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Bernard Reginster, The Nietzschean Self, by Paul Katsafanas, Mind, Volume 126, Issue 504, October 2017, Pages 1260–1267, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzx021
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Extract
Paul Katsafanas’ new book is composed largely of previously published materials, but they are here organized into a comprehensive view of Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind, understood broadly enough to encompass his philosophy of action. The guiding ambition of the book is to show that while Nietzsche’s conception of the human mind grounds his notorious devaluation of consciousness, as well as his rejection of traditional conceptions of free will and agency, it also allows for the preservation of these concepts in a suitably modified form. Thus, chapters 2-5 examine the framing concepts of Nietzschean psychology—the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, the character of drives, and the nature of valuation—and chapters 6-9 endeavour to articulate Nietzsche’s new conceptions of willing, agency, and the self that are both compatible with his psychology and philosophically plausible in their own right. The book is clear and engaging. Katsafanas makes judicious use of concepts and theories from more recent philosophical psychology to illuminate Nietzsche’s views, and he offers detailed, insightful discussions of relevant secondary literature. Yet I wonder whether he ultimately succeeds in steering a viable course between an acknowledgement of Nietzsche’s systematic devaluation of consciousness and the ambition to attribute to him a robust conception of agency.