;

that is what a self is. Only in such conditions I am conceptually aware of the world.

All this, of course, depends on language. When I say “This is a bottle”, or “I am

Sofia” there is flow of information and specialized agents dealing with it at the sub-

personal level and definitely no ‘Cartesian natural unity or centre stage’ there. The 20 See Miguens 2002, 6.4 A natureza e o seu interior. Consciência fenomenal ou ilusão do utilizador de uma máquina virtual [Nature and its interior. Phenomenal consciousness or user-illusion in a virtual machine]. 21 As Lewis Carroll once formulated it : «Tweedledum : You’re only one of the things in his dream! You know very well you are not real ! – I am real ! – said Alice and began to cry» (L. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 1995 : 116. Ware, Hutfordshire, Wordsworth).


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unified I who speaks is itself an achievement, a result, which exists at the personal

level only. So language plays a doubly important role: there can be no centre without

a self and there is no self without language. Also, without language there could be no

conceptual awareness of the way things are in the world, as opposed to behaviour-

controlling awareness. In Dennett’s metaphor for his Multiple Drafts Model22, in the

brain of animals such as ourselves, language gives rise to an inner political miracle –

it makes a commander of the agents possible. From a cognitive point of view, minds

simply are the putting together of many specialised agents. Such agents are busy

dealing with their ‘private’ affairs, producing multiple drafts, i.e. sub-personal

content-fixations ; they do not ‘mind’ other agents. Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind

view of the mental is a clearly acknowledged inpiration of the Multiple Drafts Model

model here23. But we are also definitely not far from Nietzsche, when he says ‘I am a

herd and a shepherd’24. That we are, according to Dennett, conscious creatures only

inasfar as we are linguistic creatures, makes us profoundly different from other

sensient creatures. What’s more, and this is yet another convergence with Nietzsche,

that ‘we’ are as described – a multitude of agents, which, in the absence of language,

would go on with their business in a non-comunicating way - is what makes us the

appropriate material for the all important Nietzschean operations of self-moulding and

self-exhorting25.

22 Dennett 1991. 23 Dennett 1991. 24 “Aber der Erwachte, der Wissende sagt: Leib bin ich ganz und gar, und Nichts ausserdem; und Seele ist nur ein Wort für ein Etwas am Leibe. Der Leib ist eine grosse Vernunft, eine Vielheit mit Einem Sinne, ein Krieg und ein Frieden, eine Heerde und ein Hirt.” Also sprach Zarathustra, Von den Verächtern des Leibes. 25 One should notice here that thinking about language Dennett is thinking of natural language. One of his main aims is to distance himself from a Fodorian Language of Thought hypothesis, for reasons having to do with a critique of a Cartesian Theatre. In Brain Writing and Mind Reading (Dennett 1978) this is clearly stated by saying that there is no language ‘deeper’ than the one we use ‘on the outside’ ; any claim to the contrary would amount to infinite regress. One may want to agree with this, and with the reason given for it: mentalese, Dennett says, is “a hopeless answer. It is hopeless not because there coudn’t be any such system to be found in the internal goings on in people’s brains. Indeed there could be (…) it is hopeless as an answer to the question we posed, for it merely postpones the question. Let there be a language of thought. How do you know what your sentences in the language of thought mean? This problem comes into sharper focus if we contrast the language of thought hypothesis with its ancestor and chief rival, the picture theory of ideas. Our thoughts are like pictures, runs this view; they are about what they are because, like pictures they resemble their objects” (Dennett 1996 : 52). But how is one to tell? Who is there to tell? No one – and that is Dennett’s point. But one should notice also that the dispute about the status of natural languge in a cognitive system is not just a dispute around the representational theory of mind, which is the arena of Dennett’s opposition to Fodor: it also reflects on conceptions of personal identity and personhood. In particular, this is the link between the cognitive models and the question of self-creation: linguistic self-moulding and self-exhortation are the (cognitive) means for self-evaluation (which is, for Dennett, as I said before, a ‘condition of personhood’).


