Nietzsche and Posthumanism

Abstract

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche envisages the naturalisation of the human being, its retranslation back into nature, as a liberating experience where the human being rediscovers nature as a creative and transformative force that the human being embodies. For Nietzsche, the question of the future of the human being is contingent on whether the human being is capable of re-embodying nature. Human nature for Nietzsche is not a given of the (human) body, something that belongs to the human being per se. Instead, nature in the human being comes with the task of retranslation, replanting, re-embodying nature. This is why Nietzsche’s thinking about nature is future oriented, opening up the horizon of human transformation. In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s thinking about homo natura is distinctly posthuman and as such sets the stage for contemporary debates on posthumanism.