Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy

The Germans with their “Wars of Liberation” deprived Europe of the meaning, of the miracle of meaning of the existence of Napoleon—they thereby have on their conscience everything that followed, that exists today, this sickness and unreason the most inimical to culture that is nationalism…. that eternalizing of the petty-state situation of Europe, of petty politics. (EH “Books” CW: 2)60

But what kind of politics could achieve the “higher cultivation of humanity” and “the remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements,”61 while avoiding nationalism and its associated sicknesses of racism and imperialism? What “great politics” could not be “inimical to culture”? I suggest that Nietzsche’s notion of “great health” and his characterization of the philosopher as a physician might provide an answer to this question.

intellect is at its height, its power overcomes the need to dominate others:

beyond good and evil. (BGE 4) 49

Memory establishes sameness and identity between what is singular and distinct. As such, memory is based on the same imprecision as the process of concept formation. Both subsume the singular and the real under a more general unity according to the criterion of sameness or equality (Gleichheit). Furthermore, both memory and concept formations are defined by civilizational forgetfulness: concepts are formed “by dropping these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another” (TL 1). Whereas intuited metaphors are defined by the forgetfulness of the animal as a carrier of silent truth, the civilizational forgetfulness inherent to the formation of memory and concepts is inseparable from a loss of singular truth or, in other words, from a dissimulating transposition (Übertragung) of an intuited metaphor into a word.

Speaking in more general terms, the processes of both concept and memory formation are a reflection of the civilizing processes of socialization. What distinguishes socialization, as I have argued in Chapter 2, is a “seeing as equal [Gleichsehen]” and a “taking as equal [Gleichnehmen]” of what is irreducibly singular and distinct.47

Culture for the Greeks, therefore, neither confounds itself with an accumulation of knowledge, nor with imitation and repetition. Instead, it stands for a pluralization of life that “augments nature with new living nature” (SE 6). Consequently, “humanity” for the Greeks is not something added to life, like a dress veiling the body, but rather signifies an affirmation of their animality as an inherently cultural force (HL 10).60

Nietzsche’s Prefaces as Examples of Artistic Historiography
Nietzsche’s project of reediting his entire body of work started in 1886 with “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” prefacing The Birth of Tragedy, and ended in 1888 with the writing of Ecce Homo. During this period Nietzsche reread all of his pre-Zarathustra books and added new prefaces to their original editions.61 These prefaces provide us with examples of artistic historiography insofar as they are constituted by a return to the past that breaks open the past and reorients it toward the future. The underlying premise of Nietzsche’s project was that the past is not yet defined, determined, and fixed, but open to “an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate” (HL 3).62 Such an attempt requires adopting the perspective of the artistic historian who knows not only how to remember but also how to forget, and who can therefore supply artistic formations and transformations of the past, which are carriers of future life.

In Nietzsche, a “distancing relationship” between the one who gives and the one who receives takes the form of a friendship, understood as an agonistic competition between opponents who challenge each other to greater virtue.57

What distinguishes the egoism of the squanderer is that it results in an excessive overflowing and explosion of the self that de-centers and destroys the self in order to enrich the other (TI “Skirmishes” 44).

Nietzsche compares the overflowing of the self in the act of squandering to the natural movement of a river that overflows its banks. Both movements are “involuntary [unfreiwillig]”; they cannot be traced back to an intentional subject, a conscious decision, or a willful act. Throughout his work, he describes the absence of an intention, a consciousness or a reason at the source of gift-giving, in terms of the forgetfulness of the animal. In the prologue, Zarathustra confirms the intimate relationship between giving and forgetfulness: “I love the one whose soul is overfull so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under” (Z: 4 “Prologue”). In agreement with Nietzsche, Derrida insists that the gift can take place “only along with the excessive forgetting or the forgetful excess.”56 The direct involvement of gift-giving with forgetfulness suggests that what “acts” or is active in gift-giving is the forgetfulness of the animal. Accordingly, gift-giving for Nietzsche, and perhaps also for Derrida, should be understood as an animal rather than a human virtue. The possibility of gift-giving depends on something other and more than itself: on the recovery of animal otherness as an overfull force of life that allows the individual to enter into a gift-giving relationship with others.

After all, what flows over to the other is something that resists reduction to the status of a subject or object.53 Gift-giving cannot be understood as an exchange of objects because, to give, essentially, means to give who one is rather than what one possesses. Zarathustra sees this desire to give who one is reflected in his disciples:

Verily, I found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the gift-giving virtue…. This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourself; and this is why you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. (Z: 1 “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”)54

Furthermore, the question of the relationship between language and forgiveness touches directly on the question of the animal and human properties of forgiveness. Contrary to the prejudice found in the Judeo-Christian tradition of forgiveness, Derrida upholds the “undeniable possibility and necessity” that there is a type of forgiveness that is not verbal and not human:38 rather, Derrida refers to a silent, animal forgiveness that manifests all the features of what he defines as pure and unconditional forgiveness and what Nietzsche defines as the highest virtue: “the gift-giving virtue” (Z: 1 “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”).39

She holds that revenge always acts in the form of reacting to an original trespass. It is an automatic, calculable reaction to transgression, and therefore it stands in direct opposition to the idea that humans are the origin of unexpected action and, thus, inherently free. In contrast to revenge, forgiveness can never be predicted. It is a thing that “arrives, that surprises, like a revolution, the ordinary course of history, politics and the law.”20