18. Is the examined life worth living? Nietzsche and the curse of consciousness

Socrates claimed the unexamined life isn’t worth living—but Nietzsche wasn’t so sure. What if our acute self-awareness is the source of our suffering?

In this episode, we journey from the carefree contentment of grazing cattle to the haunted introspection of the modern human. We explore Nietzsche’s radical claim that consciousness is not our crowning glory but a socially evolved disease—a by-product of language, hierarchy, and domestication that alienates us from nature, from one another, and from ourselves.

We trace the emergence of consciousness as an evolutionary trade-off: a tool for collective organisation that became a prison of self-surveillance and moral guilt. Along the way, we confront the “hard problem” of consciousness from a wholly different angle—what if the problem is not the mind’s mystery, but the false metaphysics smuggled in by language itself?

Finally, we consider Nietzsche’s Dionysian remedy—a return to the primal unity beneath the illusions of thought, a dangerous dance with chaos that may cost you your “self”… but might just offer something deeper in return.

Transcript

“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal.⁠1”

Socrates famously declared, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. One need only watch a domestic dog or cat for a while to conclude that this is a dubious claim. It’s telling that the human seems to be the only animal that routinely suffers from insomnia. Nietzsche didn’t mince his words, asserting that consciousness “is dangerous” and even “a disease.⁠2” 

We tend to see consciousness as the seat of the essential self, our reason, moral conscience, and agency. For us, the acutely self-aware consciousness humans uniquely possess makes us exceptional, perhaps even divine. Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” made the individual consciousness the irreducible, undoubtable fact of existence. He claimed that thinking proves the pre-existence of a thinker. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, it is thinking which creates the illusion of a thinker and he insists, “consciousness is associated with a great and fundamental corruption, falsification, superficiality and generalisation⁠3.”

Nietzsche’s indictment may surprise us yet, for him, we are at fault for failing to interrogate our fundamental assumptions about consciousness. As we commonly view it, this uncanny, immaterial phenomenon seems utterly foreign to the indifferent universe of brute matter that our senses disclose. We find ourselves in an irreconcilably dualist universe—mind and matter—and this sets before us the so-called “hard problem”: how can subjective experience arise from physical processes? 

Through his investigation into the origins of consciousness, Nietzsche radically deflates the reverence we lavish upon it and thereby overturns the assumptions that generate this conundrum. What if human consciousness is not some metaphysical mystery? What if it is itself the cause of the apparent mind/matter dualism we think we perceive? What if the territory we are traversing is being misrepresented by the map we are navigating with? 

Imagine a species of animal inhabiting the primordial forest. Physically weak, it can survive only in social groups of extended-family. Its animal instinct, honed to perfection by natural selection, determines all its behaviour instantly, efficiently, and unthinkingly. Desire and aversion are its guiding lights—it feels its way through the world. It has no inner narrative, no memory, no imagination. It lives right in the present moment. Its behaviour is pure stimulus/response. 

Somewhere in this timeless, preconscious dreamworld, something momentous occurs. An animal vocalisation made in response to a particular experience—say, food or a predator—comes to have abstract mental significance. It signifies the experience even in its absence. This is a noise becoming a word, but also a word transforming an experience into a definite thing—an object. The word separates and distinguishes the named object from the flux of the environment and fixes it in conceptual space. This is a watershed moment in the evolution of the species.

Language-use is naturally-selected to proliferate because it enhances group organisation. The group assigns words to each similar-enough conglomeration of phenomena that regularly occur together, designating them as things in broad classes. No two trees are alike, but for efficient communication, all trees are designated by “tree”. Thereby, through language, a grossly simplified cognitive map of separable objects in space is generated to represent a complex, sensory territory. 

Because language doesn’t just name a thing, but conjures an abstract concept of it even when it is not present, imagination becomes possible. With imagination comes foresight. The animal begins to mentally picture the ends it desires to bring about, and to deliberate about the means and methods that might lead there. This entails logical and causal reasoning. In place of the unthinking, instinctive stimulus/response behaviour that had formerly been its sole guide, our animal now reasons and calculates. Such goal-oriented, hypothetical mental speculations are accompanied by another completely new psychological experience: the feeling of having choices—of agency.

