A New Way of “Thinking” Consciousness: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Neo-Materialism

Abstract

This paper re-examines consciousness through Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and contemporary neo-materialism, arguing that traditional views overstate its importance and that retreating to the subconscious is inadequate. Using a moth infestation metaphor, it highlights the interconnectedness of sentient and non-sentient beings and advocates for recognizing our shared existence. Nietzsche’s perspectivism shows that human will arises from interdependent life forces, while Wittgenstein’s “form of life” illustrates that meaning comes from shared practices. In one reading of the form of life, religion can be seen as different forms of life. This paper concludes that theology must rethink its focus on human consciousness post the “anthropological turn”, avoiding dualistic body–soul separations. By embracing a holistic view of interconnectedness, we can enrich our understanding of human existence and foster compassionate engagement with diverse life forms, promoting a more integrated and empathetic approach to living.

1. Introduction

In the following article, I discuss the notions of “perspectivism” in Nietzsche and “form of life” in Wittgenstein, and through the constellations of different readings, I will try to bring us closer to understanding why consciousness in philosophy and theology has been overrated and why it is not the right move to go to the un- or subconscious as a refuge. To draw up an account of how as human beings we are sentient and of understanding and are navigating the world while also being in the world, I start with the common moth. I aim to arrive at an account of how we coexist with other beings—sentient and non-sentient—that will open a new way of thinking about consciousness and the way we are in the world. Through Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and especially the neo-materialist philosophers of the 21st century, I would like to show that we are not so conscious or self-conscious after all or that it takes a new way to relate to that concept or part of our being. Once the philosophical concept of consciousness has been dethroned, we can have a broader conversation about what kind of beings we are, not in distinction from but in connection to other species and even things in the world.

A few summers ago, I met a friend who told me that her life had been upended by moths. Her apartment needed to be fumigated, all fabrics needed to be brought to the drycleaner’s or to be washed on a hot cycle and put in plastic boxes; a lot of her finest clothes had to be thrown out. It was an infestation of moths that she could not master, her wool and other organic clothes had been overtaken by Tineola Bisselliella (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tineola_bisselliella, accessed on 6 May 2025), the common cloths moth. Tineola is one of approximately 160,000 different species of moths whose larvae or caterpillars “are considered a serious pest, as they can derive nourishment from clothing—in particular wool, but many other natural fibers—and also, like most related species, from stored foods, such as grains”. I too have battled the same pest and had been under the false impression that I had finally found a solution for the infestation, albeit not through chemical warfare. I had obtained Ichneumon Wasps that lay their eggs into the larvae of the moth and thus kill them. The promise was to be moth free in twelve weeks after distributing little sachets of wasps every two weeks. The adults can live from fifteen to thirty days or until after mating and the overall life cycle from egg to egg typically takes four to six months. Unfortunately, that meant that when I saw new Tineolas around the apartment looking to mate even after six months, I knew my battle was not won. And so more wasps needed to be ordered as part of this biological warfare. Eventually I resolved myself to live with Tineola and her many relatives as well as the Ichneum wasps and started to understand that we all share in our forms of lives. This is where this article will lead us: shared forms of life between humans and animals and even things that are not sentient. It is not to be conscious or to be sentient that makes one a protagonist in the shared scenes of our lives.

The episode with the moths leads us to Aby Warburg and his deepest point of delirium at Bellevue. Warburg “’practiced a cult with the moths and butterflies that [flew] into his room at night. He speaks to them for hours. He calls them his little soul animals (Seelentierchen) and tells them about his suffering’”1. There is a lesson we may learn from Warburg. Instead of chemical or biological warfare we ought to regard moths as the kind of little living souls—Seelentierchen—that will be left for us to confide in when everything else is out of joint. Warburg also had been deeply impressed by Nietzsche; his ideals concerning “surviving images” were developed from the Nietzschean perspective of a genealogy of resemblances. Didi-Huberman writes that Aby Warburg had an “entirely critical way of envisaging the emergence of forms [le devinir de forms], one that went against the grain of every type of teleology or positivism or utilitarianism” (Didi-Huberman 2017, p. 106). Images are not generally formed like concepts. What Warburg helps us see is that we are part of the world through relations that come from such picturings or imaginations. Didi-Huberman holds that Warburg developed his ideas of surviving images from the perspective of a genealogy of resemblances, which is a Nietzschean perspective. “Aby Warburg created in the aesthetic domain […] a disturbance that is more discrete than, but comparable to, the one Nietzsche had already created in the ethical domain”. We also find another of the tiny insects in Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense; this time it is a gnat (Nietzsche 1783). Nietzsche starts by looking at the universe from a perspective outside of it, describing earth as a “star upon which clever beasts invented knowing” (Nietzsche 1783, p. 4). He goes on to deride this as “only a minute” (ibid., p. 5) in world history, after which the clever beasts had to die. He criticizes intellect as having “no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life” (ibid, p. 10). He holds that only humans thought “the world’s axis turned within it”, and that “if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself” (ibid. pp. 12–13).

To see what Nietzsche called a genealogy of resemblances, we need a new perspective. My anecdote of moths and wasps and human beings and the way we live together is an attempt to reach something that connects us that is not made of intelligible stuff, or of the conscious. Living together with other species is a form of symbiosis2. This symbiosis could be a more vivid one, as we can see through the example of Aby Warburg. He established a relationship with the moth that flew through his room at night. Warburg, the master of creating relationships between images and the way we relate them to one another was obviously also quite capable of creating relationships of another kind. Family resemblance is the key to the formation here. Warburg changed his perspective when he had to and called moths little soul animals and confided in them as the only friendly souls around him. Doing this was like practicing a ritual and what Warburg shows is that we can take seriously family resemblance and its creating relationships through imaging and imagination, e.g., between ourselves and moths, similar to the relations he created between his images in ever new arrangements. These newly minted constellations are not answers to questions, they just are and show the relations they have created.

Nietzsche begins the essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (Nietzsche 1783) by observing that if we could communicate with gnats, we would find they see themselves as the center of the universe, like our own self-perception. This highlights the need for a genuine shift in perspective, urging us to rethink our understanding of body and soul as interconnected rather than separate. I argue that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein offer valuable insights for this rethinking, which contemporary neo-materialist thinkers have further developed. In my paper, I, therefore, present three perspectives. First, I explore Nietzsche’s concept of “perspectivism”, emphasizing that his notion of “will” is not about sovereign selfhood, but rather emerges from a struggle of interconnected life forces—human, animal, and material. This interpretation challenges the common view that perspectivism aligns with transcendental philosophy, arguing instead that it should be viewed through a monistic lens. Second, I delve into Wittgenstein’s idea of the “form of life”, positing that meaning arises from shared practices embedded within our respective forms of life. I contend that interpreting Wittgenstein through a transcendental lens only aligns with a dualist perspective, while a monist interpretation does justice to his insights regarding meaning and understanding. In the third part of this paper, I explicate how both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein can be read through a neo-materialist, vital materialist, or agential materialist framework. I argue that thinking does not operate in the way of intentional representation aimed at truth; rather, it is a speculative process that resembles Aby Warburg’s method of creating new constellations. From this perspective, thinking becomes a deeply creative and bodily enterprise, where consciousness does not represent mastery, but reflects our engagement with the world and the connections we forge. Through an assemblage of interpretations, I aim to illustrate a web of resemblances between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, ultimately proposing a new account of consciousness that recognizes our roles as creators and participants in the patterns we assemble.3 Contemporary philosophy is also challenged by a new temporality, one that one could say is always already in the future perfect.4 Our thinking is a mapping, a kind of running ahead of ourselves by putting things together in the way we do and at the same time speculating to finding ourselves in those patterns that we invented through assembling them. It is a thinking process that is bodily and performative and as bodies we are geared towards the future as Davor Löffler writes in his paper on the temporality atmospheres. (Cf. Löffler 2013). Doing philosophy becomes an aesthetic endeavour of putting together and assembling which is at the same time a creating and a recognizing of the connections we not only make but also are. This is the new account of consciousness that I am putting forward: we are not the masters of representation through consciousness, since we ourselves are of the same stuff that representations are made of and the best that we can do is make a good guess at it.

If we look closely at the structure, temporality, or constellations of a “thinking” or “consciousness” that is not only intellectual, but also sensual, religion or faith also begins to play a different role in the larger picture. Before it was episteme, knowledge, and then hypotheses that led us to knowledge, and on the side of the sensible, it was sensible imagination or guessing that led to faith. Once we step out of the dualism of sensation/materiality and knowledge/truth, we can see that our way of being in the world is denser and much more complex than logical truth or a cogito would have us believe.

2. Nietzsche and Perspectivism

In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many “souls”. Hence a philosopher should claim the right to include willing-as-such within the sphere of morals—morals being understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of “life” comes to be.

(Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1966, p. 27))

Nietzsche’s concept of human life is such that the body is understood as the model of a fight between the parts of an organism. Human beings consist of many living beings, cells, and organs that are in a constant fight. There is a part that commands and there is a part that obeys. There are many constantly changing constellations. Obeying and commanding are fundamental categories of the relation of things to one another in constantly shifting constellations. The whole human being, his and her thinking, feeling, and wanting, is like that. This interpretation (and my translation) of aphorism 19 in Beyond Good and Evil leads us in the direction that can further a take on thinking as involved with the body and sensible intuition as opposed to a pure cognizing mind. Many “actors” fight over the commanding function, the configuration is constantly forming. Wanting is commanding and obeying. A manifold of bodily processes underlies our thinking.

The aphorism is also a first approximation to form an account of what Nietzsche calls the “will” or “willing”. Willing manifests itself in the relations of commanding and obeying. There are not only different organisms that the human being consists of, but there are also other organisms that partake in the fight. A social structure composed of many “souls” is not as we would think of one of many subjects, but Nietzsche’s account of willing goes beyond the human will and consciousness to what he calls the phenomenon of “life”. What does Nietzsche mean by “willing” or “willing-as-such”? The notion underlies his perspectivism which does not give pride of place to the human being’s perspective. The notions of perspectivism and will are tightly interwoven and Nietzsche’s account of the will to power is derived from a perspectivism that has less to do with an “agreement” of the intellect, but more with an “agreement” on the bodily level. The will is a driving force which works from sensations as well as from thinking and emotion. This bodily will is not restricted to human beings. Now we should be able to start to see why moths are our serious competitors. This willing is a bodily willing that we share with all other living beings, with all animals, and likely also with plants if not stones. What we can say for sure is that Nietzsche’s perspective involves bodily willing. I first elucidate what Nietzsche means by the invention (Hineindichtung) of the subject. Then I show why perspectivism has been interpreted as a version of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that perspectivism is neither a relativism nor a nihilism. It allows us to “think” or rather “constellate” relations between human beings, animals, and things anew.

2.1. The Invention of the Subject

In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that the biggest mistake of philosophy has been Plato’s invention of the “Good-in-itself”. Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought this was the inversion of truth and “denying perspective, the basic condition of all life” (Nietzsche 1966, Pref. p. 3). The vantage point from the realm of ideas that is cut off from the things and people in the world would be one that lacks the perspective that Nietzsche thought was the condition of life. His perspectivism consisted in the idea that there is not only the human being, but also the rest of the world that constructs and measures, and touches and designs, which all ends up being will onto will. The effects of this have to do with the relations of power between different beings.

Contemporary interpretative approaches to Nietzsche’s perspectivism are varied and reflect the rich engagement with his philosophical ideas. One can roughly distinguish epistemological approaches, which argue that there is no absolute truth (“Plato’s Ideas”) and that knowledge is contingent upon individual perspectives. Alexander Nehamas argues against this that all knowledge is bound to individual perspectives. His reading of perspectivism is immanent, in that there are infinitely many ways of interacting with the world, each of which is distinct from our specifically human viewpoint. His second position is that the perspectivism is transcendent, in that the human perspective is limited in such a way that it is impossible for us even to image what the viewpoints of other creatures are like (Nehamas 1983, p. 475). This is also the starting point of Robert Miner who explores perspectivism through an epistemic pluralist lens that embraces multiple, and even conflicting, viewpoints to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world. He thinks that in The Gay Science, (Nietzsche 1974) piles up a “variety” of perspectives for the sake of increasing knowledge. But only a free spirit can practice these in a “dance-like activity” (Miner 2017, p. 69).

There are also ethical perspectives that focus on the implications of perspectivism, which supports moral pluralism. The rejection of universal moral truth leads to diverse moral viewpoints and flexible ethical frameworks. When it comes to aesthetic interpretations, John Wilcox gives an interesting interpretation, since he emphasizes the affective dimension. He introduces a “transcognitive” approach to highlight how non-cognitive attitudes and values shape knowledge (Wilcox 1974). This is probably the closest to my interpretation, which focuses on creativity and art shaping human understanding. Finally, perspectivism ends up having political and social dimensions, especially concerning discussions about identity and narrative, and some of the neo-materialist thinkers I discuss take their starting point in such an interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. The strongest connection to postmodernity is through the critique of grand narratives and emphasis on the plurality of meanings, e.g., Donna Haraway’s critique of the Anthropocene and the introduction of the Chthulucene in Staying with the Trouble.5 But Haraway’s is also a critical perspective and stands against those critical perspectives that are worried that perspectivism will lead to relativism or nihilism.6 In the following, I will put together some interpretations of perspectivism to collect them like images and constellate them into a bigger image or album, as Warburg was constellating his images in the Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg 2020).

