We ourselves are the animals
A talk I gave in the context of the American Academy of Religion, north-eastern edition:
I would like to frame this talk within the context of what various scholars have, beginning perhaps in the late 1980’s, termed the ‘animal turn.’[1] Of course, as MIT historian Harriet Ritvo notes at the beginning of her article, “On the Animal Turn,” “learned attention to animals is far from new.”[2] Aristotle, of course, devoted entire works to the History and the Parts of Animals, as well as Philo and Plutarch. And even if they did not devote entire works to animals, philosophers and theologians from Augustine to Heidegger have often had something to say about other animals. Indeed, I intend, at least in part, to demonstrate, over the course of the next 25 minutes or so, that the question of the animal, and, furthermore, the question of the animal and religion has been posed before—albeit, admittedly, implicitly.
That said, the critical turn toward the animal that has taken place in recent years, often under the rubric of ‘animal-studies,’ constitutes, particularly within the context of the humanities and the social sciences, a radical break with academic tradition—that is with the way in which diverse disciplines, from anthropology to geography, have gone about marking their respective territories. To account for this recent turn would be the subject of another paper, but it is clear that, within both the humanities and the social sciences, the figure of the animal has come to serve, as Kari Weil asserts, as a “limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power.”[3] And, if the recent work of scholars such as Aaron Gross and Donovan Schaeffer are any indication, we might add, of ‘religion’ as well.
While Gross’ The Question of the Animal and Religion, represents the first “monograph” to take up “the task of theorizing the study of animals and religion as such,”[4] the animal has long appeared at religious sites. In hindsight, an animal turn within religious studies could be seen, as Bataille might have it, as a return to ‘origin’ of religion—an origin, whose source must forever remain “closed to us,” while—simultaneously—unfathomably close, constantly bubbling up, as it were, from the depths of what Rudolph Otto, following Schleiermacher, would call ‘creaturely feeling.’
However, it is Nietzsche who, by tracing the origin of religion back to the birth of civilization—that is, to the point where ‘humanity’ broke with its animal past—offers us the first opportunity to consider, or reconsider, the genealogical relationship between the figure of the animal and the concept of religion.
Today, I plan to demonstrate, at minimum, that Nietzsche is, as Derrida claims in his Animal that therefore I am, “more attuned to animals than anyone else.” And, furthermore, to tell the story of how, according to Nietzsche, humanity came to distinguish itself from other animals. As we will discover, the way in which we think about our relation to other animals depends, in Nietzsche’s view, on the way in which we deal with the problem of suffering.
Nietzsche is one of the first philosophers to take seriously the “Darwinian discovery” that the human being, as Venessa Lemm puts it in her recent study of Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, “stands in direct continuity with other forms of biological life.”[5] As early as 1870, two years before publication of his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes, in one of his early notebooks that “the sciences teach [human beings] to think of themselves as animals.”
However, though the sciences teach us to think of ourselves as animals, Nietzsche recognizes that “the natural [human being] experiences a decisive gulf between himself and the animal” (NF-1870, [5] 36). Such that, human beings “will never act accordingly.” Instead, they will always “rely or fall back upon stupid distinctions [dumme Unterscheidungen]”to both make sense of and justify this ‘decisive gulf.’ (NF-1870, [5] 36)
Although Nietzsche does not tell us what these distinctions are, it is clear that he has at least one in mind. That “human being means ‘thinker,’ writes Nietzsche, “therein lies the insanity” (NF-170, [5] 37). Here, Nietzsche most likely has Hegel in mind (as he often does) and, in particular, Hegel’s claim in the introduction to the Encyclopedia, or perhaps in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, that the human being comes to distinguish herself from other animals through thinking.
In any case, it is clear that Nietzsche rejected, early on, Enlightenment definition of the human being as that animal “endowed,” as Kant asserts, “with the capacity for reason (animal rationabile).” In Nietzsche’s view, even if we could legitimately say that reason or thought differentiates us from other animals, this would not give us a reason to think of ourselves as superior to other animals; in fact, quite the opposite. We only think, as he puts it in The Anti-Christ, because we are “most unsuccessful animal,” the “sickliest animal” (AC §14). We were forced to think, just as Red Peter in Kafka’s Report to an Academy, was forced to to learn. That is to say, not because we wanted to, but because it was our only way out or Ausgang—the term Kant uses when he defines the Enlightenment as the “emergence [Ausgang]” from “self-imposed immaturity.”[6]
That Nietzsche regards human beings as animals becomes even clearer in the 1872 fragment, Homer’s Contest. There, Nietzsche considers the ‘trait of cruelty’ or, what he otherwise calls, the ‘tigerish lust to annihilate’ and its role in the cultivation of the Hellenic Greek. Admittedly, in Homer’s Contest, Nietzsche not only claims that the human being is wholly animal, but, moreover, wholly natural. Of course, ‘nature’ and ‘natural’—as well as ‘animal’ and ‘animalistic’ for that matter—are notoriously ambiguous terms. However, it is clear that, for Nietzsche, what is ‘natural’ in the human being corresponds to what is ‘animal,’ and what is ‘animal’ corresponds to, for lack of a better word, what is cruel. The passage I am about to quote is a bit long, but it is important for us so I will quote it in full.
