Deconstructing the Human: Ludwig Binswanger on Homo Natura in Nietzsche and Freud
Vanessa Lemm
1 Introduction
In aphorism 14 of 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” (A 14).1 In recent scholarship, Nietzsche’s views on human nature in The Antichrist 14 have been read as evidence of his adherence to a naturalistic conception of human nature that is Darwinist and largely inspired by the life sciences of the nineteenth century.2 In this chapter, I draw on Ludwig Binswanger’s consideration of human nature as homo natura in Nietzsche and Freud. I will offer a reading of The Antichrist 14 that shows why Nietzsche’s (and also Freud’s) project of the re-naturalization of the human being does not reflect a conception of human nature that begins and ends with the natural-scientific view of nature. My thesis is that Nietzsche and Freud employ natural science to deconstruct the civilizational ideal of humanity as superior to animals and plants. Both Nietzsche and Freud, however, set aside natural science when it comes to reconstructing human nature from its place among animals and plants because natural science is unable to account for human cultural productivity.
Binswanger acknowledges that both Nietzsche and Freud adopt the viewpoint of the natural sciences in their respective investigations of human nature: Freud’s homo natura is a “truly natural scientific, biological-psychological idea” (Binswanger 1947: 166).3 However, he also maintains that they do so to deconstruct the metaphysical, moral, and religious conceptions of human nature. Thus the viewpoint of the natural sciences is adopted for strategic reasons and not as an end in itself.4 Binswanger insists on Nietzsche’s and Freud’s relentless efforts to dismantle the vanity and hypocrisy of the human being by uncovering homo natura beneath the civilizational constructs of homo cultura (Binswanger 1947: 161). For Binswanger, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s critiques of civilization are one of the key achievements and merits of their naturalism. As I will demonstrate in the first part of this chapter, the scientific deconstruction of the human as it is deployed in Nietzsche’s critique of civilization is what I take to be at stake in aphorism The Antichrist 14.
Although Binswanger insists on the scientific nature of Freud’s and Nietzsche’s approaches to the question of the human being, he is careful not to fall back into naturalistic and scientistic conceptions of human nature that treat the human being as an object of nature. When Binswanger insists that Freud’s approach to human nature needs to be understood in strictly scientistic terms, reflecting the perspective of the natural scientist, or when Nietzsche invokes the “discipline of science” (Zucht der Wissenschaft) in BGE 230 as the privileged vantage point of an investigation of human nature, this does not mean that Nietzsche and Freud are advancing some kind of “anthropological absolutism.”5 It is not rooted in the “truth” of the natural sciences, as if one could explain 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” (Leiter 2002: 10).6 For Binswanger, Nietzsche and Freud instead investigate the “inner history of life” (innere Lebensgeschichte), the history of the human being’s embodied existence, and not the “functionality” (Lebensfunktionen) of the empirical body (Binswanger 1947: 167). According to Binswanger, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s anthropologies are inspired by the discovery of the human being’s bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) and vitality (Vitalität) as a living being (Binswanger 1947: 168). Nietzsche and Freud embrace Darwin’s revolution in biology insofar as they accept that an investigation of human nature needs to begin with the acceptance that the human being is an “animal” (animalische Kreatur) (Binswanger 1947: 184).7 However, Binswanger is careful to distance Nietzsche’s and Freud’s considerations of the human being’s bodiliness and vitality from scientistic and reductionist naturalism. For Nietzsche and Freud, the human body is situated within the horizon of the human being’s (self)-experience as a living being. This is an important aspect of Binswanger’s understanding of human nature in Nietzsche and Freud that he shares with Löwith, who interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy as a philosophical anthropology (1933: 43–66).8 Both Löwith and Binswanger identify a naturalism in Nietzsche and in Freud that is centered on the question of the human being and its (self)-experience as a meaning (Löwith) and culture (Binswanger) creating living being. As I will demonstrate in the second part of this chapter, the philosophical idea of the body is an aspect of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s naturalism that is not captured by reductionist and scientistic accounts of homo natura.
For Nietzsche and Freud, the use of natural science is not sufficient to re-naturalize the human being because for them the question of the human being’s capacity for knowledge (Erkenntnisfähigkeit) is not exhaustive of human nature, as it is the case in neo-Kantian epistemology. On this point Binswanger would disagree with Leiter, who argues that with homo natura “Nietzsche wants to establish a proper starting point for knowledge” (1992: 279). On Binswanger’s account, Nietzsche and Freud are primarily concerned with the human being’s capacity for culture: “For Freud the basic question (Grundfrage) is how far the cultural capacity of the human being extends” (Binswanger 1947: 163). Thus, for Binswanger, the rigorous, scientific deconstruction of human nature and the importance both Nietzsche and Freud ascribe to an investigation of the human body are not the only distinguishing features of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s homo natura. Binswanger explains that the deconstruction of the human is not the end point of Freud’s and Nietzsche’s critiques of civilization. Rather, it prepares what they both refer to as the recovery of the naturalness of the human being. In Nietzsche’s terms, this is the “re-naturalization” (Vernatürlichung) of the human being (GS 109; KSA 9:11[211]). Re-naturalization is at the heart of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s larger projects of cultural renewal. It would therefore be false to assume that the end product of the natural-scientific deconstruction of human nature already encapsulates Nietzsche’s conception of the naturalness of the human being as naturalist readings seem to suggest.
Re-naturalization in Nietzsche and Freud is diametrically opposed to the “humanization” (Vermenschlichung) of the human being associated with the project of civilization (BGE 242).9 Addressing the question of re-naturalization relies on a theory of cultural productivity that exceeds the limits of scientific deconstruction and requires an interpretative, historical-philosophical reconstruction of human nature, which I discuss in the third part of this chapter. The challenge of such a reconstruction is not only to provide an understanding of who we are as human beings, but, more importantly, to offer a vision of who else we might become. Binswanger draws on Nietzsche’s idea of the over-human to illustrate this idea of human becoming that he finds absent in Freud.
In contrast to Binswanger, I argue in the final part of this chapter that he does not sufficiently appreciate the ancient Greek influence on both Freud’s and Nietzsche’s thinking about human nature. In particular, Binswanger seems to be overly critical of Freud’s theory of the drives, which he wishes to complement with a philosophical idea of metamorphosis, as exemplified in Nietzsche’s thinking about the Űbermensch. Instead, I argue that Nietzsche and Freud rely on archaic conceptions of nature, as chaos, according to which nature is a creative and artistic resource of transfiguration and transformation that cannot be fully captured by the discourses of the natural sciences (Granier 1977: 135–41; Granier 1981: 88–102). On my hypothesis, homo natura in Nietzsche and Freud always already reflects an understanding of human nature that is engaged in cultural (self)-transformation and, as such, overcomes the dichotomy between culture and nature. Both Nietzsche and Freud advocate for a recovery of the human being’s natural drives to overcome false conceptions of the human being produced by civilization toward the cultivation of a more natural and genuine humanity.
2 Deconstructing the human through natural science (The Antichrist 14)
In his commemorative speech to celebrate Freud’s eightieth birthday, Binswanger uses Nietzsche’s coinage homo natura to shed light on Freud’s conception of human nature. Binswanger distinguishes between two different and consecutive steps in Freud’s investigation of human nature: first, a rigorous-scientific deconstruction of human nature; and second, a creative-interpretative reconstruction of human nature. Whereas the first is an element of Freud’s critique of civilization, the second belongs to his larger project of cultural renewal.
Binswanger understands homo natura in Freud as the scientific idea of “the human being as nature, as a natural creature” (als Natur, als natürliches Geschöpf) (1947: 159).10 He remarks that Freud was the first to formulate a truly scientific theory of the human psyche analogous to a mathematical function of the soul.11 The scientific method is employed by Freud for a deconstructive purpose:
Nowhere is the destruction (Destruktion) of the human being more rigorous and thorough as in the natural science. Also the natural-scientific idea of “homo natura” must deconstruct (destruieren) the human being as a being that lives within a multiplicity of meaning direction (in den mannigfachsten Bedeutungsrichtungen lebendes) and that can only be understood out of this multiplicity of meaning directions. The natural-scientific dialectic must be applied to the human being until there remains only the product of tabula rasa, the dialectical product of reduction and everything that constitutes the human being as human and not only as an animal creature is extinguished. This must be and actually is the starting point for anyone who “deals” (umgeht) with the human being in practice or in science. (Binswanger 1947: 184, emphasis added)
Binswanger adds in a footnote that Nietzsche followed exactly the same method. When Nietzsche and Freud reduce the human being to its animal nature, this should not be misunderstood as some kind of scientistic reductionism. Rather, the objective of deconstruction is to reveal that everything else we find in life, namely, sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung), are fiction (Erdichtung), illusions, consolation, and “beautiful appearance” (schöner Schein) (Binswanger 1947: 185). For Binswanger, Nietzsche and Freud follow the method of the natural sciences by reducing the human being to a happening that “bears meaning (sinn-bares Geschehen), to a being lived and overwhelmed (ein Gelebt- und Űbermächtigwerden) by blind driving forces (treibenden blinden Machten)” (Binswanger 1947: 185). Binswanger explains that the point of their “destructive-constructive method” (destructive-konstruktive Weise) is not “to expose in an absolute sense the belief in meaning (Sinnglaube) as something that pertains to humanity (Menschheit) or to being human (Menschsein als Ganzes)” (Binswanger 1947: 185), for that would be inherently nihilistic.12 Instead, the great genius of Nietzsche and Freud was to unveil the hypocrisy of certain individuals, groups, and cultural epochs and not of humanity as a whole. A reading of The Antichrist 14 will illustrate how Nietzsche employs the viewpoint of the natural sciences to unveil a series of errors in the dominant conceptions of the human being found in the history of Western civilization.
The Antichrist 14 begins with the following statement:
We have learned better (umgelernt). We have become more modest in every respect. We no longer trace the origin of the human being in the “spirit,” in the “divinity,” we have placed him back among (zurückgestellt) the animals.
In the literature, The Antichrist 14 and BGE 230 are often cited together as evidence for Nietzsche’s naturalism. Although both aphorisms put forward an argument for naturalism, they offer two quite different treatments of the question of human nature. The “We” implied in The Antichrist 14 has gone through a process of transformation. In contrast to Nietzsche’s free spirits in BGE 230, the group alluded to as “We” in The Antichrist 14 are no longer stupefied before the “terrible (schreckliche) basic text of homo natura” as in BGE 230. Rather, they have already become masters over “the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text homo natura” (BGE 230). The “We” alluded to in The Antichrist 14 refers to the type of philosophers who have undergone the “discipline of science” (Zucht der Wissenschaft) and are “deaf to the siren songs of the old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long: ‘You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!’” (BGE 230). They can say with confidence that the human being is not “the great secret objective of animal evolution” and “absolutely not the crown of creation” and that all creatures of nature are “stand beside him [the human being] at the same stage of perfection” (A 14). As such, they have a “newly discovered, newly redeemed nature” (GS 109): for them nature is eternal and complete.13
The Antichrist 14 accomplishes this learning process and transformed perspective on human nature by systematically placing the human being back among the animals; as such, it illustrates Binswanger’s account of the rigorous-scientific deconstruction of the human. By contrast, BGE 230 can be read as an interpretative historical-philosophical reconstruction of human nature that is comparable to the one Binswanger discovers in Freud. Whereas The Antichrist 14 enacts a “tabula rasa” to reach the end product of a systematic deconstruction, Nietzsche’s treatment of the naturalness of the human being in BGE 230 is future oriented and presents re-naturalization as the open task of retranslating and replanting the human being back into nature. BGE 230 ends in an aporia on the question of the value of truth and hints at the transformative power of knowledge (Erkenntnis). As such, BGE 230 has the features of what Binswanger refers to as the reconstruction of the naturalness of the human being in Freud.
