Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.

12350

Nietzsche on Nature
Gary Handwerk*
University of Washington

Abstract
Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has traditionally been seen as oriented toward human (all too human)
affairs, nature present in it as backdrop or atmosphere, but not on its own terms a central focus of his work.
Yet Nietzsche was well informed about the natural science of his era and particularly attuned to the im-
portance of figures such as Charles Darwin. Building upon John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s New Darwinism,
this essay explores the relation between Nietzsche’s ethics, psychology, and philosophy of history and
Darwinian evolutionary theory – not just Darwin as understood by the 19th-century reception of his
ideas (heavily shaped by social Darwinist ideologies), but as foundational for a contemporary understand-
ing of ecological and environmental concerns. Anticipating some of the implications of Darwinian
thought in the 20th century, Nietzsche’s writings help sharpen our awareness of the tensions between so-
cial and natural selection, biological and social diversity, and ( genetic) fate and (willed) destiny – all crucial
for environmental debates of the 21st century.

The angle from which I would like to approach Nietzsche in this essay is environmental –
a surprising choice, perhaps, because Nietzsche has most often been seen as articulating a
strictly human or more-than-human project, not an ecological one. Zarathustra’s words
are indicative of this: “Lead back to the earth the virtue that f lew away, as I do – back
to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning” (Nietz-
sche 4:100). Such remarks ( frequent in Nietzsche’s work) could easily be taken as evidence
that his philosophy as a whole and many of its key concepts, such as the will to power, are
anthropocentric and anti-ecological, contrary to any environmental philosophy of limits
and balance, indifferent or even actively opposed to currently predominant ecological values
such as sustainability. One could wonder, in fact, whether there is much space at all for na-
ture as we conventionally understand it (i.e., what is non-human, pre-human, supra-
human) in Nietzsche’s work, except as a back-drop to human affairs. Or conversely,
whether Nietzsche’s projects, centered on human concerns as they seem to be, can be ex-
pected to give us anything useful toward contemporary environmental dilemmas.
A crucial element for this inquiry involves Nietzsche’s relation, as a late Romantic, to
Darwinian evolution and to the question of whether the human species is subject to evo-
lutionary laws or, in key respects, post-evolutionary, a term elucidated by nature writer
Barry Lopez.

Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the
thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution. With the development of var-
ious technologies…mankind has not only been able to take over the specific niches of other animals
but has been able to move into regions that were formerly unavailable to him. The animals he found
already occupying niches in these other areas he, again, either displaced or eliminated…the same tech-
nological advances and the enormous increase in his food base have largely exempted man from the
effect of natural controls on the size of his population. (Lopez 38)

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

638 Nietzsche on Nature

Lopez emphasizes the risks – ethical and ecological – of this perspective throughout Arctic
Dreams and his subsequent publications. His writings help frame the relation of evolutionary
theory to human culture by asking as well whether the principles of evolution have had and
continue to have a discernible bearing on human ethics and politics…and whether they
should.1
Even if we were to locate human beings wholly inside the evolutionary process, it remains
uncertain just what bearing this positioning might have for us, because it is a separate question
whether human beings are continuing to evolve in any observable or meaningful way. Some
variants of standard evolutionary theory, such as the Eldredge/Gould thesis of punctuated
equilibrium,2 do suggest that the processes of evolution might on occasion be observable
within a human time-frame. Indeed, thanks to contemporary scientific research, we are better
positioned than ever before to investigate whether human beings are still evolving (in ways
discernibly following the laws of natural selection) and to test our hypotheses about such
matters.
A recent article by Benjamin Phelan, “How We Evolve,” pulls together much current sci-
entific research on this topic. Based upon information from geneticists such as John Hawks,
Phelan concludes that not only are human beings evolving, but that “Up to 10 percent of
the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever be-
fore in human history” (193), for reasons that he argues have more to do with raw numbers
than anything else. “We invented agriculture, started eating different food, and began dwell-
ing in cities. Our numbers swelled, and our DNA is still catching up” (196). For all of the
rightful hesitation of scientists in approaching the issue, it seems clear that human intelligence
would then be evolving as well, even in a world where our own ongoing evolution might be
governed more by culture than by biology. “Culture,” after all, “is not an escape from con-
ditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind” (199) – and crucially differ-
ent, because it seems that we have the power to direct it. Yet even if this claim were true, we
should still bear in mind that evolution typically happens too slowly to be visible in terms of
biological life-spans. There may well be no way, therefore, for us to stand far enough outside
the process to perceive changes as they occur and to draw any reliable conclusions about the
implications of those changes. Moreover, it may be true that verifying an accelerated pace of
evolution would be irrelevant to the most pressing environmental concerns, as Paul Ehrlich
has said. “The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species…may be determined by the next
five generations. So I don’t really give a shit what’s happening to our genetic evolution”
(Phelan, 202). As a modest literary historian, I am hardly in a position to referee the scientific
debate, but my interest is in any case less in the objective facts than in cultural perspectives on
such questions and the impact that those perspectives have upon political discussion (indirectly
then, to be sure, upon scientific research as well). I would like to offer Nietzsche, as a provoc-
ative early instance of environmentally relevant evolutionary speculation, one with roots
deeply in the Romantic era.
That Nietzsche’s philosophy is in crucial respects developmental is clear from the projective
force of concepts such as the Übermensch. John Richardson has treated the evolutionary dimen-
sions of Nietzsche’s thought brilliantly in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism; his arguments summarizing
Nietzsche’s affinities with the Darwinian model of evolution offer an indispensable starting
point for this discussion. One should note first, however, that the affinities Richardson tracks
are not with Darwinism as it was conventionally understood in the 19th century or now, and es-
pecially not with social Darwinism, which Nietzsche vigorously critiqued.3 Instead, the affini-
ties result from how Nietzsche thought through in his own terms the implications of Darwin’s
ideas with respect to human destiny, implications sometimes at odds with core tenets of
Darwin’s own theorizing.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
 Nietzsche on Nature 639

Richardson’s interpretation, cobbled together as one must from the published texts and the
Nachlaß ( given that none of Nietzsche’s published works offers a systematic theory of nature),
argues that, “Nietzsche’s key borrowing from Darwin is a general answer to the challenge [of
providing a non-intentionalist theory of the directedness of drives and wills] – a way to
decognitivize and naturalize life’s directedness” (14). The key difference between these two
theories, Richardson later says, “is with Darwinism’s stress (Nietzsche thinks) on survival
or preservation, instead of on power or growth” (18).4 His account then separates three
distinct levels (not phases, for all three are present simultaneously) that Nietzsche sees at work
in the evolutionary process. In addition to the basic process of natural selection, which lies at
the core of Darwinian evolution, Richardson sees Nietzsche articulating more clearly than
Darwin how a second, distinctive form of social selection actually works.5 This second layer
of selective processes, which has evolved over the course of human civilization, operates in
tandem with genetically coded natural selective processes, yet in tension with them as well,
because it “works in favor of quite different overall outcomes” (7).6 “[These social-cognitive]
processes,” Richardson explains, “are replicated not only by inheritance…but by training/
learning….Hence they are selected not only by the comparative fitness ( for surviving/repro-
ducing) these habits confer on the persons who possess them, but also by these habits’
comparative propensity to diffuse through society by persons learning or imitating them”
(41) – i.e., thanks to their mimetic (or memetic, as Richardson puts it) efficacy. “The latter
is a kind of ‘fitness’ these practices have in their own right, to copy themselves independently
of the genetic route” (41).7 Crucially, “Social selection favors habits that not only preserve
the social medium in which they replicate, but that also shape or adapt this medium to suit
their own replication. That is, it favors habits that produce a kind of society, and a kind of
person, in which habits generally can most readily spread by copying” (86), a milieu of
perpetually reinscribed social conformity.8 Furthermore, “as such practices become able to
spread through a social medium, a new selection arises for them: selection as to how well they
can copy themselves in this way. So practices are selected to be ‘habit forming’ and are
progressively designed to be maximally so” (157) – social construction, if you will, as an
addictive process.
One way in which social selection resembles natural selection, however, is that it operates at
an unconscious level; indeed, it is crucial for Nietzsche that it seems to operate best when dis-
guising its purposes most fully. The initial force of Nietzsche’s critique of how social selection
works, then, is diagnostic; its result, he argues, has been to turn the human species into a race of
unhealthy, unhappy animals.

