Luca Lupo, Le colombe dello scettico. Riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla coscienza negli anni 1880-1888 [The Sceptic’s Doves: Nietzsche’s Reflections on Consciousness, 1880-1888], Pisa: ETS, 2006.

‘As proof that sometimes a sceptic needs to let himself go in free reveries before returning, calmed, to the firm ground of “maybe, and maybe not”, I will recount the propositions that my swarming doves recently brought home to me, from the clouds. Firstly: the most common habitual form of knowledge is the unconscious one. Consciousness is knowledge regarding knowledge. Sensation and consciousness have the same essential features and are probably the same thing. […] Good! And now fly away again, my doves, and return to the clouds what belongs to them.’
(KSA 9, pp.438-39, 10 [101], Beginning of 1881)

This book examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatment of ‘consciousness [Bewusstsein]’. The above mentioned posthumous note of the 1881, from which the book takes its title, expresses well Nietzsche’s hesitant and questioning approach to this topic, an approach which is further reflected in the fragmentary presentation of his reflections, in his radically exploratory attitude and his ‘methodological’ concern never to arrive at definitive, dogmatic conclusions. Given this, the book does not attempt to identify a coherent ‘theory of consciousness’ in Nietzsche’s various reflections on this topic, or even a single theme or concern. The book’s main aim is rather to provide an account of Nietzsche’s treatment in all its textual and philosophical complexity, and to reconstruct its development across significant moments in his works and notebooks of the years, 1880-1888.
In particular, the book examines how Nietzsche, having recognised that consciousness cannot be adequately understood in the rigid terms of the psychological and philosophical tradition, develops a conception of consciousness radically distinct from those typical of traditional psychology and philosophy, along with a criticism of the traditional notion of consciousness as a ‘higher’ phenomenon, manifested exclusively by human beings.
Nietzsche begins by adopting a naturalistic position, which, while strongly influenced by the sciences, nonetheless also maintains a consistently critical attitude towards them. Aiming to provide more than a merely psychological understanding of consciousness, he conceives of it as a phenomenon that is constituted simultaneously by drives, processes, and the semiotic-communicative, and that is present in every organic form, albeit to differing degrees.
The book begins with an introduction which examines Nietzsche’s distinctive manner of philosophizing on consciousness, in its philological, philosophical, and scientific aspects. The main body of the book is then concerned with the genetic and philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s reflections on consciousness. In this, the book can be said to have a circular structure, in that it begins with a discussion of the notion of a ‘causality drive [Ursachentrieb]’ introduced by Nietzsche in one of his last works, Twilight of the Idols of 1888, before considering how he treats consciousness and related matters in the preceding years, and concludes by examining his later criticisms of the traditional conception of consciousness.

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