The individualization of conscience: what Daybreak (9, 10, 544) and The Gay Science (117) tell us about the sovereign individual

ABSTRACT

The figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings but is present in sections from Daybreak and The Gay Science that have not been pursued in this context in the Anglophone literature; sections that shed new light on the sovereign individual. Second, that examination of these texts reveals that the sovereign individual is for Nietzsche embodied by Socrates and the Socratic individual. Third, and most importantly, that with the sovereign individual there emerges individualized conscience – the capacity for self-laceration that concerns one’s misdeeds alone and involves the belief that one’s misdeeds are entirely one’s own individual fault, rather than the fault of the community or the gods. A fourth, rather negative consequence, is that at the end of the day Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, does not manage to provide us with a genealogy of moral guilt.     

Biased cognitive processing of cancer-related information among women with family histories of breast cancer: evidence from a cancer stroop task.

Stimuli associated with sources of stress have been shown to interfere with cognition. The authors hypothesized that women with the stress of having a family history of breast cancer (FH+) would exhibit greater interference on a task with cancer-related stimuli than women without cancer in the family (FH-). The authors developed a modified Stroop color-naming task to test this hypothesis in a sample of FH+ (n = 72) and FH- (n = 96) women. Consistent with the hypotheses, FH+ women had longer color-naming times and more errors (ps < .01) on a cancer word list relative to noncancer lists. This biased processing was not mediated by the significantly higher perceived risk, general distress, or cancer-specific distress in FH+ women. Maladaptive alterations in processing cancer stimuli may have important clinical implications, as these women must process complex cancer-related information critical to their health (e.g., options for chemoprevention, screening).     

Unconscious Familiarity and Local Context Effects on Low-Level Face Processing: A Reconstruction Hypothesis

A common view in face recognition research holds that there is a stored representation specific to each known face. It is also posited that semantic or memory-based information cannot influence low-level face processing. The two experiments reported in this article investigate the nature of this representation and the flow of face information processing. Participants had to search for a particular primed face among other faces. In Experiment 1, the search was done in a context where distractors had either a different degree of fame or the same degree of fame. In Experiment 2, the target face was primed either with semantic information or without any information. Both experiments demonstrated that increasing the display set size lengthened face detection time. However, the lengthening was a function of face fame. The search context also had an effect on the slope of the famous face detection. The results are explained in terms of the idea that face representations are reconstructed and that high- and low-level information are integrated into the processing. The integration process is not a conscious one.     

Evidence for blatant dehumanization of mental illness and its relation to stigma

ABSTRACT

People with mental illness face stigma, and due to their low social status, they may also face blatant dehumanization that denies their status as fully evolved human beings. In the current research, three studies documented the existence of blatant dehumanization of mental illness. Study 1 (N = 112) showed that participants rated people with mental illness in general as being significantly less human than other dehumanized social groups such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims. Study 2 (N = 158) showed that dehumanization occurs for specific mental disorders but that the level of dehumanization varies widely among disorders. Study 3 (N = 223) documented significant correlations between dehumanization of mental illness and standard measures of stigma such as fear, pity, and social distance. Overall, the results establish the relevance of blatant dehumanization to mental illness stigma and suggest new directions for understanding stigma.