Philosopher urges us to heed Nietzsche’s call to renaturalize ourselves

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is very relevant because “he proposes to ask us what it means to be human and what our responsibilities are with other forms of life,” said Vanessa Lemm, a specialist in the German thinker and author of the book Man by nature (Herder Editorial), which was presented in the country a few days ago.

The German researcher, who also gave a couple of lectures on the developments in the work of Nietzsche (1844-1900), commented to The Day: “we have not assumed what it means to be an animal and that what we call human is an illusion that must be undone to reach what the philosopher called ‘homo natura’.”

The poet also “anticipated concepts that we now know as the philosophy of the environment, for example, or contemporary theories that confirm the continuity between nature and culture.”

Lemm said that his writing, subtitled Nietzsche, anthropology and biopoliticswas born from the aphorism 230 of Beyond good and evilwhich captures the notion homo natura and describes that its “philosophy has the task of renaturalizing the human being, of retranslating it to nature.”

The philosopher also explores the way of understanding the thought contained in that Nitzschean fragment, but also the different receptions it had later, since “10 to 15 years ago there was a certain fashion of appropriating his ideas to put forward a deterministic or scientific naturalism. According to these interpretations, the figure man by nature “specifies definitively and absolutely what the human being is.”

The magazine editor Nietzsche Studies He warned that these approaches “are very dangerous” because they are limited to the idea that “the natural sciences have an answer to who we are, but it is biological or genetic.”

Man by natureLemm added, examines the aforementioned interpretations and takes up “the concept of nature, which must be reappropriated by philosophy and the human sciences with open visions oriented toward the future.”

He praised Nietzsche for having stopped talking about “truth as something abstract, absolute, and rather as a physical and corporal experience. He explores different things throughout his work. Philosophy is transformed into that experimentation from the perspective of the philosopher’s life, which is limited, punctual, situated and has nothing universal.”

Assumption of the Darwinian principle

Given the emergence of biology as a new knowledge in the 19th century and the Darwinian notion that man belongs to the animal sphere, Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers who assumed such ideas and with them examined the “conception of philosophy, history, culture, politics and morality,” commented the vice-rector of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Greenwich.

Vanessa Lemm recalled that Nietzsche contributed to several debates of the 19th century, such as his criticism of democracy, his ideas about the emergence of mass ideologies and industrialization, but his work makes use of “timelessness” as an “articulation between history, present and future.” This way, described in On the advantages and disadvantages of history for life“it is a way of using his philosophy to develop a critical perspective in our time.”

Free education

In Nietzsche there are “two movements of formation: one is more civilizing, of domination and imposing rules on life and there is that of culture as an anti-civilizing movement. It is an antagonism that is rather a creative transformation, on the artistic and poetic side.”

What is relevant about this distinction is that “civilization movements have distanced us so much from nature that they generate forms of discomfort in culture”, an intuition shared by Sigmund Freud and who together with Nietzsche clarify this problem in Western culture: “to heal it we must undo some civilizational elements and have an education that is free, creative and oriented towards the future.”

Lem concluded: “an idea in Freud and Nietzsche about a certain creative potential in which we must rediscover the movement of self-improvement that the German refers to with the superhuman or the superman, as a human being who is capable of using that movement of renaturalization for transformation.”