Enhanced organisation brings stricter hierarchy. For a plan to work, the group must act in concert toward a shared future objective. This means one, or a few, must command and the majority must obey. Planning demands memory: one must remember the plan, the roles, past mistakes and successes, and lessons that they yield. With memory and foresight, the animal enters the stream of time, dragging its past around like Jacob Marley, and fretting about its future (where, unveiled for the first time, something dreadful awaits).  

Even the simplest plan requires different roles: in the hunt, one might be an ambusher or a chaser. Roles create responsibility. Responsibility requires recognition. Individuals must now be distinguishable—accountable. Finally then, a new kind of word is invented, one for every member of the group: you are given a name.

Language has transformed our animal into a human: a discrete individual with social duties and a concept of itself, a calculating subject in a world of objects, a denizen of time with a personal history and hopes and dreams for its future. Nietzsche outlines this theory of the development of consciousness in The Joyous Science (section 354). His account relies on no supernatural forces, no metaphysical speculation—only the logic of evolution.

On Nietzsche’s terms, human consciousness is an inescapable consequence of language, and language is an evolutionary adaption that was naturally-selected because humans, so fragile and slow compared to other animals, thrive only by working together in organised groups. The more sophisticated the means of communication, the more organised the group, and the better its chances of surviving and outcompeting rivals. 

But in the race for life, success means growth. And the power of organisation soon becomes a catalyst for aggressive expansionism. Raids against neighbouring clans must always have occurred. But now, the organisation made possible by language allows for more sustainable forms of exploitation: the systematic subjugation of defeated clans. The conquered become tribute-paying vassals or slaves, burdened with the drudge-work of the victors. Meanwhile, the dominant clan—“the masters”—are freed to become a full-time warrior caste, devoted entirely to conquest.

Thus, in the earliest civilisations, the vast majority are mercilessly oppressed. In order to avoid punishment and survive, they must stifle their natural instincts. They bottle up their emotions, suppress their whims, contain their aggression, conceal their desires, and obey. They must think before they act—something unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and unnatural.

Eventually, they are herded into cities and forced to live cheek-by-jowl with strangers—other enslaved clans who, in the wild, would have been mortal enemies. But now they are pacified, domesticated, tamed, made to wear what Nietzsche calls the “social straitjacket⁠4”. 

This creates an unbearable tension—between raw instinct and strategic conformity, between feeling and thinking. A sharp division opens between the slave’s inner, private mental life (previously barely there at all) and the persona it is permitted to express to the external world. Consciousness becomes hyper-inflated. The ruminating, reflecting, conflicted human begins to experience life as if imprisoned inside its own skull, peering out at the world from behind a socially acceptable mask. Its frustrations, denied outward expression, turn inward. Its cruelty is vented on itself.

To make the bad worse, Christianity makes an appearance and tells the poor slave that it deserves its misery because it is inherently sinful. It points to the barely-contained, anti-social animal instincts as evidence of that fact. And so this animal, “divided against itself”, is infected with a bad conscience that gnaws at it constantly. What could be more perverse that torturing an innocent animal? Training an innocent animal to torture itself. Such is the condition of the modern, civilised, conscious human being.

Over centuries, the masters themselves, always a minority, are gradually absorbed into the worldview of the teeming majority. The slave-class, made increasing clever by their oppressive social circumstances, were able to easily outmanoeuvre and manipulate their relatively simple masters.

Against all those philosophical giants—from Plato to Kant, from Aristotle to Hegel—Nietzsche claims that the essential constituent of consciousness is not reason. Our much-lauded rational faculties are a late-stage adaptation, co-evolved with language, not to liberate individuals, but to enhance the organisational capabilities and survival prospects of the social group—what Nietzsche disparages as the ‘herd’. Likewise, the moral conscience does not reflect some transcendent ethical order, but evolved because it contributed to herd cohesion, conformity, and discipline. 