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I mentioned that both self and higher-order mental states were essential for

understanding the implications of Dennett’s cognitive models in his view of

consciousness. So now I want to say something about higher-order mental states. It is

important to remember that at the output end of the 1978 model there is the Public

Relations component. Its input are ‘semantic intentions’, i.e. it gets orders to perform

speech acts and acts on such orders. It gets orders from the executive component (the

Control-Component, CC), and accesses information only through a memory storage

(MC, Memory-Component). In such circunstances, an introspection routine occurs the

following way: the Control-Component ‘decides’ to initiate the introspection sub-

routine, and addresses a question to the Memory-Component. When the answer

arrives, is may access it (censor it, interpret it, infer from it) or pass it on to the Public

Relations component. The result is a speech command to the Public Relations

Component, which acts according to it, i.e produces a speech act (e.g. “I am Sofia”, or

“This is a bottle”). In Consciousness Explained the status of such speech acts and

their importance for consciousness is explained in terms of a higher-order theory.

This is a third component of Dennett’s approach to consciousness, besides the

functionalist models and the arguments for eliminating qualia. According to Dennett

‘creature consciousness’ takes place if and when higher-order mental states (i.e.

mental states which are about other mental states) take place. These higher-order

states are, according to Dennett, beliefs, and not perceptions, as in other higher-order

theories. In this proposal Dennett is close to, and in a way, follows, David

Rosenthal26. Like Rosenthal, he explains creature consciousness appealing to higher-

order mental states. He believes the fact that one reports on one’s own mental states

by expressing higher-order mental states is crucial for (creature) consciousness. He

disagrees with Rosenthal only in that Rosenthal sees his own higher-order theory as

an exercise of conceptual analysis of consciousness. For Dennett, in contrast, a

higher-order theory is a conception of cognition. The point anyway is that

consciousness requires that higher-order beliefs about one’s own beliefs be

linguistically formulated. Besides their linguistic (and thus conceptual) nature the

most important thing to notice about higher-order states is that Dennett is not saying

that there are salient and independent higher-order mental states in one’s mental life

due to something like inner observation. What he is saying is that it is only the

26 Rosenthal 1997, A Theory of Consciousness.


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linguistic framing itself, i.e. the linguitic prompting of the system by the system,

constructs them.

Again, only this is proper consciousness, and such consciousness is characteristic of

linguistic creatures only. We, human beings, are like that. In fact if a self is in place

and linguistically expressed higher-order mental states take place we may say that the

illusion of the Cartesian Theatre is perfectly real. In this sense there is a cartesian

theatre, i.e. there is self-presentation or self-appearing in the cognitive system. The

fact that other animals are not like that is what makes them, in Dennett’s words, very

much unlike us: in his words, ‘they are not beset by the illusion of the Cartesian

Theatre’27.

I will make just two more points about the 1991 Multiple Drafts Model. As the 1978

model, the 1991 model aims at explaining consciousness in terms of cognitive

architecture. Yet now there is a new focus: Dennett is keen on explaining the unity

and continuity of phenomenological experience in cognitive systems such as

ourselves, in which at the hardware level there is distributed parallel processing of

information and at the functional level there are competing ‘agents’, producing

multiple drafts (Dennett now refers to these multiple drafts as microtakings or

microjudgements). In other words, we are again confronted with Nietzschean

multiplicity at the subpersonal level and with the need to explain the unity at the

personal level. Only now it is not only the unity of a self that is at stake but also the

unity of the flow of consciousness. Both the level of distributed parallel processing of

information and the functional level of competing ‘agents’ are sub-personal levels.

Inasmuch as the 1991 Multiple Drafts Model is about this sub-personal level, it is a

cognitive model. But it also prepares the ground for Dennett’s positions on what we

may regard as formal features of personal level conscious experience such as its unity,

centredness, sense of the present or presence and sense of control. Such positions got

him involved in discussions about phenomenology (discussions in which he

introduced the strangely named ‘heterophenomenology’, which I will not consider

here). Explaining such features in terms of a cognitive architecture, as the model

purports to do, is explaining how we appear to ourselves as mental. Now according to

Dennett in Consciousness Explained, all the features above are virtual features. By

this he menas that they existe at the level of a ‘cognitive’ interface’. Still, they are

