Nietzsche and the Earth

Biography, Ecology, Politics

Henk Manschot

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350134416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) loved nature and his daily walks in the Swiss Mountains and by the Mediterranean Sea heavily influenced his writing, and particularly his most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. By following the philosopher on these ramblings and reflecting on Zarathustra's (Nietzsche's alter ego) surprising interactions with the animals he meets on his way, Henk Manschot cleverly shows how all these experiences were reflected in the philosopher's thinking on the relationship between human beings and the Earth. Working at the intersection of philosophy and environmental studies, Manschot presents key Nietzschean concepts as the foundations of an ecological 'art of living' for the twenty-first century. In a unique contribution to the field, he also introduces the concept of 'terra-sophy', which combines the notions of terra (earth) and sophy (wisdom), to contend that humans should reimagine themselves as in a reciprocal relationship with the planet. For Manschot, Nietzsche's thought can inspire humanity to move from a human to an Earth-focused relationship to the world; a shift in thought that would considerably benefit a generation facing an unprecedented ecological crisis.

Part I

Nietzsche’s experimental lifestyle

1

Nietzsche, animals and nature

A personal and philosophical voyage of discovery

Around 1880 Nietzsche set off in an entirely new direction in life. He was thirty-six years old and had resigned from his position as a professor of classical philology in Basel to seek peace and quiet. He went looking for a place where he could feel healthy and be able to think and write. For the summer months he found it in the Swiss Alps near Sils Maria, ‘at an altitude of six thousand feet above sea level’.¹ Almost every summer after that he spent several months in a small boarding house built up against a rock face. He needed only to step out of the door and he was in the mountains. In winter he preferred the mild climate of southern Europe, although he did not find there one specific place in which to settle. He stayed mainly in or near Genoa, Nice or Venice. One thing all three places have in common is their coastal location. With a view of the sea and the mountains, this was the landscape in which Nietzsche took his daily walks, lasting up to seven hours a day. Along the way he made brief notes about ideas on all kinds of subjects, which he worked up into short passages of text in the evenings or in the days that followed.

He chose to walk alone. His repeated forays into the mountains or along the rocky Mediterranean coast put their stamp on his life and determined the rhythm of his days. Nature was his faithful companion and silent witness to his moods and ruminations, and in it he encountered an endless stream of impressions, associations and fantasies. He experienced his new life of peace and fresh air as a profound liberation. He felt his whole body come alive. Powerful emotions took hold of him, primeval passions that existed both in him and in the natural world around him. A desire to come into contact more and more deeply with ‘le sens immédiat de la vie’, with life as an immediate and unmediated experience, is how Italian philosopher Giorgio Colli, editor of the first scholarly edition of Nietzsche’s work, described the most basic motivation that inspired Nietzsche from this time onwards. His philosophizing changed radically as a result, in both form and content. Not just thinking and speaking but singing and dancing and the poems of ‘Prince Vogelfrei’ all became part of it, a whirlwind of associations and reflections that seem born out of new experiences.

The first fruits of this walking philosophy were collected in books including Human All Too Human, The Dawn, The Wanderer and His Shadow and The Gay Science. The title of the latter refers to the knowledge of the troubadours. In a revised preface, added after a few years to a second edition of The Gay Science, he characterized the experiences of those early years of wandering as a process of healing for body and mind. Out of the sick and degenerate situation in which he had found himself, ‘one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before’ (GS, Preface, §4). It was clearly a truly exceptional experience of healing of both mind and body, and just how powerful it must have been becomes even clearer when we realize that Nietzsche had been feeling sick, in every sense, of the culture in which he lived. This expressed itself in feelings of contempt and an almost physical aversion to his own era, as well as rage and powerlessness, sarcasm, a bodily sense of not being at home anywhere, migraine, eating disorders and difficulty sleeping. His sufferings reverberate throughout the text, which continues,

How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our uneducated people, our rich people, and our rulers! How maliciously we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the ‘educated’ person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide ‘spiritual pleasures’ – with the aid of spirituous liquors! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! (GS, Preface, §4)

Nietzsche felt forced to give up the life into which he had settled, to terminate the professional career that had made him a respected figure in the cultural world of his day. He was determined to live differently, closer to nature. But it is typical of Nietzsche that his personal process of physical and mental healing was from the start tightly interwoven with questions about culture. He applied the labels ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ to cultures as well as to individuals, and he believed cultures could make people ill or extinguish their joy in living. Might they also help to promote high spirits? If so, how? A new skin, a softer tongue, a more delicate taste – primary physical experiences and sensations were his first guides on the way to the ‘great health’ he was seeking. Animals had a vital part to play in that search.

