24090
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Our inclinations would not conflict if we were a unity; we imagine unity for our multiplicity [Nietzsche]
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Full Idea:
How is it that we satisfy our stronger inclinations at the expense of our weaker inclinations? - In itself, if we were a unity, this split could not exist. In fact we are a multiplicity that has imagined a unity for itself.
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From:
Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[35])
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A reaction:
Plato had the same thought, but stopped at three parts, rather than a multiplicity. What Nietzsche fails to say, I think, is that this 'imagined' unity of the mind is not optional, and obviously has a real link to the one body and the one life.
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7130
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Unity is not in the conscious 'I', but in the organism, which uses the self as a tool [Nietzsche]
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Full Idea:
If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious 'I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the ... prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool.
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From:
Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46])
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A reaction:
What an interesting thinker Nietzsche was! I think I agree with this. I think the self is built on the necessary internalised body-map all animals must have. The body requires the map, not the map needing the body.
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4536
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It is a major blunder to think of consciousness as a unity, and hence as an entity, a thing [Nietzsche]
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Full Idea:
There is a tremendous blunder in absurdly overestimating consciousness, the transformation of it into a unity, an entity - 'spirit', 'soul', something that feels, thinks, wills.
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From:
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power (notebooks) [1888], §529)
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A reaction:
This is a wonderfully modern and scientific view. Even strong materialists still make claims about mental unity, behind which an extravagent and contradictory metaphysics can be hidden. Was Nietzsche, then, an 'eliminativist' about mind?
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