27 Dennett 1998 : 346 (Animal Consciousness, What Matters and Why).


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fully real for us, i.e. fully real from within. In fact, the level of interface is the only

level in which there is any ‘us’. One last important difference between the 1991

model and the 1978 model brings Dennett even closer to Nietzsche, and adds to the

meaning of Nietzschean Intermittenzen. Even if the role of language in personal

access remains at the centre of the theory Dennett now stresses that there is no such

thing as an ‘awareness line’ as still he proposed there was in the 1978 model, and the

crossing of which marked proper consciousness. All there is are subpersonal levels

multiple drafts and linguistic promptings which intermittently constitute proper

consciousness. This, in spite of the reality from within of self-presentation and thus of

a certain ‘cartesian theatre’, is one more step in doing away with a certain conception

of the Cartesian Theatre.

2 Unterseele28. Nietzsche and Dennett on mind and body (or on mind being

embodied and thus ‘owned’).

“When you make a mind, the materials matter” - Daniel Dennett29

‘Selfless consciousness’ in the first sense I have been considering implies that

according to the functionalist models (selfless) awareness preceeds and exceeds

proper consciousness which is (1) consciousness of a self and (2) linguistic, and thus,

conceptual awareness of ways things are. Selves and conceptual awareness are

language-based achievements, the result of sub-personal processes in a cognitive

architecture. They are not there by essence, nor from the start. Now I want to move on

to a second sense of selfless consciousness, a sense in which we might not want a

selfless consciousness. We may take the following line (this is actually a criticism the

neuroscientist António Damásio addressed to Dennett30). All that I have said until

now (about personal access as global availability, about virtual unity and centredness

as being perceived from within as fully real), tells us only about the ‘film’, i.e. about

consciousness as a flow and some of its formal characteristics, including its very 28 Beyond Good and Evil 12, 19. “Der Wollende nimmt dergestalt die Lustgefühle der ausführenden, erfolgreichen Werkzeuge, der dienstbaren “Unterwillen” oder Unter-Seelen — unser Leib ist ja nur ein Gesellschaftsbau vieler Seelen — zu seinem Lustgefühle als Befehlender hinzu” 29 Dennett 1998b: 76. 30 In fact I am borrowing the expression ‘selfless consciousness’ from Damasio. According to Damasio Dennett’s model gives us a theory of a selfless consciousness – a linguistic self may be there but it is still in Damasio’s sense, self-less. Damasio meant it as a criticism; part of what I want to do in this article is to consider whether this is necessarily a bad thing.


13

unity.We are told nothing whatsoever about the characteristic mine-ness of

consciousness, i.e. about our own sense of ownership of our consciousness. Dennett’s

functionalist models are first and foremost about natural language and the mind-brain,

not about phenomenology (although, as I said before, exploring the consequences of

the models for a view of consciousness ended up getting him involved in discussions

with phenomenologists about phenomenology). It is in the context of cognitive

models anyway that consciousness is explained appealing to language, self-reference

and higher-order thoughts. Body, body proper, its organic nature, or other, is (as it is

to be expected from ‘classical functionalism’) indifferent for the explanation. We are

speaking, as it were, of mental life implemented and characterizing it on the side of

the mental, not on the side of ‘body’. That on which the mental is implemented, is not

per se relevant. Obviously this upsets Damasio, as an advocate of the brain. We could

put his point thus. Although Dennett is making space for a self through language, and

thus (at least partly) explaining consciousness, nothing is said about the ownership of

such a consciousness, whether it is mine or yours, or someone else’s. In other words,

Dennett’s consciousness comes off as a selfless consciousness. Now, we know (we

know phenomenologically, one might say) that a sense of ownership goes with our

consciousness – I experience my consciousness as owned by me, i.e. as mine. In his

work31 Damasio himself defends a conception of self or consciousness according to

which self or consciousness simply is ‘having the body – body proper - in mind’32.

The fact that we are embodied conscious beings, and not Cartesian souls, shows in the

fact that our consciousness is such that we always have the self in mind. This is what

‘subjectifies’ consciouness, what makes my consciousness mine, different from yours.

