Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Stilpo, Friedrich Nietzsche and Chauncey Wright

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6 ideas

15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 1. Mind / b. Purpose of mind

7131	The intellect and senses are a simplifying apparatus [Nietzsche]
	Full Idea: The intellect and the senses are, above all, a simplifying apparatus.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46])
	A reaction: This seems like a profound truth to me. The world, and our own bodies, are of almost infinite complexity, such that only a god could grasp it. In order to teach, we have to simplify even further. We choose a level of simplification for contexts.

23184	The mind is a simplifying apparatus [Nietzsche]
	Full Idea: The intellect and the senses are above all a simplifying apparatus.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[046])
	A reaction: Very plausible, and not an idea I have met elsewhere. There's a PhD here for someone. It fits with my view as universals in language (which is most of language), which capture diverse things by ironing out their differences.

15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 5. Unity of Mind

24090	Our inclinations would not conflict if we were a unity; we imagine unity for our multiplicity [Nietzsche]
	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.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[35])
	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.

7152	With protoplasm ½+½=2, so the soul is not an indivisible monad [Nietzsche]
	Full Idea: Along the guiding thread of the body. When protoplasm divides ½ + ½ does not = 1, but = 2. Thus the belief in the soul as monad becomes untenable.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[68])
	A reaction: This is presumably an anticipatory remark about the cutting of the corpus callosum (in the brain), which seems to cut a physical person into two people. Personally I always found the absolute unity of the mind or person implausible.

7130	Unity is not in the conscious 'I', but in the organism, which uses the self as a tool [Nietzsche]
	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.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46])
	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.

4536	It is a major blunder to think of consciousness as a unity, and hence as an entity, a thing [Nietzsche]
	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.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power (notebooks) [1888], §529)
	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?