On the one hand our bodies and drives have been adapted for an animal, physical health – for fitness to
further the reproducing line. This involves a deep egoism. But our ‘spirit’ – our habits of memory, con-
sciousness and language – has been adapted by selection over a different field of replicators, for a differ-
ent and in fact conflicting end. Habits are selected to bind us into society, and the most effective means,
under both the ethic of custom and morality, are habits that attack and undermine our drives and their
natural ‘healthy selfishness.’…our two deep projects frustrate and interfere with one another, and sub-
ject us to a pervasive suffering. (120)

Civilization, as Freud put it, has its inherent and ineradicable discontents.
The theory attributed by Richardson to Nietzsche resembles a Darwinism shorn of the con-
solatory elements so vividly present in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, with its fre-
quent personification of Nature as a beneficent, quasi-divine agent hovering over the process
of selection.9 In opposition to Darwin’s more moralistic and metaphysical defense of nature,
Nietzsche offers a genealogical diagnosis of natural–social processes, which Richardson relates

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
640 Nietzsche on Nature

helpfully to recent philosophical theories termed “etiological,” by contrast with traditional tel-
eological philosophies.

This approach denies that the present dispositional state (even if it’s plastic, even if it’s fit) is sufficient to
constitute it toward its results – it also needs to have had a certain past, a certain causal history. So, it’s
not an organ’s [or social practice’s] ‘fitness for the future’ that constitutes its (present) functions, but its
‘fitness from the past’ – or not the way this organ is fit, but the way it’s an adaptation. (33)10

This shift could be located philosophically as a fundamental reversal of Kant, one of

Nietzsche’s favorite targets, of course, whose philosophy Nietzsche found to be similarly perme-
ated by residues of Christianity and teleology. We could conceptualize it as a shift from Kant’s
key idea in the third Critique of a “purposiveness without purpose” that governs aesthetic
(and ethical) experience to its inverse, a “purposelessness with purpose,” that purpose being a ge-
nealogically inf lected one. On the one hand, there is, for Nietzsche (and thus in Darwin, as seen
through Nietzsche’s lens), no moral order intrinsic to nature, buried somewhere beneath a bru-
tal struggle to survive and reproduce. The belief in one, as recurs residually in the Origin of
Species, is a metaphysical delusion.11
Yet, on the other hand the problem – in intellectual, ethical, social, political, and even scien-
tific terms – of valuing nature is a unavoidably practical one, not inherently metaphysical, and
intrinsic to any effort to value ourselves as human beings and our efforts in the world. Hence
Nietzsche’s goal is prescriptive as well as diagnostic, and he points more explicitly in his later
works toward a third, prognostic level of evolution, which Richardson terms “self selection”
– a more (yet probably never fully) conscious effort to determine criteria that should measure
success in the course of evolutionary history. For Darwin (at the start, at least) the criteria are
simple: sex and reproduction. Success is measured quantitatively in the Origin of Species by the
number of offspring one leaves behind (this is in turn directly related to the range over which
those offspring can spread, in a quasi-imperialist fashion, which is in turn a function of their var-
iability and hence adaptability to diverse local environments). Yet this measure is crucially
inf lected by two other facts that Darwin also emphasizes – that species are inextricably co-
dependent and that the process of evolution involves large amounts of co-adaptation, in which
there are both active and reactive elements always at work.
Richardson argues persuasively that this element of Darwinian theory thus offers an
opening to Nietzsche’s effort to define qualitative criteria for evolutionary success, with “self
selection” layered on top of both natural and social selection. His argument for how these
layers intersect is both ingenious and more intricate than I can summarize in detail here.
The short-hand version is this: “Meaning is settled by genealogy” (77), with criteria for evolu-
tionary success deduced forward from a backward-oriented genealogical account of why
human nature and societies have developed as they have. Genealogy thus includes the history
of co-dependencies and co-adaptations. “The values he creates have their distinction, and
their claim on us, by their proceeding from the genealogy. So though not perhaps compelled
by the facts, his values are crucially informed by them” (113) – this, perhaps, the most crucial
(and most subtle) distinction in Richardson’s analysis. Nietzsche then advocates for a
self-conscious “breeding” that involves “redesigning our drives and practices on the basis of
insight into why we have them, i.e., what they have been for” (195).12 Success can ultimately
be measured by one’s degree of freedom, with that in turn measured by one’s capacity to
recognize and address the evolutionary contradictions that Nietzsche sees at the center of
contemporary human experience.13 Yet this re-creation of self (and thus, too, of society) is
never ex nihilo, always a process of transformation and adaptation rather than a space of total
freedom or pure invention.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
 Nietzsche on Nature 641