Understanding how embodiment makes for such mine-ness is, for instance, crucial for

thinking about self and emotion. And self and emotions is Damasio’s territory, as it is

Nietzsche’s. Does Dennett have anything to say for himself here? The fact is,

although there are many diffferent things going on in Dennett’s theory of

31 See especially Damasio 2010. 32 This gave rise to harsh criticism. Cf. e.g. Colin McGinn : «“What has really happened is that Damasio has made an elementary confusion, and that infects his entire discussion. It is true that whenever there is a change in our mental state there is a change in the state of our body, and that this bodily state is the ground or mechanism that makes the mental state possible. But it is a gross non sequitur to infer that the mental state is about this bodily state. When I see a bird in the distance my retina and cortex are altered accordingly; however, that doesn't mean that I don't really see the bird but only my retina and cortex. The body is indeed the basis of my mind's ideas, but it is not their object. Once again Damasio has neglected the intentionality of mental states, with grotesque consequences.”» (McGinn 2003).


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consciousness, Damasio is right that functionalist accounts such as the Multiple

Drafts Model, might, while accounting for the staus of the self, and of higher-order

mental states, and for characteristics of the flow of consciousness, still leave us with a

de-subjectified consciousness in hands. Materialistic as the models may be,

embodiment is indeed, in a sense, missing. Now neither Nietzsche nor Dennett want

consciousness to be self-less in this sense, i.e. in the sense that our minds seem to be

conceivable as clean-cut separable from a particular body proper, as a Cartesian soul

might be clean-cut separable from a particular body proper (this would bring back all

problems about personal identity that Cartesian souls carried with them). Let us call

the question at stake here the question of the ownership of the flow of consciousness.

What accounts for such ownership if there is no natural unity over and above body

and brain? Who is the owner of the flow? How and why does the flow (i.e. conscious

experience) appear to me as being owned by me?

In Kinds of Minds (1998), Dennett makes some interesting suggestions which I think

converge with Nietzsche’s idea of Unterseelen (sub-souls), which Nietzsche himself

formulates for drives (Triebe). Quoting the famous passage from Zarathustra’s “The

Despisers of the Body” 33, Dennett ultimately reads Nietzsche’s words (‘Body is a

great reason’ and ‘There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom’) as

the idea that evolution embodies information in all parts of one’s body34.

In doing this he is distancing himself from the classic dis-embodied (and, as it were,

‘dis-embrained’) functionalism, inspired by Artifical Intelligence. In particular he is

trying to deal with the fact that “When you make a mind, matterials matter”. He does

not hide Damasio’s influence here. Ultimately, classical functionalism is simply the

idea that in order to be naturalizable, intelligence should be made of non-intelligent

parts. This is not something Dennett wants to drop; in that sense he is definitely still a

functionalist. What he now sees differently is the status of the parts, of the

‘homunculi’, the ‘components of mind’. These are not just sub-minds, dis-embodied

sub-functional components; rather they are nowsub-bodies. And this is an important

reason why “It is not possible to separate me from my body leaving a clean border, as

philosophers have sometimes assumed”35. In other words, in a very literal sense, what

matters is what a mind is made of. The materials of a minded portion of matter 33 Dennett 1996 : 78-89. 34 Cf. Constâncio (forthcoming), note 30, on Nietzsche against Schopenhauer on the smartness of instincts. 35 Dennett himself included (Cf. Dennett 1978, Where am I?)


15

matter. Our organic body, unlike peripheral devices of classic computers, is not a

mere auxiliary for abstract information gathering, bringing it into a nervous system

also to be thought of as an abstract control system, the body coming back into the

picture only when action is about to be performed. Although functionalism is

anything but absurd, there are problems with the fact that the specifics of physical

implementation of mental functions is not indifferent. In other words, even if the key

idea of multiple realizability makes sense in relation to central processing, (central

belief fixation as Jerry Fodor once put it36) it does not make sense when it comes to

information gathering or implementation of action: “the physical composition of

transducers and effectors is dictated by the job they have to do”. Thus, embodiment

matters. Matter matters. This does not mean that there is something wrong in thinking

of mind in terms of multiplicity or sub-parts (I must say I very much appreciate

Nietzsche’s term ‘sub-souls’, as I appreciate the fact that Nietzsche does not drop the

term ‘soul’; we certainly do not have to do that, just because we drop Cartesian

immaterialism).