Henry Kerger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is developed along the lines of the notion of justice and juridical norms. Kerger holds that after Plato, human beings have been constructing themselves as thinkers who live in a world of appearances and that their intellect can “know” according to rules of reason. Inventing concepts was the pride of human beings, and those concepts were true with a capital T since they were derived from the ideas-in-themselves. The shift that Nietzsche’s philosophy undergoes is one where perspectivism is not cognition—as cognition cannot be carried out by a general subject as it conducts itself in alliance with a law—but instead, the cognition of a specific being consists in acting and reacting so that perspectivism has only a complex form of specificity (Kerger 2003, p. 191). Furthermore, Kerger thinks that Nietzsche’s perspective needs the “negation of the subject and the atom as the last ontological unit” (ibid., my translation). Kerger quotes Nietzsche from The Will to Power II in this connection stating that “the mistake lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject”.7 Instead, he argues that Nietzsche thinks that in all beings, there is a will to power; there is not just human will, but an entirely different world from the one that humans perceive and that it is not about which perception is more correct. One could say that given such a reading, the question of correctness becomes meaningless. Concepts, Nietzsche insists, are products of the imagination, and if each of us had a different kind of sense perception, now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, then we would not speak of the regularity of nature. What even is a law of nature? he asks furthermore. We are only acquainted with its effects, its relation to other laws of nature, which we know only as sums of relations. Therefore, Nietzsche draws the conclusion that “all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence” in the essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense discussed before. All that we know of the laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them, which is time and space, and therefore, relationships of succession and number. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins, writes Nietzsche.

2.2. Perspectivism as Kantian Transcendental Philosophy

This idea, that we bring the laws of nature, e.g., time and space, to the phenomena we perceive is an outright Kantian idea. Therefore, some interpreters have tried to show that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is akin to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. One of these interpreters is Volker Gerhardt who underlines this in an article called “The perspective of perspectivism”8—also arguing that the perspectivism of being is the fundamental condition of life for Nietzsche, as we have already seen above (Nietzsche 1966, Pref. p. 3). Nietzsche thinks all cognition is bound to perspectives and that we cannot see “around the corner”. Gerhardt reads this as akin to Kant’s transcendental conditions. Kant thinks we can only grasp reality the way in which it appears to us and not how it is in-itself. Nietzsche too calls space, time, and causality marks of the human condition, while all sense and meaning are rooted in perspectives. Consciousness itself is a perspectival sphere. However, Gerhardt adds that there is a problem, since saying that everything is perspectival stands itself outside of all perspective. He explains that whatever we see inside of intuition is only one perspective or aspect, a fact that we can only grasp when seeing another aspect or perspective of the same thing. Gerhardt uses Wittgenstein’s duck–rabbit9 example to elucidate this. Only when you look at the lines on the paper and the aspect change happens before your eyes you can see a rabbit and at the same time you can now not see the duck. He goes on to say that to have an account of truth, we would need a concept of the thing we look at under different aspects, but this concept would again have to go beyond perspectivity—not unlike Plato’s Ideas. Plato’s Ideas go beyond perspectivity and still we must accept that they are prone to a specific point of view or perspective. Gerhardt sees a contradiction here: if there is to be something like a rational perspective to overcome all subjective standpoints and represent the thing objectively, no matter from where, that must be a view from nowhere, and that view has no perspective. Gerhardt then tries to solve this dilemma by introducing the notion of interest, and by making the perspective of perspectivism a critical metaphysical idea that disposes of claims to knowledge that cannot be had. In the essay discussed, he goes on to say that Nietzsche thinks the difference between theory and praxis is fateful, because every concept contains something that is inspired by our neediness or interest which makes the dominance of praxis obvious. The perspectival is a specific action/reaction/activity of the subject, a center of force says Nietzsche, according to Gerhard. “The center acts against the whole and experiences itself as an active force. ‘I’ and ‘subject’ are the horizon-line, through which the change of the perspectival glance happens” (Gerhardt 1992, p. 271).

Gerhardt’s reading is superb, especially since it is very close to Nietzsche’s own description of the subject being only an invention. However, his reading does not go far enough since it does not allow for the possibility of different wills fighting, human and non-human. While Gerhardt thinks the logic of the will to power is one of Selbstherrschaft—“self-government”, in that we want to become who we are—he is missing the point that the subject is invented in the first place, so the fact that we are constantly inventing ourselves needs to be seen not just as an intellectual, but also as a material affair. In short, Gerhardt is still a dualist. And while he gives room for interest in Nietzsche, he underestimates the role that the drives play.

Let me continue our tableau with a reading that does take the drives into account. In Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients Matthew Meyer suggests that Nietzsche’s perspectivism claims that “our drives play a role in effectively constituting our commonsense life-words” (Meyer 2014, p. 239). Nietzsche, Meyer points out, goes against positivism, and with that refers to Teichmueller’s work The Apparent and the Real World (Teichmueller 2007). While Meyer thinks Teichmueller is right that the world is perspectival, he underlines that perspectivism is not about arguing that true substances are found in the realm of the spirit. Meyer argues that it is the sensible world that is perspectival, and that there is no appeal to a substantial or immortal soul in Nietzsche. Instead, he holds that “all creditability, all good conscience, all evidence10 of truth come only from the senses” (Nietzsche 1966, p. 134). This is an important reversal that cannot be underlined enough. We have completely made the shift of knowledge coming from logical thought to knowledge and truth coming from the senses. Finally, Meyer argues with Plato’s Theaetetus (Plato 2006) that what the senses report is that something appears as such to a particular perceiver. The senses do not provide evidence for mind-independent or non-relational facts about the world. This goes back to Protagoras for whom appearances are reality or man is the measure of all things. Nietzsche sees that brute sensations are bound up with and relative to the knower, but they do not falsify some further reality. Meyer concludes “I claim that Nietzsche is simply replacing an ontology that includes things-in-themselves with an ontology of dynamic relations” (Meyer 2014, p. 205). This ontology of relations will be at the center of the third part of this paper on neo-materialism.

