Nietzsche on Consciousness and Language

Laura Elizia Haubert

The subject of consciousness occasionally appears in Nietzsche's youth texts; however, it is in his mature phase, and especially between the years 1880 and 1888, that the German philosopher profoundly dealt with the problem of consciousness in his work. In fact, it is observed that of the aphorisms written during this period, few came to be published and the majority of the reflection is in its posthumous notes. This research will be focused on some aspects of the problem that were exposed in the aphorisms published during its lifetime, as 354 in The Gay Science, which besides presenting some of the essential conceptions for the understanding of consciousness, also articulates the role of consciousness in relation to language, thus demarcating the link between the act of becoming conscious and the act of being able to communicate with others. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to make clear to what extent consciousness and language work together to produce a sense of transcendence that leads to the illusion of discontinuity between the real and the spiritual world. For this, the philosopher approached in the aphorism the problem of consciousness through physiological and animal history, from which the consciousness appears in a position different from that which had been guaranteed by the philosophical tradition. For Nietzsche, consciousness is nothing more than a superficiality, and it serves to connect the men who by being weak animals have developed communication and consciousness as weapons for survival. With this in mind, one observes how the philosopher sought to restructure some of the classic problems of tradition by proposing a new interpretation of consciousness and its relation to language from the presented aphorism.