Anyway the interesting point about the idea of ‘subsouls of the body’ is that it helps

counter a certain kind of mind-body dualism which may very well persist at the heart

of materialist reductionist approaches to mind and personal identity (think for instance

of Derek Parfit’s formulations and recent reformulations of his reducionist view of

Personal Identity37). The very distintion between that which is implemented and the

materials which implement it does not go well with the idea of a body’s multiple

minds, or subsouls. We may go on saying, as Dennett does, that:

There is no more anger or fear in adrenalin than there is foolishness in a bottle of whisky. These substances are per se, as irrelevant for the mental as gasoline or carbon dioxide. It is only when their abilities to function as components of larger functional systems depend on their internal composition that their so called intrinsic nature matters 38. But embodiment by sub-souls adds something to self-reference and self-

representation: it results in my flow of consciousness appearing to me as mine. Only

through it is there mine-ness of consciousness, myself as more than just unity, formal

36 Namely in The Modularity of Mind (Fodor 1983). 37 Parfit 2012. 38 Dennett 1996: 76.


16

self-reference and, self-attribution of mental states. And this is one more meaning for

Nietzsche’s “Leib bin Ich gar und ganz”.

3. Is that all? Warheit and Wissenschaft.

I have now explored the first and the second senses of selfless consciousness,

comparing Dennett and Nietzsche. Yet as we know, Nietzsche is not just interested in

self and language, self and body. He is also interested in thought’s most elaborate

products, such as systems of morality, or science. His philosophy trades in ‘truths’

and their valuing. This means that in discussing Nietzsche’s views on consciousness,

issues very different from the ones I have been considering do naturally come up.

Until now I tried to isolate questions regarding self, language and body. I think that

Nietzsche’s orientations concerning such questions are very much alive and fruitful.

But Nietzsche’s ideas regarding the thinking of linguistic thoughts are a different

department. It is here, namely, that observations regarding simplification (the

‘simplifying apparatus inseparable from language’)39, falsification, or generality as

vagueness appear. I believe such questions do not have the same status as the

discussions about self, body and language40, they are not all on the same footing.

Hence my initial suggestion that we should be exteremely careful in distinguishing

the very different pursuits that go under a ‘theory of consciousness’.

The first thing I think is worth pointing out is that if one speaks of consciousness as

‘falsification’, there must have been some claim to truth in the first place. In other

words, there must be some conception of truth at play, and there was nothing like that

in the Einheit/Vielheit issues regarding mind and language, and mind and body that I

have discussed until now. Such conception belongs rather in Nietzsche’s sensualist-

perspectivist-empiricist views of Wahrheit and Wissenschaft. The issues there are

quite distinct from Nietzsche’s insights on body, language and self. So what I want to

do to finish this article by suggesting what the differences might be.

39 Nietzsche’s talk of ‘vagueness’ or ‘simplification’ given that ‘thoughts are signs’ is itself too vague. The nature of articulation, compositionality, context, has to be considered for thought and for language prior to any such general qualifications. My point here is just that Nietzsche’s views on the role of natural language in our psychology are not by themselves a conception of language, or of thought-language relations. 40 See Katsafanas 2005 and Riccardi forthcoming. The question should be: simplification of what? What complexity was there before? Short of an already intellectualized conception of the world an sich, it is not even possible to say such thing.


17

Again, I will look for a starting point in Dennett. Looking at Dennett’s models of

consciousness we were mostly looking at Dennett’s ‘cog-sci persona’. It is there

where we found parallels with Nietzsche - the task was explaining the difference

natural language and embodiment make for certain kinds of minds from a cognitive

viewpoint. Yet is it the case that it is a viewpoint on cognition that is at stake

whenever we discuss consciousness? In the context of discussing his Intentional

Stance Theory, Dennett says the following:

The intentional stance presupposes (…) the rationality and hence the unity of the agent – the intentional system – while the Multiple Drafts Model opposes this central unity all the way. Which (…) is the right way to conceive of a mind? It all depends on how far you are. The closer you get the more the disunity, multiplicity and competitiveness stand out as important1.

