The Economic Problem of Production: Nature, Culture, Life

Abstract

The interpretation of bodily states is the nexus between Nietzsche’s vision of history and his conception of nature, both of which fall under his understanding of life. Nietzsche’s political physiology encompasses ongoing ranking and ordering (Rangordnung), as do all organic processes. Therefore, an examination of the relationship between ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘life’ is crucial for understanding why the task of the highest type is to ‘translate man back into nature’. Despite the fact that Nietzsche himself did not define ‘great politics’,¹ we must assume, at the minimum, that it must necessarily involve the philosopher-physiologist’s diagnostic activity of symptomatology, namely, of reading the ‘symptoms’ of vitality or degeneration of organisms (of diagnosing values in terms of ‘the physical constitution — of individuals or classes or even whole races’²). In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Michel Foucault points to the body as the originary scene of all historical phenomena. Foucault develops Nietzsche’s genealogical project as a challenge to the philosophical pursuit of origin or Ursprung.

He who has recognized the unreason in the nature of his age, then, will have to think of means of rendering it a little assistance; his task however, will be to make the free spirits of his age and those who suffer profoundly from our age acquainted with Schopenhauer, assemble them together and through them to engender a current capable of overcoming the ineptitude with which nature employs the philosopher.

—UM III, 7