One of Nietzsche’s most fundamental revisions of Darwinian theory is his claim that our ap-
parent errors and failures turn out to be essential parts of the evolutionary process – thus cre-
ating a persistently high level of hermeneutic uncertainty as we envisage our future through
the lens of our past, a major and ineradicable constraint upon our capacity to choose our fu-
tures. As Richardson puts it, “Nietzsche’s main thrust is that it’s errors (as well as lies) that have
been thus functional. Our cognitive practices are crucially built out of dispositions designed to
get things wrong – i.e., out of drives to simplify and otherwise distort reality” (40). Another
key revision is to shift the basic unit of analysis as one tries to assess the relations among the
well-being of species, tribes, peoples, nations, families, individuals and, one might add, the en-
vironment as a whole. Where Darwin relies upon entire species (and only secondarily upon
variants within species) as his basic units, Nietzsche points instead to the lineage.14 Again from
Richardson: “The primary biological entities are neither individual organisms, nor kinds or
types, but these ‘chains’ of individuals – what I have called ‘lineages’” (44).15 Thus Nietzsche
raises a key question: what is the most suitable unit of analysis for evolutionary inquiry, with its
incommensurable scales of geological, historical, and biological time?
The first step in this regard, post-Nietzsche, would be to shed the conventional, largely un-
ref lective equivalence of “natural” with “right” that dominates so much environmental debate,
but also, oddly, so much anti-environmental rhetoric – a tendency shared by Enlightenment ra-
tionalism, Rousseauvian-derived Romanticisms, even Darwinism and tea-party Republican-
ism, despite the fact that each of these broad movements defines nature quite differently.
Nature gets invoked in contemporary political and cultural discussions as the trump card to sup-
port either side of almost any issue, homosexual rights or the opposition to them, capitalist com-
petition or its socialist contrary, gender equality, or gender subordination. It gets invoked with
special astringency in environmental debates, where nature itself is what is at stake.
In an essay this short, I can give at best some hints of how one might extend the path that
Richardson has charted through Nietzsche and the implications of that for environmental
thought. This is, if you will, a map for a possible re-reading of Nietzsche, with a preliminary goal
of marking some points de repère along the way. We must remember, too, that “nature” and
“natural,” like most key terms in Nietzsche’s works, are unstable, appearing in multiple guises
that often have no consistently sustained valences. But I want to foreground two aspects of a
re-valued nature that we can glimpse through Nietzsche’s writing, diversity, and freedom,
and to propose that he posits an intrinsic, evolutionarily grounded connection between them.
“Diversity” is among the most widely used and highly charged terms in contemporary academic
and social settings, of particular interest because of how it migrates readily across the discourses of
culture and biology, valued in both, although often in quite different ways. Although the dis-
cursive registers it inhabits are not the same in the two areas, it carries a strongly political reso-
nance in both, and has a parallel effect in both contexts of polarizing left- and right-wing values
that are among the most deeply held by partisans on both sides. “Freedom” is beset by similar
contestation, an idea at the core of Euro-American political debate since the emergence of lib-
eral political philosophies, claimed for any and all purposes.16
Nietzsche understands the evolutionary dynamic to involve an oscillation or dialectic be-
tween homogenization (species) and diversity (variant individuals or lineages); his ethics f low
out of his effort to chart the relationship between individual selfhood and intra-species interde-
pendence. As Richardson says,

