The Gay Science and the Dismal Science

The NDPR has two new reviews of book about Nietzsche up.

One concerns FN's "philosophical psychology." The book is the work of Mattei Riccardi. The review comes to us from Christopher Fowles, of the University of Oxford.

I will merely drop in this passage from Fowles:

Consciousness has been the locus of much discussion regarding Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind, and not without reason. The inadequacy of conscious thought and the threat posed by the misunderstandings it engenders are central themes in Nietzsche’s mature writings. Furthermore, his remarks are perplexing. Nietzsche presents consciousness as at once a danger—error-strewn, superficial, misleading—and a nullity, of little consequence in contrast to the sub-conscious interplay of drives and affects. One might reasonably wonder if these can be reconciled without Nietzsche being guilty of some egregiously misleading overstatement. Riccardi’s picture, however, promises a solution. Nietzsche, we are told, should be understood as a pluralist about consciousness. Riccardi disentangles qualitative and perceptual senses of ‘consciousness’ from the dominant sense addressed in GS §354. It is this dominant sense, which Riccardi identifies as reflective consciousness (‘^Rconsciousness’), that is both overestimated and a danger.

Fowles is using GS as an abbreviation for The Gay Science, Nietzsche's 1882 book that contains among much else the first occurrence of the expression "God is dead."

The title of the book, by the way, was a common 18th and 19th century expression for the poetic arts. Rabelais may have popularized it, as "gai sçavoir." This was the expression that Carlyle was riffing on when he gave economics the moniker "the dismal science."

I just learned about that connection myself. One earns something new every day.

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