Max Minden Ribeiro

This article critically examines two claims Mattia Riccardi ascribes to Nietzsche in his 2021 book Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. The first is that Nietzsche’s main notion of consciousness should be interpreted as Rconsciousness. Rconsciousness is an awareness of a mental state or process that is achieved when that state is linguistically interpreted by another state. This article finds that Riccardi’s account commits to two instances of states becoming conscious and to two kinds of consciousness. The second claim is that Nietzsche advances a pluralism about consciousness, endorsing a perceptual form of consciousness, Pconsciousness, and a qualitative consciousness of sensations, Qconsciousness. As Riccardi’s account offers no criteria for what it takes to be conscious per se, it is unclear what the pluralism he ascribes to Nietzsche amounts to. Moreover, this article finds that Nietzsche offers no positive reason to conceive any candidate mental phenomena as conscious other than those that are linguistically-reflexively conscious.

Mohan Matthen holds that visual perceptual content is divided into descriptive and referential elements. Descriptive content is our awareness of sensory features belonging to objects located in the visual field. Matthen conceives of this in terms of an image. The referential element is a demonstrative form of content, by which we pick out those objects as particulars and assert their physical presence. Matthen terms this ‘the feeling of presence’. Together, they make up the ‘assembled message’ that visual states present to the perceiver in perceptual experience. I argue that the two elements cannot play together as Matthen envisages. Beginning with the referential element, I show that the feeling of presence is unable to both provide demonstrative reference and assert that the visual state reflects how things are. Turning to the descriptive element, I argue that Matthen is committed to a view on which descriptive (or image) content is a mental entity, a reified image. This is a common element across perceptual experience, episodic memory and visual imagination. The mental entity proves a defective ingredient in assembling perceptual content that purports to present reality. There are problems integrating the depicted viewpoint with the subject’s actual viewpoint, and problems maintaining a coherent notion of assertion. I argue that the project of assembling perceptual experience from descriptive and referential elements is unworkable.

Perceptual experience and visual imagination both offer a first-person perspective on visible objects. But these perspectives are strikingly different. For it is distinctive of ordinary perceptual intentionality that objects seem to be present to the perceiver. I term this phenomenal property of experience ‘presence’. This paper introduces a positive definition of presence. Dokic and Martin (2017) argue that presence is not a genuine property of perceptual experience, appealing to empirical research on derealisation disorders, Parkinson’s disease, virtual reality and hallucination. I demonstrate that their arguments fall short of establishing that presence is not perceptual.