[M]aking oneself, by making one’s values, is the best a human can be. But human life also depends on
society – on a background of shared values and practices, to which there must be very general alle-
giance. This allegiance in turn depends on a shared metavalue on agreeing and sharing, a value that
must be a strong instinct in order to support effective social practice, an ethos. In his thought about rank

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
642 Nietzsche on Nature

order, what matters most for Nietzsche is the necessary grades of escape from this dominant social in-
stinct. (201)17

The best balancing of these two pulls (however one might define “best” here) involves
assessing whether the goal in evolutionary terms of this process can be measured by any single
criterion, such as maximizing the number of available variants within a given species. Individual
bodies, Nietzsche recognizes, are the sites of such variance; as Richardson says, “will to power is
an engine for diversity,” while at the same time it “gives no overall direction to the evolutionary
process” (165). This, too, is a deeply Darwinian idea, understood by him in imperialist terms
that align readily with cruder interpretations of Nietzsche’s will to power. As The Origin states,
“The more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution,
and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified
places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers” (Appleman 125)…with
this increase in numbers, in turn, fostering further diversity. We have, in effect, a condition one
might term evolutionary drift, the logic of which is both geographical and temporal, yet scarcely
visible to any entity in the midst of it. For what diversity, intra- and inter-species variance, also
confers upon a given species (or society), beyond the potential to dominate other species and
larger territories, is ecological resilience in the face of inevitable environmental changes.
Our survival as a species, and our power as a species as well, rests in ways we still scarcely un-
derstand upon our interdependencies with other species, our capacity to continue to adapt along
with them. They, too, are part of our diversity, part of a logic that subtends the explicit ethical
purposes of a law like the Endangered Species Act, which confers upon all species a right to
exist. The preservation of diversity, resisting thus the centrifugal forces of global homogeniza-
tion, be it in the form of cultural reproduction or agricultural monoculture, offers a counter-
balance against the limits of human purposefulness, a corrective for its recurrent blindnesses
and errors. Yet, the social selection increasingly fostered by human behaviors undercuts the
natural tendency toward internal re-diversification of successful species. So how do we come
to count diversity among our highest values?
The most provocative element in Nietzsche’s works in this regard is what one might term
the ethic of chastening or restraint that they seem at times to urge upon us – an ethic rooted
in his strong perspectivist epistemology.18 There is, as Robert Pippin has cogently argued, a
perpetual caution against the hubris of mastery in Nietzsche’s works, his own (though
significantly different) version, of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic or Kant’s critique of human
reason. “The upshot of these obscure allusions seems to be that nothing really counts in some
probative way as ‘the’ establishment of mastery” (118). Mastery, freedom and self-overcoming
remain essentially bound to what Pippin identifies as “yielding” (hingeben).19 Reading the tale
of evolutionary history and applying that tale to our own histories requires a finely honed
balance in this regard. That record reminds us in all sorts of ways that we are and will never
cease to be part of nature, that we co-adapt along with innumerable other species, that we co-
exist “with rocks, and stones, and trees.” As Richardson puts it, “not only do we share values
with other creatures, but even in us the really effective or inf luential values are not those
conscious ones, but values we have, as it were, through the plant or animal in us. Values
are built into our bodies….” (74).20 Nature is not only all around us, but within us, interpen-
etrating every atom of our biology and every facet of our cognition.
Freedom within this framework (and at this evolutionary moment in the twenty-first
century) would then be not an end in itself, but a means toward sustaining diversity and
maintaining evolutionary drift. The attainment of freedom (as ultimate expression of the will
to power) would aim not at any simple form of self-replication – species reproduction and
expansion, in the Darwinian sense – but also at variance, the production and retention of

