Forthcoming in Inquiry (Special Issue on Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology)

Note: this is the penultimate draft, not the final version. In a list of the most puzzling claims made by Nietzsche, pride of place might well be given to his idea that consciousness is necessarily superficial and falsifying. Nietzsche writes, “Due to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface- and sign-world, a world generalized and made common” (GS 354). He tells us that consciousness is a “simplifying apparatus ” (WLN 2/KSA 11: 34[46]); it “is presented only with a selection of experiences—experiences, furthermore, that have all been simplified, made easy to survey and grasp, thus falsified ” (WLN 30/KSA 11:37[4]). For these reasons, Nietzsche maintains that consciousness “involves a vast and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization ” (GS 354) What does Nietzsche mean by these claims? Why and in what sense does consciousness render our experiences superficial and falsifying? In Katsafanas (2005), I argued that we could explain these claims by investigating Nietzsche’s account of the conscious/unconscious distinction. In particular, I argued that Nietzsche endorses a novel view of consciousness: he argues that conscious mental states have conceptual content