Nietzsche and the animals

During his walks, Nietzsche must have developed a special bond with animals and indulged the emotions and fantasies that animals foster in human beings. Yet it was not immediately clear how they were to figure in his life. Although I have been reading Nietzsche’s work for many years, it came as a complete surprise to discover that of all modern philosophers it is he who discusses animals most often and in the greatest variety. It came home to me only when I discovered the book Bestiaire de Friedrich Nietzsche (2011), in which François Brémondy lists all the living creatures mentioned in Nietzsche’s books in alphabetical order, complete with quotations from the passages in which they feature. There are well over a hundred of them.²

They fall into two categories. First, there are those Nietzsche must have come upon on his walks and that caught his eye, including a lot of birds, naturally: swallows, pigeons, seagulls, sparrows, probably the eagle, and in his imagin ation the albatross, which along with the eagle made the greatest impression on him of all. Then there were the large herbivores and herd animals, the cows and sheep, the horses and donkeys, as well as the dog, cat, goose, peacock, snake, frog, and a menagerie of butterflies, flies and hornets, worms and ants. The other category is made up of animals that he cannot have seen himself but that very much spoke to his imagination and his state of mind: the camel and the lion, the tiger and the bear, the wolf and the llama, the rhinoceros and the hyena, the crocodile and the rattlesnake, not forgetting the ape. Many of these were to have a considerable impact on his ideas about inversion and transformation.

What functions do animals go on to fulfil in Nietzsche’s philosophy? The following passage contains an early hint.

Moreover my eyesight is poor and my imagination (whether dreaming or awake) is accustomed to a great deal and regards a great deal as possible that others would not always accept as such. – I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics – that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness. When I’m in a very good mood, I glide about that way continually, high and low as I see fit, the one without effort, the other without haughtiness and abasement. ‘Upswing’, as many describe this, is for me too muscular and violent. (NF-1881, 15 [60])

The bird is a major figure in Nietzsche’s writings. Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s alter ego, says, ‘If ever I spread silent skies above me and flew into my own sky with my own wings . . . , ’ he also talks of ‘my freedom’s bird-wisdom’ (Z, ‘The Seven Seals, §7’). Nietzsche feels akin above all to the big birds that hover, including the albatross, king among birds, and the condor of the Andes (NF-1883, 8[2]), able at the greatest of heights to hang almost motionless in the air for more than an hour, riding the air currents. On the wings of these birds Nietzsche explores the landscape and his feelings of appreciation and disdain, experiencing bodily the energy that is released when a person can be free as a bird, nourishing a desire for all things light, graceful and high. Birds teach Zarathustra to sing and urge him to stop talking for once. Of all the animals it is the birds that inspire in him the most beautiful words with which to capture intense moments of happiness and deep desires.

Animals accompany Nietzsche in his search, understand his fears and joys, bring him ‘food’ in times of need and sing along with him in moments of joy. We find them doing all these things in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a dramatized frame story about Zarathustra who withdraws to the mountains where, as a hermit, he experiences the great transformation that occupies Nietzsche’s thoughts. The animals ‘did not leave his side day and night, unless the eagle flew out to fetch food’ (Z, III, ‘The Convalescent, §2’). Here is Nietzsche the poet, the prophet–poet as Zarathustra calls himself. Here animals can do whatever poets and storytellers make them do. The lion can laugh and mice dance on the table. Nietzsche pulls out all the stops and takes inspiration in doing so from literature and from animal philosophy. The eagle that ‘flew out’ brings so much back that

Eventually Zarathustra lay among yellow and red berries, grapes, red apples, aromatic herbs and pine cones. At his feet, however, two lambs were spread out, which the eagle with difficulty had taken as prey from their shepherds. Finally, after seven days, Zarathustra sat up on his bed, picked up one of the red apples, smelled it, and found its aroma lovely. Then his animals believed the time had come to speak with him. (Z, III, ‘The Convalescent, §2’)

Animals keep humans company in many stories. That in itself is nothing new. What strikes me here is the richness of the colours and smells of nature, and the warmth with which Nietzsche writes about Zarathustra’s animals. There is a sharp contrast between Zarathustra’s contact with animals and the way he interacts with people – as if Zarathustra belongs to their world; as if he were one of them.