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
 Nietzsche on Nature 643

variance rather than the transformation of individual variants into singular species. This ac-
cords with Nietzsche’s pedagogy, where as he regularly reminds us, his goal was not to create
disciples, adherents to his doctrines, but free-thinkers able to reject and alter as much they
adopt from his ideas, revolutionaries rather than Darwinian imperialists…a point we can
readily extend to our relations with the natural world. It, too, should not just resemble us.
In the end, we imagine ourselves as post-evolutionary (or, one might add, as post-human),
wise enough finally to impose a unified image of well-being upon the entire globe, only at
the cost of forgetting that evolution, as Darwin so clearly saw, goes hand in hand with possible
extinction. Hence we need constantly to read ourselves and our world biologically and geolog-
ically, and astronomically and cosmologically as well. Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return
demands, as Richardson contends, serious humility. “[T]his thought of eternal return brings
home the ‘partiality’ of one’s values, by stressing how temporary and small they stand in overall
time” (197). What returns most eternally upon human beings is our capacity to err; the more we
homogenize our world, the less room we give ourselves to evade in the future our own errors. A
point one can extend to insist upon Nietzsche’s value for grounding a serious ecological humility
that comes in two parts: the knowledge that our power depends upon nature’s diversity, and the
recognition that our survival may not be nature’s highest value. Not a superhuman, instead a
more-than-human perspective. We return, then, via Nietzsche, to Wordsworth and the birth
of modern Euro-American environmentalism, “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,” finding
our place, a modest one, on a globe that revolves among uncountable celestial bodies.

Notes

* Correspondence: Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. Email:

