Friedrich Nietzsche

The notion of consciousness found in humans may well be the root of misery

Date published: 10/9/2008

FOR THE PAST few weeks, I've been going through the latest developments in my philosophy, focusing in on the "phenomenological method" and how it relates to the sensation of the self. I have not run out of things to say on this topic, so how's about we continue?

The main idea last week was that the self always imposes a negativity on the things it experiences--objects always get defined as "not-me." The sensation of the subject is not (and cannot) be any more than this.

That's why I'm always so easily ticked off when people talk about the history of evolution and how it relates to "self-consciousness." So often, self-consciousness gets described as this tremendous achievement in the history of life, as if elephants and octopuses (with their marginal senses of self) are merely on their way to "discovering" themselves in the fashion of humans. Why do people talk as if the self is something lurking in the real world, waiting to be realized? If we are to define the sense of self as anything, it would have to be nastier than that; it is a superimposition smeared on top of experiencing life fully.

Earlier, I mentioned that, in the subject's interaction with objects, objects always get defined with a distance and a negativity. Everything is always not-oneself. This is bad--everything the subject touches gets separated from it--but think how much worse this is when the subject goes from interacting with objects to trying to interact with itself!

We have the ability to judge and criticize our actions--so instead of being ourselves fully (that is to say, innocent), we are allowed to prescribe changes and improvements to ourselves. We can split our "narrative self"--the story of our lives and personalities--with our sense of being an observer, and can use the observer-self to dismantle and cannibalize our character.

Nietzsche puts this very well in aphorism 224 of "The Gay Science": "I fear that animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal."

Why are we humans so pitifully removed from other animals? Principally because we have this alienating distance between ourselves and our environment. We become embarrassed, we repress our feelings--in psychoanalytic terms, we have a superego that is constantly watching us, inhibiting us, disconnecting us from our world.

The continual attempt to escape from experience, always climbing up higher and higher for some vantage point to watch everything from--this only tangles us up more and more painfully in the web of reality.

Joe Holmes is a student at the University of Mary Washington. Reach him at jholmes3@umw.edu.

Date published: 10/9/2008