2.3. Perspectivism Is Not a Relativism or Nihilism

As mentioned twice before, Nietzsche holds that perspectivism is the foundational condition of life. Our cognition is bound to perspectives. We only see a specific view of the whole, although it seems to be a whole to us. Interestingly, this could as well be a phenomenological perspective. In a short article for the Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books (Alloa 2017), Emmanuel Alloa defends Nietzsche’s ideas of perspectivism against the alleged triumph of relativism using phenomenology. He sums up how to read Nietzsche’s conviction in that there are no facts, only interpretations, as he writes in The Will to Power (Nietzsche 1968, p. 481): “[…] I would say, no, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations”. Alloa wants to revise the myth that there is an “anything goes” approach in Nietzsche. On the contrary, he underlines that Nietzsche stigmatizes those who think there is only “a jolly dance of appearances alone”. Affirming the rise of mere appearances in a society of pure spectacle is to remain caught in the metaphysical dualisms, Alloa contends. Nietzsche scolds such a naïve and comfortable perspectivism, which affirms only that everyone has different perspectives. Instead, Alloa elaborates an ambitious perspectivism which aims at a different conception of truth. The displacement of one’s own perspective is not just a matter of personal, subjective growth, but a first step towards objectivity “to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity’”, Alloa continues. Nietzsche wants us to “employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (Alloa 2017). This is an invitation to change standpoints, to engage in a pluralization of aspects. It is not a betrayal of objectivity, but its precondition. Alloa comes up with the same criticism of the subject that I have elaborated on above when he writes:

Let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, willing, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ’absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself’ they always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of an eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.

(Alloa 2017)

Perspectivism is not a relativism, instead, Alloa underlines that Nietzsche thinks the more perspectives we are able to draw together, the more comprehensive our objectivity will be. He is close to Wilcox here. Nietzsche warns us against naïve metaphysics which believes one can produce a discourse about facts regarding one’s own position. Objectivity requires accepting that there are infinitely more standpoints than the one we currently hold. We cannot pretend speaking from the vantage point of others. Nietzsche says, and we have heard this before from Volker Gerhardt: “we cannot look around our corner”. He stresses that at least we are not decreeing any more that our angle is the only perspective permitted. Alloa presents the following quote from The Gay Science:

This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner (in German ver(all)gemeinert, a pun on general and mean that does not work in English); whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and one who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.

(Nietzsche 1974, p. 354).

In this quote, we can see, furthermore, that Nietzsche couples perspectivism with the senses and turns around the equation in pointing out that “becoming conscious” is coupled with falsification, to the point where consciousness in the sense of the intellect becomes a danger.

But let us go back to the perspectivism that comes from the senses and that is crucial for our way in the world. A recent volume on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein that compiles older comparative papers in the first part, but also looks for systematic relations in the second part, makes the same connection between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein that consists in the connection of perspectivism from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein. The editors argue that the way the Philosophical Investigations are composed avoids any form of dogmatism and frames tentative solutions, without a clear preference for one side. Such a procedure, the editors say, “might be called perspectivist, could be one point of intersection with Nietzsche” (Takagi and Zambito 2023, p. 2).

As we saw, Meyer thinks for Nietzsche there are two different worlds of mental experience: a conceptual and a non-conceptual one. The conceptual one Nietzsche calls consciousness11 and it falsifies the contents of a non-conceptualized experience. The sensible world is one of relationships, “basic sensations that become building blocks for our respective worlds are generated through forces interacting with each other, and therefore even in sensation we do not encounter some non-relational fact, but something already constituted by relations” (Meyer 2014, p. 216). Nietzsche insists in The Will to Power that “it is our needs that interpret the world, our drives and their ‘For and Against’” (Nietzsche 1968, p. 481). Meyer writes: “Thus, when Nietzsche speculates on whether all of existence is engaged in interpretation in (Meyer 2014, p. 374), he is speculating on whether the interrelated forces of both the organic and inorganic world are endowed with perspective forming, goal-directed drives that “seek” to compel all other drives to conform to their respective norms” (ibid., p. 217). Meyer is quoting from The Will to Power (Nietzsche 1968, p. 1067). Then he goes on to say that in this sense “there is reason to think that his claim that all of existence is engaged in interpretation is bound up with the related claim that the world is will to power” (Meyer 2014, p. 217). This is a steep claim, Meyer admits, and it suits the neo-materialists, as I aim to show in the third part of this paper. Nietzsche believes, Meyer writes, that the “process of valuation, selection, and judgment goes on even at the level of sense perception” (ibid.). But before we go on to this, let us continue our tableau by looking at Wittgenstein and the idea of form(s) of life.

3. Wittgenstein and the Form/s of Life

“Once a label gets on something, it becomes an “it”, like it is no longer alive”.

(“What N.Y. Couples Fight About” Morcheeba Charango 2002)

The quote from the song above could have been taken from Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense where he writes that our drive to conceptualize leaves us with a columbarium of dead concepts. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1992), from now on referred to as Tractatus is a lot like Nietzsche’s columbarium: completely devoid of life, a static report on logical form, at least, this is how it is most often read. A more positive and lively notion of how concepts or words have meaning can be found in the later Wittgenstein. I start by giving a very brief account of logical form in the Tractatus. Then I look at Wittgenstein’s short paper Some Remarks on Logical Form (Wittgenstein 1929) in the middle period that brought him back to philosophy after declaring at the end of the Tractatus that he had, in essence, solved all philosophical problems. This also makes for an interesting explanation why the later work is, on the one hand, a continuation of the Tractatus and, on the other hand, a break with it. In the third part, I take account of discussions of ‘form(s) of life’ in the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1968) to link it up with Nietzsche’s perspectivism which was just discussed.

3.1. Logical/Pictorial Form in the Tractatus

The Tractatus world seems at first devoid of senses or intuition. In seven propositions Wittgenstein states what the world is. He starts with the world that is everything that is the case and moves from that via definitions of what a fact is, namely states of affairs, which are made of situations which are made of objects hanging with one another12 to atomic or elementary propositions as the smallest units, out of which all sentences of language could be forged. What is lacking here are human beings that take in things through the senses. It is a world in the head, and only in Tractatus Proposition 3.1, where we make to ourselves pictures of facts, is there an activity of a thinker or picture maker. To Wittgenstein, our existence seems to be one that consists solely of the intellect and its operations. The operation of picture making is described in Tractatus Proposition 3.11 as the “use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible states of affairs”. Wittgenstein adds that “the method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the projection”. There is not much life in the descriptions of the Tractatus, but as I have pointed out elsewhere, the picture theory turns out to be more of a picturing theory or a projection method. This is so because unless we compare the picture to reality, and that means until we use the proposition in real life in order to say something with the proposition, it does not have meaning.13

A logical form or pictorial form was the shared form between the proposition and that which the proposition is about. Without it, the proposition could not be a picture of that which it is about. For us, it is important to see that the pictorial form is what Wittgenstein called the sense of the proposition, something that the proposition itself cannot say, but that is shown in the use of the proposition. This sense of the proposition is how it hits our senses, the way the elements of it are put next to each other. It is also the way objects hang together in the state of affair, and Wittgenstein in the Tractatus holds that this is possible only because there is substance in the world as he writes in Tractatus Proposition 2.021. This is the most metaphysical the Tractatus becomes. This hanging-in together like links in a chain of the objects in the situations make the state of affairs, and this is what Wittgenstein calls substance. The pictorial form that the sentence shares with the fact in the world is then a logical form in the form of a constellation. I will not have time here to go into detail, but I want to stress that a logical or pictorial form is already highly problematic in the Tractatus, which, I argue in the following, can be made more visible by looking at the short essay Some Remarks On Logical Form (Wittgenstein 1929) in the middle period.