handwerk@u.washington.edu

1
Pondering such connections is complicated in ways I cannot take up here, such as the incommensurability of geological
and human time scales – be they personal or historical – a topic discussed in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential article “The
Climate of History: Four Theses.” Moreover, the tendency of the human mind to compartmentalize its concerns
reinforces our habit of keeping evolutionary theory and daily or even historical human existence apart.
2
The core elements of Eldredge and Gould’s theory can be found in selections by each of them in Appleman’s edition of
Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould, “On Punctuated Equilibrium” (1991) and Niles Eldredge, “The Great Stasis Debate” (1995)).
3
See Chapter 3 of Richardson for an extended discussion of this opposition.
4
Robert B. Pippin makes a similar point in Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy: “Nietzsche clearly does not want
‘power’ to function as purpose or basic drive, since he is admitting freely that what counts as power changes frequently and
radically and so itself is a subject of contestation and dispute” (6). Richardson extends his analysis usefully in his first
chapter. “Indeed, Nietzsche’s commonest way to give power this structural role is to make it a correction to ‘survival,’ as
what selection is ultimately for. He thinks Darwinists are constantly overstating the role of constancy and sameness in
evolution, even or especially here at the crux. Biological entities are not selected for their capacity to ‘reproduce’
themselves – in the strict sense of making copies. Rather, they’re selected for their capacity to develop or improve
themselves, in their ‘copies.’ Nietzsche aims to ‘dynamize’ the ultimate selective criterion” (61).
5
This process of social selection, as sketched by Richardson, is related in complex ways to Darwin’s later writings on sexual
selection and the emotions, as well as ultimately to Nietzsche’s theory of aesthetics and affect. See Chapters 4 and 5 of
Richardson.
6
See Richardson’s account on pp. 153ff of how Nietzsche’s version of social selection differs from Herbert Spencer’s
theory of social Darwinism. Where Spencer sees natural and social selection as continuous, “Nietzsche finds a new logic
at work in social selection – a logic that designs us for ends we don’t at all suspect.”
7
We could usefully ask here, from an ecological perspective, whether such social selection is a uniquely human capacity, or
shared to some degree with many other species.
8
One might say that Aristotle got his account of human nature in the Poetics exactly right, while seriously underestimating
the long-term negative evolutionary consequences of the reiterated and reiterable human tendency toward mimesis.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
644 Nietzsche on Nature
9
Richardson traces these elements of Darwinism back to Hegel, though one might as readily trace them to Christianity.
“Nietzsche interprets Darwinism as in thrall to the Hegelian claim of inevitability: they imagine that natural selection
leads ineluctably to human morality” (124). See, with regard to the Christian elements, Lynn White, Jr.’s important early
ecocritical essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”
10
Pippin similarly notes that the difference between Nietzschean psychology and Greek or French psychology “stems from
his insistence on the necessity of a historical dimension to any logos of the psyche, his assumption that psychic functioning is
always a second nature, a kind of historical result or product.” Pippin acutely reads the tone of Nietzsche’s writings as central
to his intent: “the sort of contempt that Nietzsche wants to inspire in us about our present state must account for that state
properly, must presume an adequate genealogy, [must] rest on a credible account of psychological meaning” (40). Pippin
later says, “Nietzsche’s best-known attempt to break the hold that a philosophical or moral picture might have over us is
genealogy. At least, genealogy can be liberating in this way if such a genealogy can show us that practices and norms
could have been very much otherwise, that some assumption or norm that we take for granted as inevitable and
unavoidable in fact has a contingent, quite avoidable origin [echoing the randomness inherent in Darwinian natural
selection], and an origin considerably more complicated than any notion of ‘rational commitments’ or ‘reflective
endorsement’ or ‘faith in revelation’ or the like would allow” (45). Note here how Pippin puts rational commitments on
par with faith in revelation.
11
Thus, in The Origin, Darwin states: “It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the
world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and
insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its
organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked
the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life
are now different from what they formerly were.” Thus, “natural selection can act only through and for the good of each
being” (Appleman 113).
12
Breeding is, of course, a highly charged word in this context, needing a great deal more scrutiny.
13
Pippin puts considerable stress not just upon freedom, but upon the way that such freedom manifests itself as resistance to
dominant social practices. Thus, “human nature is such as to deny itself its natural situation…human nature just is a
disaffection with its own nature” (61).
14
This neatness is complicated, of course, by the intensive attention Darwin gives to the elusiveness of the boundaries
between species and variants.
15
See also Pippin’s discussion of the relation between individuals and larger social groupings. He says that Nietzsche’s
aspirational freedom, “appears to be a psychological realization of the ineliminable need for self-overcoming….The
conditions for the attainment of freedom – the proper relation of attachment and detachment – seem, as they have several
times before, largely prevoluntary and extend in scope beyond what individuals can do” (116).
16
Within which debate, Isaiah Berlin’s account of positive and negative freedom may be the cleverest (one might even
say, foxiest) effort to resolve conceptually the ideological polarization.
17
See also 189 and Pippin (102) on the dialectical interplay between freedom and the herd instinct. Crucial here is the role
played by empathy, which Richardson rightly distinguishes in Nietzsche from pity, but which one might to align with
compassion.
18
And yes, I do recognize here the risks of re-Kantianizing Nietzsche.
19
Pippin precedes this point by saying, “Nietzsche sometimes concedes that the most essential element in a contestation
over power has to be the interpretive question of what counts as having achieved mastery….The ability to bully and
tyrannize someone into cooperation is one thing, the ability to inspire true service is another; self-command is one thing,
self-overcoming is another; being unimpeded in the satisfaction of one’s desire is one thing, being able to order one’s
desires in a ‘hierarchy of rank’ is another; commanding is one thing, being ‘strong’ enough to ‘yield’ command is
another” (118).
20
Richardson’s discussion of how this attentiveness to nature and the body returns Nietzschean ethics to aesthetics, closing
the circle across his final works and The Birth of Tragedy is fascinating and, I think, right on target. See Chapter 4.2, with its
discussion of Rausch (228ff ). See also Pippin’s discussion of beauty and eros (for instance 15–16 and 92).

Works Cited
Appleman, Phillip, ed. Darwin. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2001.
Berlin, Isaiah. ‘Two Concepts of Freedom.’ Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. 118–172.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Critical Inquiry (Winter 2009): 197–222.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350
 Nietzsche on Nature 645

Gould, Stephen Jay. ‘Opus 200.’ History (Aug. 1991): 12–18.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams. New York: Vintage, 1986.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988.
Phelan, Benjamin. ‘How We Evolve.’ The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ed. Elizabeth Kolbert. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 192–202. This article appeared originally in the magazine Seed.
Pippin, Robert B. Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.
Richardson, John. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
White, Lynn, Jr. ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.’ The Ecocriticism Reader. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold
Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 3–14.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 637–645, 10.1111/lic3.12350