What I want to suggest is that if it is not cognition that we are focusing on, we do not

have to go too close, to zoom in, go into the brain, and make the unity disappear, as

we have been doing in for thinking of body, self and language. Especially not when

the issue is thought-world relations. If we are concerned with thought-world relations

and thus truth, and truths, we might, namely, want to consider that the appropriate

units for pursuing an invetsigation are thoughts, propositions or judgements, and not

selves. In other words, the unity that matters in thinking thoughts about the world

(such as ‘2+2=4’, ‘I am Sofia’ or ‘This is a bottle’) is not the same unity we have

been discussing until now.

So the suggestion is that these two unities should not be conflated. The first concerns

mind representing (this) mind-body to itself as one-ness, centred-ness and mine-ness,

self-agency and self-control. That is the self I have been speaking about in this

article– its relation to language, and its relation to the body. It is in addressing these

questions that I believe is wise that we take from Nietzsche, in the contemporary

debate, the Intermittenzen, the achieved Einheit, the Unterseelen. The viewpoint of

the theory of cognition may, admittedly, have an impact on philosophy. But if we

pose the metaphysical question about thought-world relations, we deal with thinkers

thinking thoughts and questions of truth enter the picture. And this is a different

territory. Such issues cannot be approached by thinking about the brain from the

viewpoint of cognition, or centering on consciousness’ selflessness due to multiplicity

and bodily nature. Why not? To put it crudely, the trouble starts when we say that


18

thoughts are mental states – do we really want to do that? One might argue that there

are very good reasons not to.

On the other hand, Nietzsche on truth is a complicated subject, first of all because of

his own mixed feelings in regard to it. No sooner is he calling all truths metaphorical,

than Nietzsche, the eager reader of natural science of his time, is evoking natural

science to make us see ‘clear, hard to take, truths’. We may say that he does want to

keep some truths after all, some more than others. And so he wants to stick to truth

and truths. This is precisely what should make us carefully consider the nature of

Nietzsche’s philosophical pursuits. Nietzsche is, as he himself would claim, and that

is his great strength, a philosopher-psychologist-physiologist, a moraliste in the

French sense he so much praises. Thus, much of his critique of subject and language

is about psychology, cognition, and morals, and not so much about thought (issues to

which new approaches were rising in the German-speaking philosophical world in his

time in the hands of Husserl and Frege). For Nietzsche the philosopher-psychologist-

physiologist-moraliste, the self-lessness of consciousness is no problem; it is rather a

very valuable discovery. In fact it might be what we still want today. Yet mind-body-

brain is not all we want to think of when we think about thinking and about how

thought and world relate, or else we risk psychologist confusions (along the lines of

the one Colin McGinn accused Damasio of). So we should be careful namely in

mixing together the concept truth with assumptions and value judgments regarding

appearance-reality relations introduced in the discussions of mind-body-self-

consciousness relations. Basically, saying that all thinking is fiction or falsification

does not naturally come out of accepting the non-naturalness of the unity of the self.

In fact, accepting the non-naturalness of the Einheit of the self is not even the same

thing as saying that the unity of self – apparent as it may be – is not fully real for us.

Nietzsche’s own view on consciousness as falsification at least sometimes seem to be

nothing but over-indulgence, in its ‘romantic pessimism’ and condamnation of the

world. And in doing that he seems to forget his own criticims of the devaluing of

appearances in The Birth of Tragedy.

In conclusion, do we want a selfless consciousness or not? One first answer is Yes, if

that means that there is mind and consciousness in nature and there are no ‘given’

unities, such as Cartesian souls. Dennett and Nietzsche are together there. What we

have are intermittences and achievement, and no unity as given. The second answer is

No, if selfless consciousness means dis-embodied minds, and being oblivious to the


19

sense of ownership that characterizes our kind of consciousness. We do not want it

because our minds simply are not like that, they are not ‘dis-owned’. Nietzsche and

Dennett are together there as well. Finally, one third answer is Yes: we might want a

selfless consciousness in the sense that we may want to carefully distinguish the

issues surrounding the self at stake in the theory of cognition, in its relation to

philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, from the issues at stake in metaphysical

(and epistemological) discussions of thought-world relations. In his ‘critique of the

subject’ Nietzsche tries to do it all – being a physiologist-psychologist-moraliste, a

critic of culture and of the history of philosophy, and also sometimes a philosopher in

the more ‘conservative’ sense of dealing with thought-world relations. It is altogether

natural that he is not equally successful on all fronts41. Trying to do it all is also a

temptation for Dennett. In other words, Nietzsche and Dennett are also together here –

but they are not right.

