Abstract
The lecture will respond to the monograph Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology and Biopolitics (2020) by the contemporary academic Vanessa Lemm, which deals with Nietzsche's attempt to "translate man back into nature", i.e. to understand him as a purely natural organism that does not transcend nature and is in no way fundamentally different from it. The response will be directed primarily at one of the book's main theses, according to which this Nietzschean endeavour opens up the possibility of a new, post-anthropocentric view of man and his place in nature - a view in which the centre is no longer man, but life itself, or rather the continuum of life that is embodied in the human species.
According to Lemm, Nietzsche's doctrine of homo natura thus heralds the advent of a contemporary post-humanism characterized precisely by the attempt to create a non-anthropocentric view of man, nature and the world as a philosophical means of coming to terms with the reality of the Anthropocene. The paper will complement this thesis with Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of the overman, as presented in a series of lectures captured in What Is Thinking?, in which the overman is understood as the ideal of a humanity capable of responsibly assuming the power resulting from the technical transformation of the earth.
I will seek to show that this reading of Heidegger can give Lemm's interpretation even further direction than the one she herself outlines at the end of her book (in her references to contemporary post-humanist thinkers), namely, that it can concretize what Nietzsche's "renaturalization" of man is supposed to lead to - precisely to the emergence of a notion of humanity that, following the model of the processual, constantly self-transcending nature of life, would point humanity in the direction of the ideal of the superman understood in Heideggerian terms as the capacity for responsible planetary domination. The lecture will thus attempt to articulate the way in which Nietzsche's philosophical anthropology can potentially contribute to contemporary debates surrounding the Anthropocene.