Rethinking nature, culture, and freedom

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Steven V. Hicks

In part, Nietzsche's diagnosis of our modern societal ills was similar to that of Schiller, Holderlin, Hegel, and Marx, among others in the 19th century: namely, that life in the modern (post-Enlightenment) world lacked a kind of unity, coherence, and meaning that life in earlier cultures had possessed. Modern individuals had used their freedoms to develop their talents, capabilities, and powers in an overspecialized, one-sided way. As a result, their lives were fragmented, not integrated, and they lacked the ability to identify with their society in a natural way, to feel "at home" (bei sich) in that society, and to play the social and cultural roles assigned to them in the world wholeheartedly. Thus, they could not see the lives they led as genuinely meaningful, free, and good. (7) To this general diagnosis, however, Nietzsche would also add:

   our whole [modern] attitude toward nature, the way we violate her
   with the aid of machines and the heedless inventiveness of our
   technicians and engineers, is hubris; our attitude toward God as
   some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great
   captious web of causality, is hubris.... our attitude toward
   ourselves is hubris, for we experiment with ourselves in a way we
   would never permit ourselves to experiment with animals ... we
   cheerfully vivisect our souls. (8)

Once again, Nietzsche predicted dire consequences. As he writes in a late note from 1887-1888:

   Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that
   will soon be inevitable [what we would now call 'economic
   globalization'], humankind will be able to find its best meaning as
   a machine in the service of this [global] economy--as a tremendous
   clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly "adapted
   gears"; as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and
   commanding elements: as a whole of tremendous force, whose
   individual factors represent only minimal forces, minimal values. (9)

Anyone familiar with Nietzsche's writings knows that he deeply appreciated the natural (as well as the cultural and artistic) world, and that he defined humankind, at least partly, in terms of naturalistic categories. Yet in the 1880s, few people (including Nietzsche) believed that humans could actually destroy the natural conditions for human life and culture. Nuclear weapons were not on the conceptual horizon (much less on the warheads of ICBMs); the human population was a fraction of what it is today; despite the remarkable achievements of 19th-century European industry, industrialization had not spread far beyond Europe and parts of North America; the rapid species extinction that we see today was only beginning; the terms "acid rain," "global warming," and "climate change" had not yet entered into the popular lexicon: and vast areas of land and "wilderness habitat" were not only largely uncharted but also regarded, however naively, as virtually "untouched" by human hands. (10) And while Nietzsche's alter ego and "prophet" of a future, higher, and freer humanity, Zarathustra, would proclaim, "Remain faithful to the Earth," Nietzsche himself would probably have some serious misgivings about certain aspects of contemporary environmentalism. For example, he would probably be deeply suspicious of the romantic yearnings of some environmentalists to "re-enchant nature," or as Nietzsche would say, to impose "the breakshoe on the wheel of time," to "will backwards," and to try to restore a supposed Edenic past. (11) He would likely criticize the seriousness, the "spirit of gravity," and the idealized asceticism discernable in many contemporary environmentalists. And perhaps most importantly, as Michael Zimmerman notes, he would criticize the kind of anti-anthropocentrism that guides so much of today's environmentalism: