The animal in Nietzsche's philosophy -- Culture and civilization -- Politics and promise -- Culture and economy -- Giving and forgiving -- Animality, creativity, and historicity -- Animality, language, and truth -- Biopolitics and the question of animal life.
In his recent discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism, Brian Leiter invokes examples from the world of plants to demonstrate that human behavior and values are causally determined by “heritable psychological and physiological traits,” or what he also refers to as “type-facts.”1 On this view, Nietzsche’s naturalistic project is concerned with explaining how and why a certain type of person comes to bear certain values and ideas just as “one might come to understand things about a certain type of tree by knowing (...) its fruits.”2 Leiter holds that “just as natural facts about the tree explain the fruit it bears, so too type-facts about a person will explain the ideas and values he comes to bear.”3 Nietzsche views the.. (shrink)
Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocated the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on Earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a (...) more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life and remains a deep source of wisdom about living. (shrink)
This essay presents a reading of Nietzsche's untimely consideration On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life that reevaluates the importance of animality and animal forgetfulness in Nietzsche's conception of history. It argues that the novelty of Nietzsche's essay On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life is contained in the insight that animal is prior and primordial to human memory; that life is historical through and through because it is forgetful through and through. Furthermore, it contends that (...) the perspective of animal forgetfulness reveals that memory is an artistic force, and, as a consequence, historiography must be understood as an artwork rather than a science, concerned with interpretation rather than the factual representation of the past. Dieser Artikel vertritt die These, dass die Originalität von Vom Nutzen und Nachthiel der Historie für das Leben darin besteht, das tierische, Vergessen als die Bedingung und Möglichkeit des menschlichen Erinnerns festgestellt zu haben. Dies beduetet, dass das menschliche Leben nicht deswegen als geschichtlich zu begriefen ist, weil der Mensch sich erinnert, sondern weil er wie das Tier vergisst. Es wird dafür argumentiert, das es diese Einsicht in den Vorang des tierischen Vergessens ist, welche Nietzsche dazu geführt hat einerseits das menschliche Erinnerungvermögen als eine Künstlerische Kraft neu zu definieren und andererseits die Geschichtsschreibung als ein Kunstwerk, dass sich mit Interpretation und nich mit der faktischen Widerspiegelung der Vergangenheit befasst, neu ze bestimmen. (shrink)
Este artículo investiga el análisis que Foucault lleva a cabo de la vida filosófica de los cínicos y de la parrêsia en El coraje de la verdad desde la perspectiva de la siguiente pregunta nietzscheana: ¿Cómo puede ser incorporada la verdad? Para considerar a la filosofía como una forma de vida y no meramente como una ciencia o una doctrina, la pregunta de cómo puede vivirse o materializarse la verdad en el cuerpo físico es, evidentemente, crucial. Mientras que tanto Foucault (...) como Arendt pueden ser leídos como defensores de la vida filosófica por sus efectos ético-políticos, Arendt sostiene que la vida filosófica socrática es una vida que habilita una distancia con el cuerpo, en contraste, en el análisis de Foucault sobre los cínicos encontramos una idea de la vida filosófica en la que la verdad se revela o manifiesta en el cuerpo material de la vida. Este artículo recoge la lógica inmunitaria de la biopolítica de Esposito con el fin de sostener que la vida filosófica de los cínicos y su hablar franco utilizan los recursos comunitarios de la encarnación para unificar la vida y la filosofía en una forma de vida cosmopolita. (shrink)
(2013). Nietzsche, Einverleibung and the Politics of Immunity. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 3-19. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.746271.
Der Artikel befasst sich mit der Frage, ob Nietzsches Vision eines kommenden Adels als ein Streben nach autoritärer und ausbeuterischer politischer Herrschaft verstanden werden kann. Entgegen der Auffassung, Nietzsches Vision aristokratischer Kultur hätte eine Politik der Gewaltherrschaft zur Folge, argumentiert der Artikel, basierend auf einer Auslegung der Begriffe der aristokratischen Gesellschaft, der Rangordnung und der Verantwortung bei Nietzsche, dass aristokratische Kultur auf die Überwindung einer solchen Politik abzielt.
Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.
Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and embodied (...) truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)
This dissertation is a discussion of the Nietzschean hypothesis that human nature is a double nature, human and animal. Human nature is not a given, but becomes through the antagonism of its animal and human life forces. The movement of human becoming is a movement of overcoming and self-overcoming. It involves effort and courage, sacrifice and suffering so as to lead the human species and individual to a higher type of humanity, a more future promising and more human humanity. Nietzsche (...) claims that the forth bringing of a truly human, over-human nature requires the continuous return to the human animal forces. The animals stand at the beginning and re-beginning of humanity. ;I show that the problems of culture and civilization, of politics, of history, of truth and of morality in Nietzsche's philosophy are formulated on the basis of the antagonism of human and animal life forces. The dissertation develops the following theses. Against the animals, the human species gives rise to a political community based on slavery and tyranny. With the animal forces, it gives rise to a political community grounded in the singular individual's responsibility and freedom. Against the animals, the human species gives rise to a form of history that infinitely ties the human individual to its past. With the animal forces, it gives rise to a form of history as culture and self-culture, invested in the freeing of the human individual and species from the past so as to orient it towards its human, truly human becoming and overcoming. Against the animals, truth takes the form of an illusion of absolute and universal truth that opposes itself to human becoming and overcoming. With the animal forces, truth takes the form of an illusion of relative, contingent, singular and multiple truths, favoring the movement of becoming human. Finally, against the animals, the human species bases the relation to the other on the feelings of resentment, revenge and hatred. With the animals, it gives rise to the virtue of giving that establishes a relation of love and friendship between humans and animals, between humans and humans. (shrink)
Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é esboçar os traços de uma antropologia nietzschiana que sustente um processo de transformação humana. Na primeira parte, antropologia literária, argumento que sua antropologia resgata a noção grega arcaica da natureza como arte ou cultura. Na segunda parte, antropologia científica, apresento o método científico de Nietzsche e de Freud em sua aproximação filosófica da questão da natureza. Na terceira e última parte, antropologia transformadora, discuto o desafio da renaturalização do ser humano, isto é, compreender não (...) apenas o que somos como seres humanos, mas também do que podemos nos tornar, questão que ilustro apelando para a ideia do “além-do-homem” de Nietzsche.: The purpose of this article is to sketch traces of a Nietzschean anthropology that supports a process of human transformation. In the first part, literary anthropology, I argue that his anthropology recovers Greek notion of nature as art and culture. In the second part, scientific anthropology, I present Nietzsche’s and Freud’s scientific method and its philosophical approach to the question of nature. In the third part, transformational anthropology, I discuss the challenge of renaturalizing human being, i. e., of understanding not only what we are as human beings, but also what we might become, issue that I illustrate by relating it to the Nietzschean overman. (shrink)
Este artículo ofrece una lectura de la curiosa figura del homo natura. Según Löwith el homo natura de Nietzsche apunta hacia una forma de vida humana que es “más natural” que la concepción cristiana de la naturaleza humana. Coincido con Löwith en que responder a la cuestión acerca del sentido de homo natura exige una antropología filosófica. Sin embargo, sostengo que la concepción de la naturaleza humana de Löwith no capta adecuadamente su fondo dionisíaco.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche envisages the naturalisation of the human being, its retranslation back into nature, as a liberating experience where the human being rediscovers nature as a creative and transformative force that the human being embodies. For Nietzsche, the question of the future of the human being is contingent on whether the human being is capable of re-embodying nature. Human nature for Nietzsche is not a given of the body, something that belongs to the human being per (...) se. Instead, nature in the human being comes with the task of retranslation, replanting, re-embodying nature. This is why Nietzsche’s thinking about nature is future oriented, opening up the horizon of human transformation. In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s thinking about homo natura is distinctly posthuman and as such sets the stage for contemporary debates on posthumanism. (shrink)