Animals help Nietzsche to detect intense urges that we do not easily accept as part of ourselves, feelings Nietzsche believed were appropriate to hunter and prey. From the very start he is fascinated by the phenomenon of violence in nature and wrestles with its significance. How do life and violence go together? What impulses show themselves in violent and cruel behaviour? What do we feel if we empathize with such behaviour, indulge it, allow ourselves to be swept along by it? Nietzsche is fascinated by the superior beauty of the predator, by its great power, and he comes to see that compassion, which lies at the core of morality, holds no value for it. He repeatedly states that morality has no part to play in the interaction between predator and prey, indeed must play no part in it. After one of his walks he noted, ‘In nature there is no partiality for the living or against death. If something living does not survive, nothing fails in its purpose’ (NF-1881, 12[111]). The place of violence and aggression in life, including human life, became one of Nietzsche’s central themes. In his subject matter the centre of gravity eventually shifts to the moral perspective. What kind of violence contributes to life? With such questions in mind he consulted the latest scholarship, becoming involved in debates about evolution, investigating the new science of biology, in which organic life is explained as a great interplay of forces and counterforces. Later, in On the Genealogy of Morals, he diagnosed the coming into being of human morality as one long, progressive development of increasingly complex schooling, of attempts to discipline the primal force that the predator, which cannot be disciplined, inflicts in its natural beauty and splendour.

These are some of the ways in which animals appear in Nietzsche’s writing. It would be possible to identify others, but I do not intend my account to be exhaustive, and anyhow there is something artificial about picking a text apart in this way. Nevertheless, it has helped me in my efforts to discover how important perception and empathy were for Nietzsche in his discovery of nature, in restoring his sense of a connection with life, of le sens immédiat de la vie. The overwhelming vitality of a life lived outdoors resonates with a rich variety of poetry and philosophy that came from inside him.

Almost all the literature about Nietzsche quotes a sentence in which he characterizes humanity as ‘the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed’ (BGE, III, §62), words usually explained as a theoretical assertion. Nietzsche is often assumed to have meant that all animals besides humans have fixed patterns of instinct. Or that the human being is not an animal among animals but differs from them categorically. I suspect that this particular pithy statement was preceded by a perception. Nietzsche was so good at imagining what it was like to be an animal that during one of his walks it must have occurred to him to ask: If I were to create myself, what would I want to be like? In what combination of strengths and skills would I wish to train myself?

Animals occupied a key role in Nietzsche’s new life, but in his writings he developed his own particular way of associating with them. We need to become familiar with it, even to go along with it, if we are to understand him. His animals want to put the people who have shut themselves up in their human world back on track towards true happiness. On a long walk in the mountains we might suddenly come upon a small group of cows that stand together and give us a good long look. Such an experience was one Nietzsche would remember. It turns up in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

When Zarathustra had left the ugliest human being, he was freezing and he felt lonely; after all, so much that was cold and lonely went through his mind, to the point where even his limbs grew colder because of it. But as he climbed further and further, up, down, now past green meadows, but then also across wild stony deposits where previously an impatient brook might have laid itself to bed, then all at once his mood became warmer and more cordial. ‘What happened to me?’ he asked himself, ‘something warm and lively refreshes me, something that must be close to me. . . .’ But when he peered about himself and searched for the comforters of his solitude, oddly enough, it was cows huddled together on a knoll; their nearness and smell had warmed his heart. Now these cows seemed engrossed in listening to someone speaking, and they paid no attention to the one who approached them. But when Zarathustra was quite near them he heard clearly how a human voice spoke from the midst of the cows; and evidently they had all turned their heads toward the speaker. . . . ‘What are you seeking here?’ cried Zarathustra, astonished. ‘What am I seeking here?’ he answered: ‘The same thing you seek, you trouble maker! Namely happiness on earth. But for that I want to learn from these cows.’ (Z, IV, ‘The Voluntary Beggar’)

Where did Nietzsche encounter his animals? Why was it that he found among them his most faithful companions, rather than among people? To understand this we need to go a few years back in time.

Nietzsche by the sea

‘So is there in the whole world now a single person who, like me, sits beside the sea and . . . ’ (NF-1881, 12[113])

Nietzsche’s decision to lead a different life did not come out of the blue. The years that preceded it were far from happy. In 1876, four years before the start of his period of wandering, when he was still a full-time professor, he took a trip to Italy. It was his first journey to southern Europe. Greatly troubled by migraine and other ailments, mentally exhausted and disappointed by Wagner’s cultural projects, he accepted an invitation from a good friend to go and stay with her in Sorrento, near Naples, to recuperate. He told her he would bring two friends with him. According to Paolo D’Iorio, the stay in Sorrento brought about the first fundamental transformation in Nietzsche’s life and thought. We can follow the events of those few months almost day by day, since in D’Iorio’s 2012 book Le voyage de Nietzsche à Sorrente (published in English in 2016 as Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento), the author reconstructs them by drawing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Translator’s note
• Abbreviations
• Part I Nietzsche’s experimental lifestyle
• Part II ‘Terrasophy’: Guidelines for a philosophy of the future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright