From: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Virtue of Nature [Stephens Michels]
How to reconcile Nietzsche's seemingly apparently conflicting views of nature -- that is the question. How can nature be both chaotic and yet furnish humanity with its meaning and purpose?
My answer is that humanity must enter into a dialectical relationship with the chaos - that is, with "nature" -- if it is to cure itself of its moralizing pretensions.
Thus, "intellectual shamanism".
On one hand, Nietzsche states that his goal is “to translate man back into nature” (BGE 230).[19] He argues that man has drifted too far from his natural self, sacrificing his instincts and power for the comfort and convenience of modern society. Nietzsche writes: “I use the word ‘vice’ in my fight against every kind of antinature or, if you prefer pretty words, idealism” (EH Books 5; emphasis added).[20] In this formulation, Nietzsche recommends a form of naturalism or metaphysics that seeks to ground science, morality, and politics in the innocence and integrity of nature.
Yet nature also appears in Nietzsche’s writings as chaotic. Nature is described as “wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power” (BGE 9).[21] Nietzsche warns—“Let us beware”—against deifying nature. “The total character of the world...is in all eternity chaos,” Nietzsche teaches. “In the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms” (GS 109).[22] Nietzsche denies that there are any “laws in nature”; rather, “there are only necessities.” Nietzsche breaks with those, including Plato, who view nature as the source of divinity and order in the universe and denies any teleological understanding of nature or man. And if there is no true end, there can be no “accidents” either.
How to reconcile Nietzsche's seemingly apparently conflicting views of nature -- that is the question. How can nature be both chaotic and yet furnish humanity with its meaning and purpose?
My answer is that humanity must enter into a dialectical relationship with the chaos - that is, with "nature" -- if it is to cure itself of its moralizing pretensions.
Thus, "intellectual shamanism".
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