3.2. Some Remarks on Logical Form

After Wittgenstein threw away the ladder at the end of the Tractatus, we still see the idea of the pictorial form or of the logical form and how it “matches” the proposition—as well as the fact that the proposition is about—in the projection. Some Remarks on Logical Form is a very short article in which Wittgenstein revisits the problem of the Tractatus, which had been a problem of the ultimate connection of the terms of a proposition. At the center, he had placed “atomic propositions” as the “kernels of every proposition, they contain the material. The rest is only development of this material” (Wittgenstein 1929, p. 163). That ordinary language disguises the logical structure that had been Wittgenstein’s credo in the Tractatus and allows the formation of pseudo-propositions. What he was interested in was the symbolism, which could give a clear picture of the logical structure. Here, we are again at the heart of the logical form. Why now is ordinary language with its subject-predicate and relational form misleading and not capable of giving us the right form? To explain this better, Wittgenstein draws up a simile. He has us imagine two parallel planes with figures. The figures on one plane produce images of the figures on the second. There are two ways to complete this: The first works such that there must be a law of projection. We can lay down a rule that indicates clearly, e.g., that for every ellipse on plane one, there is to appear a circle in plane two, while for every circle, there is also going to be a circle. The problem that arises from this is grave: when we see circles on plane two, we cannot figure out whether it had been an ellipse or a circle on plane one. With this, Wittgenstein wants to show that from the way we use terms, e.g., in ordinary language, it is very hard to draw conclusions.

Then, he presents a second problem. If we use a “method of projection by which the reality is projected into our symbolism” (Wittgenstein 1929, p. 166) we have the problem that “the sentence, together with the mode of projection which projects reality into the sentence, determines the logical form of the entities” (ibid.). This results in a problem akin to the one of perspectivism that we encountered in Nietzsche. It means that the mode of expression we have for our projection method itself becomes part of the determination of the logical form of the entity. Wittgenstein merely notes at the end of his short paper: “just as in our simile a picture on plane two together with its mode of projection determines the shape of the one on plane one” (ibid.). What Some Remarks on Logical Form gives us to think about in terms of the logical form is the fact that it is not just out there in a pure way, not even when we try to think of it as something built up from atomic propositions that are connected to atomic nodes in the world. Language or thinking is such that the moment we engage in it, our conceptual apparatus will project its own mode of expression onto that which is thought and will thus color it or make it into something that one might want to call a perspective. In the later work, Wittgenstein stops speaking about the logical form and substitutes the logical with the grammatical form, stressing the aspect of a shared grammar, that subsequently leads us to a shared form of life.

3.3. Form of Life in the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1968)

And to imagine a language means imagining a form of life.

(Wittgenstein 1968, p. 572)

Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of a life-form.

(Ibid., p. 23)

“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of language.

(Ibid., p. 243)

Can only those hope who can talk? (Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are mode of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write.)

(Ibid., p. 174)

What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—form of life.

(Ibid., p. 226)

In Wittgenstein’s later writings, the logical form becomes grammatical form that gives way to the notion of language games as part of what Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’. The concept of life is part of a big family of concepts in Wittgenstein that encompasses nature and culture and is in constant flux, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (Wittgenstein 1968, p. 66). Interestingly, the ‘form of life’ wins a sort of transcendental coloring in the context of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as we can see in the last quote above “the given is […] form of life”.

There is a plethora of interpretations and disagreement among Wittgenstein scholars over the status of the concept of a form of life. While Newton Garver (Garver 1990) thinks that the human form of life features only in the singular, and contrasts with the form of life of animals and cannot be equated with cultural forms of life in the plural, Rudolf Haller and Rafael Ferber (Haller 1988; Ferber 1993) speak of forms of life in the plural. In the Critique of Forms of Life (Jaeggi 2018), Rahel Jaeggi offers an immanent critique of the notion by pointing out that ways or forms of life are inherently normative, asserting their own goodness and rightness with the purpose to solve basic social problems.

In the following I discuss several takes on the notion of the form of life, arranging them in an album-like fashion. Lynne Rudder Baker’s take on the form(s) of life underlines a problem that we have already seen in Gerhardt’s reading of the notion of perspective in Nietzsche. Baker starts and ends her paper by saying that “little can be said about form of life that is meaningful” while managing to say quite a bit. She characterizes forms of life as “patterns of activity and response” (Rudder Baker 1984, p. 277). She talks about obvious patterns that are constitutive of human life. The practices that shape human life form no system. They are more like a background, and one cannot say what constitutes the background (ibid.). Forms of life are non-systematic; they are communal since no private practice exists (ibid, p. 278). They are conventional and rest on agreement. Rudder Baker writes that we agree in “the ways that we size up and respond to what we encounter” (ibid.). Then she brings in Stanley Cavell who thinks that agreement in Wittgenstein is something like “being in harmony or being mutually attuned”. Furthermore, she underlines that Cavell holds there is no guarantee that we will make the same projections of words in unfamiliar contexts, although what we do overall is

a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘form of life.’ Human Speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this.

(Cavell 1962, p. 74)

Forms of life are not empirical regularities. There is no escaping outside of our forms of life to imagine other ways we ‘might have been’, writes Rudder Baker. Comparisons are made from within our forms of life. We are not bound by forms of life as we are by natural laws. Sometimes a form of life is taken to be something akin to practices that are not universal, e.g., religions. Different societies exhibit different forms of life, this being a narrower use that comes from the elasticity of the idea. Wittgenstein’s first concern is with human practices, not with local options (Rudder Baker 1984, p. 279). I find it compelling to think of forms of life as practices of different societies, and to make the link to different religions. However, in the context of philosophy of language, this makes a big change. As a fact about an individual cannot come through language, it cannot be shown how an individual accords with her own intentions.14 There must be something general—in isolation, an individual cannot intend anything at all. Community is the source of meaning. Concepts too have their meanings because we act in certain ways, we apply concepts. Our agreements are, therefore, as Wittgenstein held, “not in opinions but in form of life” (Wittgenstein 1968, p. 241), in the way we apply concepts. This is how Rudder Baker presents us with a similar problem to the one we saw in Gerhardt dealing with Nietzsche’s perspectivism. She shows that if our form of life inheres the idea of an external world independent of us, then we still can doubt that there is a world independent from us. Any aspect of our form of life that we isolate is so only from the point of view of some other aspect of our form of life. Since forms of life are the source and limit of meaning, there is no stepping ‘outside’ forms of life to survey them (Rudder Baker 1984, p. 282). Whatever can be said about forms of life can only be said within the context of forms of life. Jonathan Lear also makes this point, and from what he writes, we can see how similar the problem of saying what a form of life is to the problem in the Tractatus of saying what a logical form is:

any attempt to say what our form of life is like will itself be part of the form of life; it can have no more than the meaning it gets within the context of its use. As we try to stretch ourselves to say something philosophical, we end up saying things that are, strictly speaking, false. Let us say that a person is minded in a certain way, if he has the perceptions of salience, routes of interest, feelings of naturalness in following a rule, etc. that constitute being part of a certain form of life.

(Lear 1982, p. 385)

Rudder Baker adds that “we should end up trying to say, nonsensically, what can only be shown” (Rudder Baker 1984, p. 282). She also claims that there is a view of a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy that is nothing but the exploration of our forms of life. An activity of “moving around reflectively inside our view of things and sensing when one began to be near the edge by the increasing incomprehensibility of things regarded from whatever way-out point of view one had moved into” (ibid.). The sharp line between what can be said and what can be shown is still there in the Philosophical Investigations. The question many Wittgensteinian thinkers have posed is whether our facts are created by language, not by the individual’s use of language, but by our common language, by the practice of the community. Lear calls this our “mindedness”, he thinks that “the vocabularies possible for us, are materially constrained by our ‘mindedness.’”15 How we are minded shapes the possibilities of our usable vocabularies. Rudder Baker’s discussion of life forms ends with the question about conceptual relativism. She calls it “form-of-life relativism” and concludes that this position would be incoherent. Forms of life cannot be relative, since forms of life cannot be compared, selected, and discarded. “We cannot even imagine in any significant detail forms of life that are genuine competitors to ours” (Rudder Baker 1984, p. 282). This makes her take such that the idea of a form of life emerges as the result of a kind of transcendental argument, as she writes, “’Form of life’ is Wittgenstein’s way of designating what it is about a community that makes possible meaning”, on p. 288. We can see that this is a new and different idea of a transcendental argument.

In the last part of this paper, I show how to go from perspectivism and the form of life to a new neo-materialism. There is a way in which we are in the world that is not merely by way of consciousness or self-consciousness, but one of inter-relatedness. In the first two parts of my paper, I aimed to show that both perspectivism as well as the notion of the form of life suffer from the problem of a vantage point. If there is one perspective or one form of life that is superior or “the” perspective of “the” form of life, we fall back into the kinds of philosophies that make the human perspective or form of life that vantage point. In the last part of this paper, I argue that a neo-materialist philosophy makes it possible at least to imagine or speculate what it would be like to allow several perspectives and consider different forms of life to coexist, where the notion of consciousness or self-consciousness drops out.

4. New Materialism

The editors of the volume New Materialisms from 2010 describe new materialism this way: “materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creating, productive, unpredictable” (Coole and Frost 2010, p. 9). Matter is part of how we conceive life and the form of it. Life is something that we co-create and it is formed matter; life is formed from matter without needing to add intellect or soul. This approach will be at the center of the last chapter of this paper. My task is to think about consciousness while disposing of the idea of life as a physical body with an added spirit, intellect, or soul. One of the problems of reading both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein is that they have been solely put in a context of philosophy of language, where their writings have been understood to be concerned with the entanglements of concepts. Marco Brusotti and Sabine Mainberger (Brusotti and Mainberger 2017) have tried to show a connection between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche by discussing the passages that can be said to be traced from one to the other. While this is an honorable enterprise, it does not lead us far, because we remain within the boundaries of a dualist philosophy. If we think the problem of showing a connection between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche lies in finding out whether Wittgenstein actually read Nietzsche and whether there are direct quotes to be found, we will end up with a very slim question and no answer to it. I like that Brusotti is especially concerned with the quote “that the soul is just a word for something about the body” and that he discusses the different ways in which we could interpret how Wittgenstein understood this differently from Nietzsche. However, I have tried to show in the first two chapters of this article that Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Wittgenstein’s account are concerned with a broader outlook. It takes a change of aspect, a new perspective, to understand in what way there are family resemblances between Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas, and I argue that this aspect change can happen if we place them in the neo-materialist background.

4.1. Nietzsche and (Neo-)Materialism

In the preface to the The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks himself whether philosophy has “not merely been an interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 35). He goes on to think history, culture, art, and reason through in terms of their appetites and aversions. “It is our needs that interpret the world” he writes in The Will to Power (Nietzsche 1968, p. 267). The mind is only a product of the bodily drives. Unity of perceptions is not due to a function of the mind, but the body works them according to Nietzsche. Our basic animal functions determine conscious life. In Beyond Good and Evil III, 36 he writes: “Suppose nothing else were ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions […]” (Nietzsche 1966, p. 47). Nietzsche basically says that we have projected logic onto the world, while all there is, is the will to power. Language reflects not how things are, but what we make of them. Propositions have sense only within certain domains of discourse, certain species-related ways for dividing up the world, and these domains of discourse are in turn bound up with material needs and drives. All of these quotes are remarkably close to Wittgenstein’s insistence on the relations between a language game and a practical form of life. Terry Eagleton in Materialism points out that what counts as an object for Nietzsche is determined by the rules and concepts of a grammar whose foundation is ultimately anthropological. (Cf. Eagleton 2016, p. 111).16