References

Ansell Pearson, Keith, 2009, A Companion to Nietzsche, Oxford, Blackwell. Baars, Bernard, 1988, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Block N, 1994, What is Dennett’s Theory a Theory of?, Philosophical Topics, 22, 1-2 Block N. 1997, On a confusion about the function of consciousness, in Block, N., Flanagan O. & Guzeldere, G. 1997, The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press Constâncio, João, forthcoming, On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s departure from Schopenhauer. Damasio, António,1992, The Selfless Consciousness, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15, 208-209. Damasio, António, 1994, O Erro de Descartes, Lisboa, Europa América Damasio, António, 1999, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion on the Making of Consciousness, New York, Harcourt Brace. Damasio, António, 2003, Ao Encontro de Espinosa – as emoções sociais e a neurologia do sentir, Lisboa, Europa-América. Damasio, António, 2010, Self Comes to Mind – Constructing the Conscious Brain, London, Random House. Dennett, Daniel, 1986 [1969], Content and Consciousness, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul (2ªedição). Dennett, Daniel, 1981 [1978], Brainstorms - Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Cambridge MA, MIT Press Dennett, D. 1978a. Brain Writing and Mind Reading, in Brainstorms. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 39-50. Dennett, D. 1978b. Towards a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, in Brainstorms. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 149-173. Dennett, Daniel, 1991, Consciousness Explained, Boston, Little Brown. Dennett, Daniel, 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea - Evolution and The Meanings of Life, New York, Touchstone. Tradução portuguesa: A Ideia Perigosa de Darwin, Lisboa, Círculo de Leitores, 2000. Dennett, Daniel, 1996, Kinds of Minds, Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, New York, Basic Books. Dennett, Daniel, 1998, Brainchildren - Essays on Designing Minds, London, Penguin Dennett, D. 1998, Animal Consciousness, in Brainchildren. London, Penguin.

41 This brings us to a very important hermeneutic issue for Niezsche studies: is it really the same author continental and analytical philosophers are interested in when they are interested in Nietzsche, in particular where a critique of the subject is concerned? I would not go that far.


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Emden, Christian, 2005, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness and the Body, Urbana, Chicago, University of Illinois Press. Fodor, Jerry, 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Hofstadter, Douglas & Dennett, Daniel, 1981, The Mind’s I – Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, New York, Bantam Books. Katsafanas, Paul, 2005, Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization, European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (1), 1-31. Magnus, B & Huggins, K, (eds), 1996, The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. McDowell, John 1998 [1994], “The Content of Perceptual Experience”, Philosophical Quarterly xliv 190‐ 205. Reprinted in McDowell 1998 Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. McGinn, Colin, 2003, Review of A. Damásio, 'Looking for Spinoza': The Source of Emotion, NYT, February 23. Miguens, Sofia, 2002, Uma Teoria Fisicalista do Conteúdo e da Consciência – D. Dennett e os debates da filosofia da mente, Porto, Campo das Letras. Miguens, Sofia, 2008, Será que a minha mente está dentro da minha cabeça? Da ciência cognitiva à filosofia, Porto, Campo das Letras. Miguens, Sofia & Preyer, Gerhard, eds, 2012, Consciousness and Subjectivity. Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe auf der Grundlage der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe Werke herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin / New York, Walter de Gruyter 1967ff und Nietzsche Briefwechsel Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1975 ff., herausgegeben von Paolo D’Iorio (www.nietzschesource.org) Parfit, Derek, 2012, We are not human Beings, Philosophy, volume 87 / Issue 01 / January 2012, pp 5-28. Riccardi, Mattia, forthcoming, Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness, in M. Dries, Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind. Richardson, John, 1996, Nietzsche’s System, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, David, 1997, A Theory of Consciousness, in Block, Flanagan & Guzeldere 1997, The Nature of Consciousness – Philosophical debates, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

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Three Senses of Selfless Consciousness Nietzsche and Dennett on mind, language and body

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