Nietzsche’s „Retranslation of the Human Being Back Into Nature“ as a Beginning of Post-Anthropocentrism

Abstract

The article responds to the monograph Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology and Biopolitics (2020) by Vanessa Lemm, which deals with Nietzsche’s task of “translating the human being back into nature”. The response is directed at one of the book’s main theses, according to which this idea opens up a new, post-anthropocentric view of the human being and its relationship to nature – a view in whose centre is no longer the human being, but life itself. According to Lemm, Nietzsche’s idea of homo natura foreshadows contemporary posthumanism and its post-anthropocentric view of the human being’s relationship to nature, designed to provide an appropriate theoretical framework for human self-conception in the epoch of the Anthropocene. The article complements this thesis with Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the overman, presented in the series of lectures What Is Thinking?, in which the overman is understood as an ecological ideal of humanity capable of responsibly assuming the power resulting from the technical transformation of the earth. The aim of the article is to show that, in accordance with the interpretations of Lemm and Heidegger, in Nietzsche it is possible to find a way in which humanity could cope with the reality of the Anthropocene, through a transition from the “last man” to the “overman”, where the transition to the “overman” is understood as the idea of establishing a new relationship between humans and nature, i.e. between humans and the earth.