Alyson Cole and Estelle Ferrarese, on the other hand, write in their “How Capitalism Forms our Lives” (Cole and Ferrarese 2018) that there has been an attempt to use the notion of the “form of life” coined by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations to address how capitalism has an influence on us. Cole and Ferrarese propose it as possibly “heuristic”, and what they mean thereby is that the emphasis on the discursive should be replaced with another emphasis on the material. Their idea is that the ‘form of life’ “presumes all facets of life [that] are inherently interwoven, by-passing distinctions between discourse, bodies, language, and materiality” (Cole and Ferrarese 2018, p. 105). Wittgenstein’s language games, our form of life, are not something we choose, but as Wittgenstein holds “is part of our ‘natural history’” (Cf. Wittgenstein 1968, p. 141). ‘Form of life’ is not constituted by its content, but by a special configuration of features. Wittgenstein speaks of family resemblances. It involves a series of practices, and the continued practice of those practices to sustain them. Cole and Ferrarese continue on page 106: “The concept refers to an assemblage that is ‘continually engendered by its own manner’ a formulation they take from Agamben (Agamben 2005, p. 28). “Use” is an important category in this context. Again, with Agamben “use” designates a human activity that cannot be reduced to either production or praxis, since there is no end-product and acting is not itself the end. The point rather is to keep engaged, the body and world are interconnected in a way “there is no a priori project, principle or intention being purposefully actualized” (Cole and Ferrarese 2018, p. 106). Secondly, it always refers to a sediment. It is what falls out, so to say, in terms of ideas, meanings, and ethical content. It is an aggregation of meaning-laden practices that is gradual. However, during the process, the practices are increasingly made unavailable, rendered inaccessible. The form of life “establishes and imposes itself, and thereby commands” (ibid). What falls out, the deposit or residue, the authors claim is primarily ethical in nature. One could say it is the residue of past commitments ossified in institutions and in things. Something lingers though, and that is the expectations that have shaped them. There is, so to say, a claim still in them, though the “form of life never appears as a pure obligation or constraint, or even as a simple convention” (ibid, p. 107). If we go back to Wittgenstein, he simply calls it an ‘agreement in judgments’ that is necessary for collective life. That agreement is, however, tacit and coincides with the form itself. Critical theorists hold that forms of life have a claim to rationality or validity in them. This way they can have the ability to criticize a life form.17 There is a huge difference between the takes on the form of life I just presented and the critical one that Rahel Jaeggi offers. I will introduce yet one more neo-materialist thinker to complement the picture. My aim is to show what this take on perspective, form of life, and lastly, on whatever could be called a consciousness could be.

Consciousness, after all, comes from the Latin con, with or together, and scientare, to know together or “knowledge shared with others”. The simple claim of my paper is that knowledge is not shared through language or with oneself through one’s own awareness of a state or object, as is commonly held today, but that it is a form of sharing that is bodily or material in the way I just described through the lens of Agamben and Cole and Ferrese. Another philosopher who supports such a reading is Jane Bennett. She reads Nietzsche as a neo-materialist who makes it clear that “will to power” is not something ascribed to human will, but to all things organic and nonorganic. She writes in Vibrant Matter (Bennett 2010) that we can use Nietzsche to talk more precisely about her example of the “active power of foodstuffs” (p. 43). This potential power is activated when the foodstuff congregates with a power-enhancing set of other vital materialities. We find a kind of material agency exhibited by all foods. However, true to her perspectivism she does not think specific diets a good idea, because one diet will be able only to enhance the vitality of some bodies. One diet simply does not fit all.

4.2. Jane Bennett and Vital Materialism

Bennett’s account of vital materiality in Vibrant Matter A Political Ecology of Things is elaborated by focusing on nonhuman bodies and depicting them as actants rather than as objects. We are also constituted as vital materialities, “human power is itself a kind of thing-power” (Bennett 2010, p. 10). The materials of our bodies are “lively and self-organizing, rather than [as] passive or mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind” (ibid.). She looks at evolution and how minerals become efficient. One could see human beings as an effect of the power of minerals. Humankind is a potent mix of minerals. Bennett breaks down the ontological divide between persons and things and shows that we seem to have the moral grounds for privileging human beings over germs by doing so. The problem is the instrumentalization of nonhuman nature, which Bennett deems unethical. She wants to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. She holds that “all bodies are kin, in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (ibid, p. 13). One inadvertently must think of family relations here. The starting point of the vital materialist is not the impossibility of reconcilement, but the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality. The ethical task for Bennett is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it (Cf. Bennett 2010, p. 15). She suggests that vital materialists

[…] linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them. This sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side may induce vital-materialists to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically

(ibid. pp. 17–18).

Nietzsche held that perspectivism demanded that there be new kinds of philosophers (Brusotti and Mainberger 2017). The coming philosophers and their truths were not to be dogmatic. He writes in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1966, p. 43) that these new philosophers will not hope for their truth to be a truth for everyone. “’My judgement is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it”. If truth is ‘only’ a perspective, must it then not be false. It must not, because it is about a way to live or a view on life. What does life mean? The new philosopher also is such a free spirit that she accepts the contingency of her views, the fact that she changes them, and her own situation, writes Bennett (Bennett 2010, p. 82). It looks to me as if Nietzsche was describing the new materialists here. Wittgenstein too thought that he was writing for a new kind of thinker or human being, completely different from us, for a small circle, or even a future superman, as Majetschak points out in his article connecting Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (Majetschak 2006). This is the main question of my paper: how do we obtain a new account of consciousness or of creative subjectivity—as in inventing ourselves—after we have given up the kind of intellect, intention, and agency that has hitherto accounted for creativity? What happens without consciousness and self-consciousness? How does the body without intellect or soul invent itself? I will ask and answer this question through a particularly dense and intervowen or interlinked collage or image of constellated quotes from Melissa A. Orlie reading Nietzsche.

4.3. Impersonal Matter

Melissa A. Orlie writes in Coole’s compendium on New Materialisms about “Impersonal Matter” (Orlie 2010). She argues that the material conditions of our social and psychic lives are created neither by nor for us. If all we are is matter, she asks, how can we speak of human beings as critical, creative, or free (Orlie 2010, p. 116)? Her answer is that there is such a thing as an impersonal materialism, and she takes Nietzsche to be the founding figure of it. The problem of creative subjectivity is obvious. Orlie writes that “materialist understandings of subjectivity challenge our presumption that human beings are capable of creative action and critical judgment” (ibid., p. 116). This is why many philosophers hold that our accounts of thinking, judging, and willing remain idealist. Against this, Orlie holds that Nietzsche, Freud, and Darwin were materialists or naturalists. People think that critical or creative minds must rise above matter (ibid., p. 117), and this is why mental capacities are thought distinct from physical bodies. Orlie suggests that impersonal materialism can circumvent the difficulties by affording a post-Darwinian and not reductionist account.

Nietzsche’s notion of “will to power” can count as such impersonal matter. He says in the Genealogy of Morals that the deed is everything and without a doer. He emphasizes action rather than the actor. We quoted earlier that Nietzsche writes that the soul is only a word for something about the body. We saw a characterization of the will to power in which something subdues and something else is subdued. But Nietzsche rejects the philosophy of substances: there is not, on the one hand, discrete subjugation and, on the other, subjugated phenomena. This is how he delivers an alternative account of the aim and practice of creativity. According to Orlie, the will to power is impersonal matter from which we arise. It is more and other than that which we think of as me and mine. “Will to power refers to impersonal energies that constitute our lives” (Orlie 2010, p. 117). There are, for Nietzsche, no souls or under-wills. In the multiplicity that is each person, there is not just one drive, but multiple drives. Mental activity, conscious or not, is an activity of the body “and an outcome of the relationships between the “under-wills” and “under-souls” that make up each of us. Thinking, Nietzsche says, “is merely a relation of these drives to each other” (Nietzsche 1966, p. 47) and the “will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects” (Nietzsche 1966, p. 86). Each of the diverse drives seeks to become master; “to remake the world according to the needs and health of the body as it interprets them” (Orlie 2010, p. 119). And she continues to write: “At the heart of who we are there are multiple, conflicting drives that represent different senses of the good and aspirations toward the better”. Whatever humanity we have achieved involves “bringing to awareness some of what has hitherto been unconscious” (ibid.). She thinks Nietzsche invokes, as “wakefulness itself”, the self as impersonal, yet productive matter. Why are we so attracted to a sovereign conception of subjectivity, she goes on asking? We do not want to acknowledge that impersonal forces compose us. We are, so to say, driven by a sovereign fantasy.