In The Antichrist 14, Nietzsche does not adopt a forward-looking perspective that asks itself what else the human being could become by recovering the transformative power of nature. Instead, it adopts a backward-looking perspective on what the human being is and has been—namely, an animal among other animals. The opening passage of The Antichrist 14 confirms this point:
We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand we guard ourselves against a vanity which would like to find expression even here: the vanity that the human being is the great secret objective of animal evolution. The human being is absolutely not the crown of creation, every creature stands beside him at the same stage of perfection. . . . And even in asserting that, we assert too much: the human being is, relatively speaking, the most unsuccessful (missrathenste) animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts—with all that to be sure, the most interesting!
According to The Antichrist 14, the human being is distinct from other animals through its cunning and trickery, attributes that are symptomatic of the human being’s vanity, which is an ongoing theme in Nietzsche and Freud.14 Nietzsche and Freud both diagnose an increasing sickness of the human being and agree that human civilization has produced “the most unsuccessful (missrathenste) animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts”(A 14). In response to their evaluation, they prescribe the healing effect of re-naturalization. They seek to recover the human being’s natural health by means of philosophy’s art of transfiguration (Nietzsche) and psychoanalysis’ art of therapeutic transformation (Freud). Their aim is to initiate a renewal of culture by cultivating a more natural and genuine humanity.
But the re-naturalization of the human being is not the topic of The Antichrist 14. Once sickness has been established as the distinguishing feature of the human animal, the aphorism proceeds to the actual deconstruction of the human. The Antichrist 14 adopts the perspective of the past by recounting how our metaphysical, moral, and religious conceptions of human nature need to be reconsidered following the rigorous application of insights derived from the natural sciences, including physics (mechanics), psychology, and physiology. As such, the overall tone of The Antichrist 14 is misanthropic, concluding with the sobering “dialectical product of scientific reduction,” the “mortal frame” (sterbliche Hülle) of the human being (A 14) (Binswanger 1947: 184). To reach this goal, Nietzsche takes his readers through the great errors in the history of philosophy, from Descartes to Hegel, revealing that at the heart of their anthropologies stand misconceptions of human nature. As such, The Antichrist 14 also accomplishes a “de-humanization” (Entmenschlichung) of nature.15
Nietzsche begins by inverting Descartes’s philosophical method, which consists of rigorously doubting one’s beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and sensory experience in pursuit of the purity and veracity of spirit in the form of the human cogito (Kofman 1979: 198–224). Nietzsche instead follows the logic of physiological proofs to take sides for and against Descartes:
As regards the animals, Descartes was the first who, with boldness worthy of respect, ventured to think of the animal as a machine: our whole science of physiology is devoted to proving this proposition. Nor, logically, do we exclude the human being, as even Descartes did: our knowledge of the human being today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as a machine. (A 14)
Nietzsche embraces Descartes’s thesis that the animal (and hence also the human body) is a machine. He does so, however, only (and subsequently) to subvert it by confirming that like the animals, the human being is a machine: “our whole science of physiology is devoted to proving this proposition” (A 14). Nietzsche’s subversion of Descartes is a double reversal. First, he reverses Descartes’s understanding of the human being as distinct from the animal by claiming that from the point of view of physiology, there is no difference between animals and humans; and second, he subverts Descartes’s understanding of the body as inferior to the mind by reevaluating the status of the human spirit by claiming that it is only an (inferior) aspect of the body.
The second step in placing the human being back among the animals concerns the belief in the “free will,” the liber arbitrium, as the distinguishing feature of human nature:
Formerly the human being was presented with “free will” as a dowry from a higher order: today we have taken even will away from him, in the sense that will may no longer be understood as a faculty. The old word “will” designates only a resultant, a kind of individual reaction which necessarily follows a host of partly contradictory, partly congruous stimuli—the will no longer “effects” anything, no longer “moves” anything. (A 14)
This time Nietzsche employs the insights drawn from psychology against the errors in moral conceptions of the nature of the human being. Psychology shows that what we formerly called “free will” is in fact a multiplicity of drives and instincts that are irreducible to one another and lie at the basis of our so-called actions. When one adopts the viewpoint of the natural scientists who “stand before the human being as they stand before other (anderer) nature” (BGE 230), one realizes that humans are like animals and plants: they lack the freedom to act at will. Actions should therefore not be thought of as willed or as conscious (TI “Errors” 7). This insight leads to the idea that the Christian doctrine of the free will “has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty” (TI “Errors” 7). Nietzsche insists that it is only because “the human being regards itself as free, not because it is free, that it feels remorse and pangs of conscience” (HH 39). Against this doctrine, Nietzsche puts forward the idea that “everything is innocence” (HH 107 and TI “Errors” 8). The point of Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian doctrine of “free will” is that its corresponding idea of moral responsibility fails to generate genuine responsibility. Instead the human being needs to recover its animal innocence to recognize in an “action compelled (zwingt) by the instinct of life” and carried out with “joy” (Lust) the “right (rechte) action” (Tat) (A 11). Freud would confirm and complement Nietzsche’s insights into the “pleasure principle” with a theory of the drives which demonstrates that the will, or the Ego, is no longer “the master of his household” (der Herr im Haus), as Freud says (Binswanger 1947: 188). A note from Nietzsche’s Nachlass summarizes this point:
The act of free will would be a miracle, a break in the chain of nature. The human beings would be miracle workers. The consciousness of a motive comes with an illusion—the intellect, the primordial (uranfängliche) and only liar. (KSA 8:42[3], my translation)
By placing the human being back among the animals and plants, Nietzsche closes the gap in the chain of nature and reestablishes the truth of nature: “The intellect, the primordial (uranfängliche) and only liar” (KSA 8:42[3]).
