Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology by Mattia RiccardiClaire KirwinMattia Riccardi, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi + 249 pp. isbn: 9780198803287. Hardcover, $70.00.Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher. Indeed, it is probably fair to say, as many commentators have, that he was an anti-systematic philosopher. It is harder to say what this means, and harder still to know how to deal with it when we aim to interpret his philosophy. For we wish to attribute to Nietzsche certain claims and positions, perhaps even arguments, and in doing so we generally prefer that these not contradict each other. And so as we attempt to understand “Nietzsche’s philosophy” as a coherent entity, we tend to find ourselves—for better or worse—heading down the path of systematizing that philosophy.Mattia Riccardi’s Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology is an impressive example of such a systematizing reading of Nietzsche. In developing his account of Nietzsche’s (mature) philosophy of mind, Riccardi acknowledges that Nietzsche’s own approach to this topic is “scattered” and “piecemeal” (5). What Riccardi aims to offer is a comprehensive reconstruction of the systematic account that Nietzsche, for whatever reason, did not explicitly give us. And what we are presented with here is a very systematic Nietzsche, one who offers a comprehensive and detailed account of the inner workings of the mind in terms of drives and affects and their relation (this is the topic of the book’s Part I, “Beneath the Surface”); consciousness—three different types of consciousness, to be precise—and the sense in which it is epiphenomenal (in Part II, “Mapping the Surface”); and the nature of the self, the possibility of self-knowledge, the nature of the will, and the relevance of all of this for the Nietzschean “ideal type” of human being (in Part III, “The Upshot”). [End Page 203]We might worry that such a systematic philosopher is no longer quite recognizable as Nietzsche—that in doing such comprehensive and systematic reconstructive work one is somehow leaving behind the Nietzsche who wrote not treatises but rather aphorisms, polemics, pseudo-biblical texts, and poetry. But Riccardi is upfront that what he is doing is reconstructive work of this kind and meticulous in showing how the positions he develops can plausibly be attributed to Nietzsche—or at the very least, that such positions can be constructed out of genuinely Nietzschean building blocks. These positions are fleshed out and given contemporary relevance through discussion of their relation to modern accounts of mindedness (the higher-order thought theory of consciousness, for example, a version of which—carefully modified—Riccardi attributes to Nietzsche), but at the same time Nietzsche’s thought is throughout set carefully within the relevant historical and biographical contexts. The seeds and impetus for Nietzsche’s ideas are located in authors he was known to have read (Schopenhauer, Leibniz, and Stendhal, of course, but also Schneider, Mayer, Fouillée, Espinas, and more). The development of these ideas over time is then traced through Nietzsche’s notes and published work. At each point, alternative readings of these texts that have been proposed in the secondary literature are considered and carefully, persuasively, refuted. For philosophers seeking to offer a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche’s thought on some topic, this sort of approach should be seen as the gold standard. And for anyone interested in understanding what Nietzsche has to say about human psychology, this book will be essential reading.Riccardi’s Nietzsche offers us a serious and detailed philosophy of mind. It seems appropriate, then, to respond to it as such. Rather than giving a précis of each chapter, or debating the exegetical accuracy of the account, I shall instead offer some critical engagement with the detail of the account itself. I will focus on two key components of the system Riccardi elaborates: first, the account of reflective consciousness and, second, the sense in which he takes that form of consciousness to be epiphenomenal. These parts of the system, the topics of chapters 5 and 7, respectively, play crucial roles within the architecture of the book as a whole. For taken together, they show just how radically...