That the mind is embodied is what is meant by saying that the soul is a different name for aspects of the body. Mind is body. It cannot be reduced to some physical location or organ, such as the brain; rather, it is claimed to be various forms of mental activity, aspects, or manifestations of matter (Cf. Orlie 2010, p. 121). Nietzsche, after all, thinks that consciousness is the “weakest, last and least developed of our instincts” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 6). While he does not think moral and aesthetic judgments to be reducible to basic sensory sensations and reactions, he calls them the “subtlest nuances” of physis. (ibid., p.121). Critical judgment and creative deeds for Nietzsche “are born of and known only by and as matter” (ibid.). According to Nietzsche, the body despaired of the body because it could not bear its own experience or digest its suffering. Thus, the part of the body that we know as mind “refuses to accept its limited mastery over what arises within experience as a consequence of events that befall it” (Orlie 2010, p. 121). This aspect has a fantasy of itself as master of its experience, even though, as Orlie underlines, “what happens to and within a self occurs without its choice or knowledge” (ibid.). This is a sign of what Orlie calls the profound impersonality of ourselves. The matter from which we are born and made does not begin with us or is possessed or controlled by us. Here, it is especially fun to look at what Nietzsche calls an “impoverishment of life” and an “overfullness of life”. We are not born with one or the other, lucky or unlucky to suffer less or more. Instead, Nietzsche thinks the overfullness of life happens to sufferers who do not flee but experience the full range and depth of suffering that is the lot of embodied selves. Impoverishment, on the other hand, arises when the self narrows down experience, when we flee suffering the impersonal chaos that sustains the self (Cf. ibid., p. 122). When something happens to the body that challenges its powers, an aspect of the body generates a defensive fantasy of its autonomy from and power over the body. The ego that says, “I think” emerges in response to experiences of either pain or pleasure because both are always to some degree beyond its control” (Orlie 2010, p. 123).

What we can glean from this is that the mind is how the body imagines itself as master of its experiences, exactly when the body feels limited and suffers. One could say the mind is “the body despairing at and of itself” (ibid). This is our affliction, the body despairing of itself. Our selves are thus limited in the form of “a perception of the past joined to a projection about the future”. That we do not actually experience our suffering with an intensity is the problem. Orlie holds that “by failing to work through the inevitable suffering of mortal, material beings whose being is in question, Nietzsche maintains that we remove ourselves from the energy needed to affirm life” (ibid.). Finally, Orlie points out that there are two responses to this: a receptive and a reactive response of mindful matter to the experience of impersonality. The receptive response is awake to the fullest range of experience, aware of variation and dissonance among perceptions, feelings, thoughts, drives, and their passions. A reactive response refuses this variation and dissonance within experience through techniques and the generation of fixated ideas about the self and world (ibid., p. 124). This goes against the grain of our notions of receptivity and spontaneity and of consciousness or self-consciousness. “The danger in the birth of an ego that says “I think” is a fixation of self and the loss of a fuller range of experience: the very experiences that are prime sources of energy and resources for critical, creative subjectivity” (ibid.). We see creatures without a creator in that we associate creativity with a strength of will of the kind described above. Orlie writes that “our capacity to experience the purposeless necessity of impersonal matter as the condition of our creative freedom depends upon the accessibility of our bodily drives and passions” (Orlie 2010, p. 124). Recovering our creative body means acknowledging and accepting the impersonality of our selves. Nietzsche wants us to suppose that “nothing else were ’given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other ‘reality’ besides the reality of our drives—for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other” (Nietzsche 1966, p. 47). And then we are to remember that this reality is only available to us through interpretation, and he writes in the Gay Science that “human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 374).

A particular affective state fosters specific perceptions and interpretations of events. I am finishing this part on neo-materialism with the positive outlook Orlie gives us: to be able to be creative despite not being able to claim a higher consciousness, a mind on top of our body as matter. Instead, she suggests we cultivate reflection in the material, that we become truly aesthetic beings. Let me draw to a close with a last quote: “Becoming interpreters of our experience means that we must learn to see as we do not yet see; we must practice material sensitivity as well as reflective judgment” (Orlie 2010, p. 130). Receptivity is key to learning to see and to experience the impersonality of ourselves. We need to cultivate a receptivity that is aesthetic in the sense of “being sensually, viscerally sensitive to flows of generative matter” (ibid.)

5. Conclusions

Theology can be translated as the study of God. Since the so-called “anthropological turn” in the 20th century, it has been important not to emphasize the human being in theological reflections. The specific image of man, and thus, also the understanding of human consciousness—that underlies the respective theological approaches—had to be considered in the theological generation of knowledge. Today, contemporary theologians almost unanimously reject a monistic view of man. Since early Christianity, the relevance of the body and soul/consciousness has been emphasized using the corporeal existence within Theological Anthropology and Eschatology. The differentiation of the body and soul lends expression to the complexity and multifaceted nature of the human being, but it also increases the danger of advocating a dualistic view of humanity. Especially in theological reflections that can be assigned to Eschatology, a split in the body and soul can be fatal. Many recent eschatological debates, such as the one between Joseph Ratzinger and Gibsert Greshake about the “intermediate state”, have the aim of avoiding a dualistic view of humanity.

The suggestion presented here is to turn the wheel one more dial and to consider consciousness by including the level of the human body and the many other surrounding bodies. This is intended to avoid the dualism. The interconnectedness of the body with other bodies makes the interconnectedness with consciousness clear. Ultimately, this exploration suggests that embracing consciousness as the idea of symbiotic relationships allows for a richer understanding of (human) existence and our place within the broader ecological tapestry. By moving beyond the constraints of traditional consciousness, we open ourselves to new ways of thinking, relating, and being in the world, fostering a sense of connection with all forms of life. This perspective not only enriches philosophical discourse, but also invites a more compassionate engagement with the diverse entities that inhabit our shared environment.