Our rationality, our sense of moral obligation, even our personal identity—these are not pure or essential features of the self, but evolved mechanisms in service of the herd. He writes, “my idea is that consciousness is actually not a part of man’s individual existence at all, but rather a part of his communal or gregarious nature⁠5”. So much for consciousness as the locus of our unique individuality.

Beneath all this lies something more ancient. The true kernel of consciousness: not a thinking thing, but a feeling thing. Not the faculty of logic, but the capacity for experience itself—sentience. A faculty we share with other complex animals.

To be sentient is to be capable of experience; to have interests—to want, to care, to fear, to enjoy. Pleasure and pain are not metaphysical phenomena—they are evolutionary signals that promote survival-for-reproduction. As David Hume famously declared, “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions⁠6”. The rational self and moral conscience are grammatical illusions and social constructs. Not “cogito ergo sum” as Descartes proposed, but instead “sentitur”—feeling is.

This does not solve the hard problem, of course—but it reframes the question. Instead of asking how consciousness arises from matter, we now ask: how did sentience—the capacity for evaluative experience—emerge?

Let’s speculate. Simple organisms with simple lifecycles respond mechanically. There is no need for experience. Their physiology operates like organic clockwork: a fixed set of inputs, a fixed set of outputs. But as animals became more sophisticated, and environments more complex, the number of possible stimuli and interactions proliferated exponentially. Mechanical responses were not sufficiently plastic to be able to cope with this increasingly complicated lifestyle. The ability to make rapid, best-guess, snap-judgements, based on limited data in situations that might not be wholly familiar, conferred a competitive edge and was duly naturally-selected.

Thus, sentience emerges—not as a precisely calibrated, mechanical response, but as a probabilistic, rule-of-thumb assessment. Each experience entails an affective evaluation—a felt answer to the question: “Do I like this? Do I want it?” It functions as an emotional triage system, a spectrum of feeling with YES at one extreme and NO at the other. Sentience directs the organism—even before the reasons for that direction have been fully collated or understood.

Perhaps we can now see that the common pathologies of our existence—anxiety, disconnection, despair—are not incidental, but the consequences of the consciousness we so piously valorise.

By representing the world as a morass of separable objects in space and time—and by representing itself as just another object, a discrete ego—the human species severed itself from nature. The very conditions that made language possible estranged it from the world which birthed it.

Following its incarceration in civilisation, with its instincts repressed, human existence became predominantly internal and mental. Consciousness ballooned. Most individual experience became private, concealed, unspoken. From this turning-inward emerged the belief in an immaterial essential self—a “soul”—dwelling ghostlike within the body.

This secret self was compelled to dissemble in its dealing with others, wearing a mask of social acceptability. And knowing that others wore masks too, it became estranged from them. Human interactions lost any authenticity and became performances.

Finally, caught between the demands of its unconscious, amoral instinctive impulses and its socially-conditioned moral conscience, the bewildered, self-conflicted animal finally becomes alienated even from itself.

It would be foolish to deny that linguistic-consciousness has brought humanity immense collective benefits. Without it, we would have no science, no medicine, no art, no philosophy. We might still be prowling the forests in small, rare, scattered bands. But it is far from clear that it has made us happier. On the contrary, the emergence of rational-linguistic consciousness may have alienated the human from the world, from other humans, and—most tragically—from itself. 

If linguistic-rational consciousness falsifies the world, our status within it, and even creates the fiction of a self, what is the world like in its absence?

Well, without the “lossy compression” imposed by linguistic abstraction, the pre-conscious world will be rich indeed: a realm of pure, sensory-affective immersion. Not a space populated with discrete things, but an integrated, unified, textured field of existence in which everything is entangled and interdependent.

Here, environmental stimuli elicit the appropriate evolved physiological responses from organisms without delay, deliberation, or reflection. With no separation between organism and environment—everything flowing into everything else—there is no gap between stimulus and response. Nothing exists in isolation; each thing is just the sum of its relations to everything else. 