The third and last step in Nietzsche’s scientific reduction of the human being to the animal concerns the idea of the purity of the spirit. In contrast to the view that spirit is the sign of human distinction and elevation, Nietzsche employs the knowledge produced by modern biology to reveal that the spirit is nothing but “pure stupidity”16 :
Formerly one saw in man’s consciousness, in his “spirit,” the proof of his higher origin, his divinity; to make himself perfect, the human being was advised to draw his sense back into himself in the manner of the tortoise, to cease to have any traffic with the earthly, to lay aside his mortal frame: then the chief part of him would remain behind, “pure spirit.” We thought better of this too: becoming-conscious, “spirit,” is to us precisely a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an attempting, fumbling, blundering as a toiling in which an unnecessarily large amount of nervous energy is expended—we deny that anything can be made perfect so long as it is still conscious. “Pure spirit” is pure stupidity: if we deduct the nervous system and the senses, the “mortal frame,” we miscalculate—that is all! (A 14)
The inferiority of the conscious over the unconscious is another common topos in Nietzschean and Freudian psychology. In GS, for example, Nietzsche maintains that contrary to the belief that consciousness denotes the human being’s superiority with respect to other forms of life, consciousness in the human animal is a relatively young, insufficiently developed organ, which, as such, can even be dangerous (GS 11, 354). Nietzsche reestablishes the value of the unconscious by reminding us that most of the human animal’s vital functions operate without consciousness and that it is thanks to their unconsciousness rather than their consciousness that the human animal has so far preserved itself. Freud’s theory of the unconscious will confirm this intuition in Nietzsche.
Despite Nietzsche’s and Freud’s sobering accounts of human consciousness as a secondary phenomenon in the life of the human psyche, neither of them simply gives up on consciousness all together. As Binswanger points out, this would be a huge misunderstanding. Once Nietzsche and Freud have reached the “dialectical product of scientific reduction” (Binswanger 1947: 184)—the “mortal frame” of the human being (A 14)—the question becomes whether one can plant a different kind of consciousness that embraces the bodily (animal and plant) dimensions of human life as the growing ground of a natural humanity. This question leads Nietzsche and Freud to an investigation of the human being’s bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) and vitality (Vitalität) as a living being (Binswanger 1947: 168).
3 Leiblichkeit (bodiliness) in Nietzsche and Freud
Binswanger notes that the importance both Nietzsche and Freud ascribe to an investigation of the body is a distinguishing feature of their conception of human nature. In particular, it sets their idea of homo natura apart from the romantic notion of a return to nature:
Whereas the Roussouian idea of homo natura is a cheering utopia of the angelical nature of the human being born from a benevolent nature, a homo natura benignus et mirabilis so to speak, the idea of homo natura in Novalis arises from a magic idealisation of bodiliness and a magic naturalisation of spirit, the homo natura in Nietzsche and Klages is based on the same idea as in Freud: here bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) determines what the human being is in its essence. (Binswanger 1947: 168)17
Nietzsche’s recommendation to follow the “guiding-thread of the body” (Leitfaden des Leibes) “in all matters of scientific inquiry” (KSA 11:26[432]), especially those related to the spirit (KSA 11:26[374], see also KSA 12:2[91]) confirms Binswanger’s observation. A posthumous note thematizes this new perspective in philosophy:
If we assume that the “soul” was an attractive and mysterious thought, a thought which philosophers rightfully only gave up reluctantly—maybe what they have learned to receive in exchange for the “soul” is something even more attractive, even more mysterious: the human body. The human body, in which the whole far and recent past of all organic becoming is again alive and corporal, through, above and beyond which a tremendous unheard stream seems to flow: the body is a much more remarkable thought than the old “soul.” (KSA 11:36[35])18
There are three points I wish to make in regards to the body opening up a new perspective in philosophy. First, the above note illustrates that what fascinates Nietzsche (and I would add Freud) is not the empirical but the philosophical idea of the body: “the body is a much more remarkable thought than the old ‘soul’” (KSA 11:36[35]). The key for Nietzsche is not only to understand that in the human body “the whole far and recent past of all organic becoming is again alive and corporal” (KSA 11:36[35]) but also that “the whole pre-history and past of all sentient being, continues within me [Nietzsche] to fabulate, to love, to hate, and to infer” (GS 54). Although Nietzsche acknowledges that the natural sciences are making an important contribution to an enhanced understanding of human nature, neither the insights they provide nor the methods they follow will answer the question of human nature. Rather, the task of explaining how “the whole far and recent past of all organic becoming is again alive and corporal” (KSA 11:36[35]) in the human being may require a contribution of the natural sciences. Grasping how “the whole pre-history and past of all sentient being, continues within me [Nietzsche] to fabulate, to love, to hate, and to infer” (GS 54) surely relies on the imagination of the philosopher and poet who has ears for the “tremendous unheard stream” that flows “through, above and beyond” the human body (KSA 11:36[35]). Nietzsche views the person like a natural organism but the whole life of this natural organism cannot be made intelligible through the discourses of the natural sciences. Naturalistic and reductionist accounts of the human body in Nietzsche miss this difference between the empirical body and the living body as a “marvellous bringing together of the most multiple life” (KSA 11:37[4]) and therefore provide only a one-sided conception of human nature in Nietzsche.
Second, both Nietzsche and Freud are well aware of the limits of their endeavors into human nature. Freud, for example, describes his attempts to capture human nature through a theory of the drives intended to grasp the meaning and origin of the human being’s psychic life and its link with the “archaic ground of all life” (Urgrund allen Lebens) as a confronting, discomforting, and uncanny experience which led him to acknowledge the mythological nature of his own scientific endeavors (Binswanger 1947: 160):
The theory of the drives is, so to say, our mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly. (Freud 1933: 95)19
Freud’s “apprehensive astonishment, his shivering before the ‘uncanny (ungeheuren) invisibility’” of the drives, attests to the impossibility of discerning with certainty the truth of human nature (Binswanger 1947: 160). For Freud, the endeavors of the natural scientist are therefore inherently tragic in kind. There is no consolation before the violent force of nature and its immanent death; Freud thus concludes that it must be the destiny of the human being to bear the suffering and pain inflicted by nature as “the first duty of all living beings”:
The unremitting astonishment of the natural scientist before the seriousness and power of life and its immanent death, the astonishment before a life, of which Freud [and I would add Nietzsche] believed that it “causes our suffering (wir all schwer leiden)” (XI, 464), for which there exists no compensation (ibid.) and no consolation, a life that we all have to bear as the “first duty of all living beings.” (X, 345 f.) (Binswanger 1947: 160)20
Freud’s tragic vision of life and his acknowledgment of the limits of human knowledge are echoed in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The impossibility of drawing a line of distinction between knowledge and mythology is an ongoing theme in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche draws the image of the human being as unaware of its being attached to the back of a tiger and claims that nature threw away the key to the mishmash of physiological activity in the body (TL). Nature manifests itself in and through the body as a wild, untamed, and uncontrollable force that is indeterminate and inaccessible to human consciousness. This insight no doubt complicates Nietzsche and Freud’s question of how to cultivate a different kind of consciousness that embraces the bodily (animal and plant) dimensions of human life as the growing ground of a natural humanity.
The final point I wish to make in regard to Nietzsche’s and Freud’s investigation of the human being as an embodied and living being is that this investigation is oriented toward an overcoming of the human. As Bertino and Stegmaier have correctly pointed out, Nietzsche’s (and I would add Freud’s) anthropology is always also a critique of anthropology (2015: 65–80). Nietzsche and Freud rely on the discoveries of their contemporaries in the natural sciences to show that the human being is neither a rational nor a moral creature. Their underlying motivation is to overthrow dominant conceptions of the human being that can no longer be upheld as a result of scientific discoveries. A note from Nietzsche’s Nachlass on the development of organic life illustrates this idea:
Perhaps the whole development of the spirit concerns the body (Leib): it is the history of the formation of a higher body (Leib) that is becoming perceptible. The organic is ascending towards higher stages. Our craving for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body (Leib) strives to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments in nutrition, dwelling and ways of living are to transform the body (Leibes): consciousness and valuation, all kinds of desires and lacks of enthusiasm are symptoms of these changes and experiments in the body. In the end it is not about the human being: it is about its overcoming. (KSA 10:24[17])
Furthermore, the above note shows that against the backdrop of the development of organic life, human nature is not something that is absolute, stable, and fixed. Rather, human nature is involved in the continuous formations and transformations of nature. From the perspective of the historical development of organic life, culture is not the distinguishing feature of the human being. Instead culture is always already immanent to nature. For Nietzsche and Freud, answering the question of how to plant a different kind of consciousness, which embraces the bodily dimensions of human life as the growing ground of a natural humanity, means to affirm nature as a creative and artistic force.21 It requires an overcoming not of what the human being is, a natural creature, but of what it has become in the process of its civilization. Again, how such a (self)-overcoming of the human can be conceived is a question that exceeds the limits of the natural sciences and requires a philosophical imaginary to provide an account of culture that does not transcend nature. This is what I take to be the purpose of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s reconstruction of human nature on the basis of a “de-deified” nature (GS 109), a “newly discovered, newly redeemed nature” (GS 109).22
4 Reconstructing human naturalness
The argument has been made that BGE 230 reflects a “natural history of the free spirit,” which provides an account of the nature of the human being as homo natura (Brusotti 2013, 259–78; Brusotti 2011, 59–91). In this aphorism, Nietzsche explains the emergence of culture (and knowledge) from what he refers to as the “basic will of the spirit” (BGE 230) and adds that this “basic will” (Grundwille) pertains to all living beings. Commentators have noted that this “basic will of the spirit” has all the features of what Nietzsche otherwise (cf. BGE 44) refers to as the will to power (Heit 2014: 27–46). The underlying idea is that Nietzsche reconstructs human nature on the basis of his hypothesis of the will to power: “Homo natura. The will to power” (KSA 12: 2[131]).
Binswanger advances the same idea—namely, that a reconstruction of human nature must be based on a certain principle or idea such as the idea of will to power in Nietzsche or the idea of the pleasure principle in Freud. According to Binswanger, the idea of will to power in Nietzsche is “to give meaning to the suffering of human life” (Binswanger 1947: 184). Likewise, the idea of the pleasure principle in Freud is “to open the possibility for the preservation and enhancement of life” (Binswanger 1947: 184). This is for Binswanger the ultimate purpose of the reconstruction of human nature in Nietzsche and Freud. As such, Binswanger understands Nietzsche’s idea of will to power as a special case of Freud’s will to pleasure:
The will to power is a special case of the pleasure principle: Will to pleasure (Lust), i.e. will to “life” and will to increase life (Lebenssteigerung) by letting be (Gewährlassen) the “unknown, uncontrollable powers” through which the human being is lived (gelebt wird). (Binswanger 1947: 170)
Both ideas—the will to power and the will to pleasure—offer an account of human nature that is immanent to nature to the extent that the human being lives and is lived by and through nature: powers “through which the human being is lived” (gelebt wird) (Binswanger 1947: 170). At the same time, they make possible an account of human cultural productivity that does not rely on ideas of spirit or soul that transcend nature.
On this second point, Binswanger engages Nietzsche against Freud in view of complementing a weakness he detects in Freud’s thinking about the drives. For Binswanger, Freud’s theory of the drives falls short of articulating an idea of human transformation. For Freud, the nature of the drives (Triebwesen) “despite their multiple transformations ultimately remains unchanged,” and hence Binswanger infers that “in contraposition to Goethe and Nietzsche, Freud’s doctrine of the drives does not articulate a genuine conception of transformation (Wandlung)” (Binswanger 1947: 178). The critique voiced by Binswanger in his celebratory speech reflects a deeper, long-standing disagreement between Freud and Binswanger on the status of philosophy, in particular Nietzsche’s philosophy, in psychoanalysis.23 While Binswanger agrees with Freud on the merits of his naturalism, he argues that the re-naturalization of the human being must involve “more” than a theory of drives. He invokes the idea of the Űbermensch in Nietzsche as an example for a philosophical-creative reconstruction of human nature that offers a more convincing account of human cultural productivity than Freud’s (unphilosophical) scientific naturalism.
Binswanger’s mobilization of Nietzsche against Freud on the question of the cultural metamorphoses of the human being has been questioned in the literature based on the textual evidence provided by a passage in BGE 230, where Nietzsche explicitly states that the human being is not “more” than nature (BGE 230) (Gasser 1997). On this view, Nietzsche would agree with Freud that the human being is not “more” than the life of its drives. Interestingly, Freud’s own reaction to Binswanger’s speech points into a similar direction. In a letter to Binswanger, Freud writes:
Of course I do not believe you nevertheless. I have always only spent my time in the main floor and basement (Souterrain) of the house. You claim that when one changes the perspective, one can also see an upper level where the distinguished guest of religion, art, etc. live. You are not the only one who makes this claim, the majority of cultural exemplars of the homo natura think this way. In this respect you are conservative and I am revolutionary. If I would still have a working life ahead of me, then I dare say I would dedicate it to finding a living place for those who claim to be of a higher origin (Hochgeborenen) in the lower floors of the house. For religion, I have already found one when I encountered the category of “neurosis.” But probably we simply do not understand each other and our disagreement will need a few hundred years to dissolve. (Gasser 1997: 235)24
Like Nietzsche, Freud rejects theories of culture based on principles that transcend nature. Freud insists that there is nothing “more” to the human being that would distinguish it from nature and other living beings. But does this mean that Freud’s conception of human nature is entirely scientific as Binswanger suggest? A different perspective on the notion of nature in Nietzsche and Freud may address Binswanger’s concerns.
5 Recovering an archaic concept of nature
In Jean Granier we find a different position, which both contrasts and complements Binswanger’s point of view (1981: 88–102). According to Granier, the common terminology between Nietzsche and Freud—the terms Es and homo natura—suggests that Freud’s conception of the human being as homo natura is essentially a philosophical one.25 When Freud adopts the word Es, as coined by Nietzsche to designate the origin of the human being’s psychic life, he does not merely adopt a word. Rather, the choice of words in Freud is based “on a type of reflection that is philosophical in nature” (Granier 1981: 100).26 Likewise, the reference to natura in homo natura demonstrates that Freud’s reflections on the question of the human being exceed by far the framework of his clinical experience and his sociocultural investigations. Like Binswanger, Granier cites the passage in Freud where he acknowledges the mythological status of his theory of the drives (Binswanger 1947: 160; Freud 1993: 95; Granier 1981: 101). Granier insists that mythology for Freud is by no means an aggregate of illusions and phantasms. Instead, Freud explicitly reestablishes the power of mythology and of myth to reveal (dévoilment) truth.
Granier argues that Freud’s conception of nature is in many ways comparable with that of Goethe and of the thinkers and artists of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci.27 Furthermore, he holds that Freud’s way of speaking of nature reminds us of the “distress and adoration the Greeks experienced before what they named aidos,” and he infers that mythology in Freud is, as in the Greeks, “a discourse on the origin, on the primordial” (Granier 1981: 101). For Granier, this origin of psychic life represents nothing less than another name for being, for life in its totality, and hence concludes that Freud’s, like Nietzsche’s conceptions of the human being as homo natura, is philosophical.
On Granier’s account, when Nietzsche employs the term “natura” to determine human nature, the objective is neither to grasp the psychological life of the human being (as in Freud) nor to articulate an anthropology (as in Löwith). Rather, the point of Nietzsche’s reconstruction of human nature as homo natura is to articulate a new conception of nature, namely, the archaic conception of nature as chaos: “Chaos sive Natura” (KSA 9:21[3] and 9:11[197]).28 Nature as chaos designates an idea of nature as a creative and abundant force that brings forth life of and out of itself (Babich 2001: 225–45)29 It is by recovering this creative and artistic force of nature that Nietzsche hopes to unleash within the human being its potential for formation and transformation.
According to Granier, chaos is for Nietzsche the abyssal reality of being as will to power. In both Nietzsche and Freud nature is featured as inaccessible to the human being referring it back to an origin, a ground (Grund) that reveals itself as abyss (Abgrund).30 This is where Freud’s and Nietzsche’s reflections on the nature of the human being again converge. On Granier’s hypothesis Freud conceives of the drives of the human being in exactly the same way as Nietzsche conceives of nature, namely as chaos. Granier therefore concludes that by borrowing the term Es from Nietzsche, Freud accomplishes the philosophical truth of his psychoanalytical reflections:
If Nietzsche’s and Freud’s radical critique of civilization has revolutionized the nature of philosophy, this subversion does not conclude with the destruction (destruction) or annulment of philosophy. Rather it leads to an overcoming in the Nietzschean sense of the term Űberwindung, that is, the reconversion (reconversion) of philosophy through a return to the origin that unveils being as something that lies beyond what can be demonstrated by objective reason and thus allows philosophy to reconquer its truth as a discourse of the world. (Granier 1981:102)
Granier’s use of the terms “destruction” and “reconversion” no doubt remind us of the notions of deconstruction and reconstruction in Binswanger. However, for Granier, Freud’s reconstruction of human nature is no less philosophical than that of Nietzsche.
Although Binswanger and Granier pursue different objectives—to prepare the way for an anthropological-philosophical analysis of human existence in psychoanalysis (Binswanger) and to recover the truth of philosophy as a discourse on nature and the world beyond metaphysics (Granier)—their reconstruction of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s anthropologies conclude on the same opening toward the future, that is, the transformation of the human being: the metamorphosis of the human being in Binswanger, and the renewal of philosophy in Granier.
Nietzsche articulates this idea of future becoming through the emblematic image of the Űbermensch, where an overcoming of the human occurs in the name of animality as the human being’s eternal source of self-transformation. The über in Nietzsche’s Űbermensch may point to yet another meaning of “more (mehr)” (BGE 230), which may allow us to reconcile Binswanger with Freud. The prefix “over” in “overhuman” and in “overcoming” denotes the human being’s self-overcoming. It does not refer to a vertical relationship that establishes a hierarchy of the human ruling “over” the animal as in BGE 230, where “more” names the human being’s “higher” or “different” origin, which transcends nature as in the “siren songs of the old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him [the human being] all too long: ‘You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!’” (BGE 230). Rather, “over” refers to a horizontal relationship that establishes the equivalence between the human and the natural. In the Nietzschean term “overhuman,” the prefix “over” is hence used neither to separate the human from nature, nor to set one above the other (Lemm 2009: 19–23). The “over” in “overhuman” is to remind us that nature is “more” than the human being. The reconstruction of human nature is thus not a “return to nature” but an elevation of the human being through the recovery of the “more” of nature, its generative and creative force. The re-naturalization of the human being is a movement that takes the human being “up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness” (TI “Skirmishes” 48).31
Notes
1 In this chapter, I rely on the following abbreviations of Nietzsche’s work: A = The Antichrist; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; GM = On the Genealogy of Morals; GS = The Gay Science; HH = Human, All too Human; HL = Second Untimely Consideration; KSA = Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988) (references provide the volume number followed by the relevant fragment number and any relevant aphorism; all translations of KSA are mine); TI = Twilight of the Idols (sections abbreviated as “Errors” and “Skirmishes”); TL = “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” (KSA 1); WS = The Wanderer and His Shadows (HH, vol. 2, part 2); Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
2 See Leiter (2013) and Emden (2014).
3 All translations of Binswanger are mine.
4 Nietzsche and Freud distance themselves from both the humanism and the scientism of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche in particular is well aware of the dialectic of enlightenment and rejects its desire for knowledge at any price, for “objective” truth, and he invokes the Greeks, who “knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin” (GS P4).
5 See Sommer (2016: 650–51); and Brusotti (2014: 129).
6 For a more extensive discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophy of plants and naturalism, see Lemm (2016: 61–80).
7 Binswanger extends this point also to the life of plants by drawing an interesting comparison between the scientific idea of the archaic plant (Urpflanze) and Freud’s idea of homo natura, two ideas that were designed to explain the creative nature of organic life (1947: 164). Binswanger approvingly cites Goethe’s account of the metamorphosis of the plant as an analogy for his own reflections on the cultural transformations of human nature (1947: 178).
8 For a discussion of Nietzsche and philosophical anthropology in Löwith, see Lemm, forthcoming.
9 I agree with Bertino (2011: 3–34) that “humanization” (Vermenschlichung) needs to be distinguished from the more general thesis of the anthropomorphism of human knowledge in Nietzsche (i.e., the idea that humans project themselves onto the world). While humanization reflects a form of domination over the animality of the human being, anthropomorphism cannot be done away with and is a constitutive feature of perspectivism in Nietzsche. Furthermore, Bertino correctly holds that the “naturalization” (Vernatürlichung) of the human being needs to be distinguished from naturalistic reductionism.
