210 NietzscheIt was certainly a great accomplishment on Nietzsche's part to have
depicted the subde and varied manners in which our consciousness
functions and the primitiveness and coarseness of the concepts that
consciousness employs to understand its workings. Usually this process
is accomplished by juxtaposing a subjective interior and an objective
exterior and then asking how to fuse back together what was artificially
split by ascertaining how the world comes into the subject and the sub-
ject into the world. Nietzsche demonstrated that our perceptions and
thought processes function differendy from how we generally imagine
them to do; they form a series of discontinuous clarifications in a stream
of acts not focused on the individual. Only secondary reflection, namely
the consciousness of consciousness, splits the world into a world of ego
and a world of objects. Still, the continuous process of life, which goes
virtually unnoticed by consciousness, serves to mask this boundary.
Nietzsche's philosophy attempts to expand consciousness for the more
sublime and broadening experiences in which we are already caught up
with our bodies and lives. His descriptions opened up a door and, just as
he had suspected, opened out to a boundless expanse—the world of
consciousness and conscious existence. This wodd is so diverse and
spontaneous that any ingenious description inevitably comes into con-
flict with a scientific concept that is oriented to systematization and
rules. Thus, Nietzsche's work—if we count the enormous Nachlass—
has ultimately itself become an expression of the stream of conscious-
ness that he set out to describe. Nietzsche wished to approach the
system from a particular vantage point. Nevertheless, he was a passion-
ate singularist. For him, the world consisted of nothing but details. He
considered even himself a detail composed entirely of further details.
And so, by the same token, he contended that there was no actual his-
tory, but only moments and events. Therefore, an alert consciousness
can never reach a point of termination. Every synthesis resolves into
details. There are only details, and although they are everything, they do
not constitute a whole. No whole could encompass the plethora of
details. Nietzsche began to recognize more and more cleady, once he