Change is ceaseless, but time is barely felt. There is no causality as we understand it—because there are no distinguishable causes or effects. “Panta rhei”, as the ancient philosopher Heraclitus taught—everything flows. This is a special kind of determinism, one without the clumsy, mechanistic fiction of separate causes and effects pushing and pulling each other—every event of any kind soever has infinite determinants. Can a current in a roiling pool be isolated? Can it be separated from the other currents that form, merge with, or clash against it? Can its boundaries be precisely marked—can we even identify it at some future moment as the selfsame current? In this Heraclitean world of ceaseless flux, creation and destruction are necessary complements in a self-sufficient, self-sustaining economy. 

The pre-conscious human here is, like all things, contextually embedded—not in its environment but of it. Every aspect of its being, including its sentience, has developed via intercourse with the world and it remains inescapably enmeshed in that undulating but unified fabric. It lives wholly in the present, its temporal horizons minimal. Naturally, the very notion of free will is incoherent. It does not choose its responses—it is its responses. In the absence of grammar, and the metaphysical scaffolding it constructs for itself, predicates require no subjects. Doings require no doers. Form is function. Function is form.

The pre-conscious human falls asleep easily.

Can we even imagine such a world? Even to describe it using language (as we must) causes misunderstanding. How can we claim that mind and matter are an irreconcilable duality when we discover we can have no faith in these discrete concepts? If there’s no such thing as things, as space (which would separate things), in what sense can we say consciousness is discrete. If consciousness is simply one mode within the unified field of existence, why treat it as an anomaly requiring special explanation? In such an undivided world, dualism collapses. Consciousness isn’t something additional—it is already there, integral in the whole, divisible only through artificial abstraction.  

The world we have built for ourselves is a kind of low-res virtual reality that has made our species fantastically successful at surviving and reproducing. But it is a condition of our kind of knowledge that is falsifies that which it seeks to know. And so, a paradox: knowing requires not-knowing. The cost of separating subject and object has been illusion and alienation, but we cannot go back, even if we wanted to. 

Is our predicament redeemable?

Nietzsche held that the Ancient Greeks had a means of ameliorating the demoralising effects of linguistic-rational consciousness through their practice of tragic theatre. In these dramatic performances, terrible fates befell noble individuals, reflecting the reality of human mortality and an inherently unjust, amoral universe. But in these essentially religious rites, the audience did not identify with the doomed protagonist, they identified with the eternal flux behind all things: the indestructible primal unity from which humanity, like all things, emerged and to which it, like all things, will return. 

Yes, everyone and everything must perish, but the great primal unity itself is immortal and inexhaustible. The endless cycle of creation and destruction is sanctified. By actively affirming this “womb of being” as humanity’s true home, by remembering humans are expressions of its relentless dynamic, by re-connecting—re-communing—with it, Nietzsche believed the greeks found profound, existential comfort.  

The character of this primal unity is personified in Dionysus, the god of wine, madness, and ecstasy (ekstasis: ‘to stand outside oneself’). For Nietzsche, Dionysus represents the true character of the world when the illusions of consciousness are stripped away. To invoke this shameless, naked, dancing god of paradox is to go insane, because the Dionysian experience is one of complete dis-individuation. Losing all sense of self and perceiving the entirety of existence as a oneness means language inevitably fails and rational thought becomes impossible. 

Taking this step means abandoning the familiar, determinate, apparently-solid ground our linguistic-rational consciousness has fabricated for us and taking a leap into a bottomless abyss. 

Whether you will return is uncertain. 

Whether there will even be a you to return is, likewise, uncertain. 

1 Nietzsche. Untimely Mediations 2.1 (1874)

2 Nietzsche. The Joyous Science 354 (1887)

3 Ibid.

4 Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals 2.2 (1887)

5 Nietzsche. The Joyous Science 354 (1887)

6 Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature, (1749)