10 On the context of Binswanger’s solemn homage and Freud’s reaction to it, see Gasser (1997): chapter 17.
11 In HH I 106, during his so-called scientific period, Nietzsche seems to have entertained a similar fantasy. On the relation between necessity and creativity in Nietzsche, see Large (1990: 50–52), who argues that Nietzsche’s flirtation with an all-knowing, calculating intelligence in HH will be long forgotten by the time of GS as it contains some of Nietzsche’s most scathing attacks on the prejudices of sciences (GS 373).
12 Leiter’s (2007: 89–90) naturalistic account of Nietzsche’s fatalism illustrates this kind of nihilism insofar as it draws a deterministic worldview where human freedom and creativity are reduced to mere illusions. For Binswanger, the misunderstanding of scientific reduction in Freud is based on the erroneous translation of the “a priori or essential possibilities of human existence into processes of genetic development” (apriorische oder wesensmässige Möglichkeiten des menschlichen Existierens in genetische Entwicklungsprozesse). Such a translation of existence into natural history is, for example, reflected in attempts to explain “the religious way of existing as a result of the fear and helplessness of the child, . . . the artistic way of existing as a result of the pleasure in beautiful appearance, etc.” (Binswanger 1947: 185).
13 On the change of meaning from “terrible” (schrecklich) to “eternal” in BGE 230, see Lampert (2001: 229–30).
14 This is an ongoing theme in Nietzsche’s philosophy beginning with TL (1) where he argues that the human intellect is not the sign of the human being’s privileged access to knowledge but a master in the dissimulation and fabrication of illusions for the sake of self-preservation. The human being, more than any other animal, stands in need of protection which explains why it had to form societies to protect itself against a threatening and essentially dangerous environment (TL and GM).
15 See GS 115, where Nietzsche claims that when one has subtracted the errors that constitute the vain beliefs in the superiority of the human being, then one has subtracted also all its so-called humanity: “The four errors—the human being has been educated by its errors: first, it saw itself only incompletely; secondly, it endowed itself with fictitious attributes; thirdly, it placed itself in a false rank order in relation to animals and nature; fourthly, it invented ever new tables of goods and for a time took them to be eternal and unconditioned, so that now this and that human drive and condition occupied first place and was ennobled as a result of this valuation. If one discounts the effect of these four errors, one has also discounted humanity, humanness and ‘human dignity.’”
16 “Stupidity” is often a reference to animality in Nietzsche, typically employed to reverse the prejudice of the human being’s “superiority in comparison to the animals,” as, for example, in HL 1.
17 On Nietzsche’s critical response to the idea of “return to nature” in Rousseau, see TI “Skirmishes” 48, as well as his critique of romanticism in GS 59.
18 In another posthumously published note, Nietzsche also claims that it is through the body that “we” make value judgments: “‘The body is the best advisor, the body (Leib) can at least be studied,’ something which is not the case for the ‘soul’” (KSA 11:25[485]). See also Z, “On the Despisers of the Body”: “But he who is awakened and knowing says: body (Leib) am I and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body (Leibe).”
19 Cited in Binswanger (1947: 160); see also Granier (1981: 101).
20 See, by way of comparison with Nietzsche, BGE 226.
21 Acampora (2006) coins the term “artful naturalism” to capture this aspect of Nietzsche’s naturalism.
22 According to Bishop (2009: 12–24), the naturalization of humanity is also at stake in Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology. From his perspective, by calling for a new conception of nature, one that dismisses the notion of laws in nature, Nietzsche is calling for a new conception of the human being (HH 3).
23 On the controversies around Freud’s relationship to Nietzsche, see Gasser (1997) and Assoun (2000). For a useful overview of Freud’s main objections against philosophy (including Nietzsche’s philosophy), see Beekman (2009/2010: 98–118). Beekman shows that “Freud hasn’t brought in an element against philosophy that Nietzsche wouldn’t have understood” and that therefore “Nietzsche cannot be the object of Freud’s contempt for philosophers” (2009/2010: 114). Instead, Beekman argues, “Nietzsche, the great psychologist,” already anticipated the limits to which Freud admits and that therefore Freud’s “meta-psychology” would not be any less metaphysical than he claims Nietzsche’s philosophy to be (2009/2010: 117).
24 The translation is my own.
25 Granier seems to think that Freud also adopted the term “homo natura” from Nietzsche, but, as far as I am aware, it is Binswanger who applies Nietzsche’s coinage to describe Freud’s conception of the human being. According to Gasser, Freud was not aware that Binswanger was actually citing Nietzsche when he defined his conception of the human being in terms of homo natura.
26 All translations of Granier are my own.
27 Löwith makes a similar point in relation to Nietzsche, namely, that Nietzsche’s reconstruction of human nature is largely inspired by the historical-philosophical examples of natural humanity provided by Greek antiquity and the human being in the Renaissance, as well as a few individual examples from modernity such as Goethe and Napoleon.
28 See Granier (1977: 135–41) and Babich (2001: 225–45).
29 See also Strong (2015: 19–31) and Hatab (2015: 32–48).
30 See also Nietzsche on this point: “The re-naturalization of the human being requires the willingness to accept the sudden and unpredictable (Durchkreuzende)” (KSA 9:11[228]).
31 See also “The re-naturalization of the human being in the 19th century (the 18th century is the century of elegance, finesse and generous sentiments) Not ‘return to nature’: for there never existed a human naturalness (natürliche Menschheit). Scholastics un- and anti-natural values is the rule, is the beginning; the human being reaches nature only after a long struggle—he never ‘returns’. . . . Nature, i.e., to dare to be immoral like nature” (KSA 12:10[53].182).
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