More Thinkers That Changed the World

I recently had a great interview/conversation with Daniele Fulvi, who is a researcher and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, about Nietzsche for his course “Thinkers that Changed the World”.

In aphorism 14 of the The Antichrist, Nietzsche announces that he has ‘changed (umgelernt)’ his way of thinking about human nature and that he has ‘placed the human being back among (zurückgestellt) the animals’. Daniele asked about the importance of Nietzsche’s claim and how I understand it.

Some scholars read this aphorism as evidence of Nietzsche’s adherence to a naturalistic conception of human nature that is Darwinist and falls within the remit of the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Within this biological and evolutionary discourse, natural history means the history of the biological evolution of forms of life.

Instead, for me the key question is what difference the discovery of human animality makes for our historical self-understanding. And what does the ‘placing back’ of the human being among the animals mean for our understanding of history? Nietzsche pursues two possible answers to this question: first, the idea that the writing of a ‘natural’ history must take its evidence from the way history is written on the body and not in terms of idealities. Second, such a ‘natural’ history reveals a conception of human nature that is essentially engaged in cultural (self)transformation, and as such overcomes the false dichotomy between culture and nature, human and animal.

Nietzsche does not adopt a scientific conception of biological evolution. Rather, Nietzsche employs natural science to deconstruct the civilisational ideal of humanity as superior to animals to uncover the creativity of life.

Vanessa Lemm, Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology, and Biopolitics (EUP 2020), chapter 3.