When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which distinguishes the [human being] from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: ‘natural’ qualities and those called truly ‘human’ are inseparably grown together. [The human being] in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly natural and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work” (HC, in PN, 32).
Nietzsche echoes these comments in Beyond Good and Evil, when he criticizes ‘modern’ humanity for its pursuit of “the universal green-pasture of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort and an easier life for everyone,” where suffering itself has been abolished (BGE §44).
While we might think that humanity has grown best under ‘humane’ conditions, Nietzsche insists that, thus far, the human ‘plant’ has grown most vigorously under the “opposite conditions”—which is to say, under conditions that we might call inhumane.
According to Nietzsche, “every thing in [the human being] that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents serves the enhancement of the species as much as its opposite. Indeed, we do not say enough when we say only that much” (BGE §44). The Greeks, for instance, though they were—in Nietzsche’s view—the “most humane [people] of ancient times,” nonetheless “considered it an earnest necessity to let their hatred flow forth fully,” to “let the tiger [leap] out, voluptuous cruelty in his terrible eyes” (HC, in PC, 33). When we look into the eyes of this Hellenic tiger, armed “with the flabby concept of modern humanity,” we grow terrified, in part because we recognize in its eyes, something, undeniably human, which is to say—at the same time—undeniably animal.
But if such is the case—if, the human being has become human “through [a] long fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions,” then how and why did we come to regard such conditions as ‘inhumane’? Or, to put it otherwise, how did we come to regard everything that life essentially is: namely, (and again I am quoting Nietzsche), “appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation,” as ‘evil?’ In truth, according to Nietzsche, the answer to this question is rather simple. We have simply come to value such attributes negatively, or, that is, to attribute to them “a slanderous intent” (BGE §259). But, still the question remains, how did we come to value such attributes negatively?
According to Nietzsche, before we became ‘civilized,’ we were, like the Greeks, able to let our “hatred flow forth fully.” But when we entered the ‘state’ of civilization, the “walls of society and peace,” we found that we were no loner able to express our “natural desire to hurt” (GM II, §16). In other words, we found that we could not find an outlet for what Nietzsche calls the most life-affirming drive: namely, the drive for freedom, or, in the language of Nietzsche, “the will to power” (GM II, §18).
This state, with its “fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected against the old instincts of freedom…brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling [human beings] turned backward against [the human being itself].” This forced us to create a new place, “an entire inner world”, a “soul”, within which [we] could discharge [our] natural, animal instincts”. (GM II, §16). In short, civilization forced us to develop a ‘bad conscience’—a conscience whose form consists of “(cruelty directed backward)” (GM III, §20).
Once we had become civilized we began, “from lack of external enemies and resistances…” to, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘lacerate ourselves,’ to persecute and ‘gnaw at’ ourselves until we became sick (GM II §16), just as—once again—Red Peter in Kafka’s Report ‘learned to “lacerate [himself] at the least sign of resistance” until his “ape nature, turnings somersaults, raged out of [him] and away” (Kafka, 87).
Under these conditions, we contracted “the gravest and uncanniest illness, from which humanity has not yet recovered:” namely, “man’s suffering of man, of himself—the result of a forcible sundering from [our] animal past…” (GM II §16). It is only with the contraction of this illness, that we began to think of ourselves as ‘human,’ for our illness is an illness which, as Nietzsche makes clear in his Untimely Mediations, that other animals cannot contract and therefore cannot suffer.
According to Nietzsche, to be an animal means “to hang on to life madly and blindly, with no high her aim than to hang on to it”—to suffer cruelties of the worst kind without reason, to suffer without even seeking a reason (UM III, §5). In contrast, we—as human beings—are ale to ask, “why do I suffer.” What’s more, we have found a way “to turn the thorn of suffering against itself and to understand [our] existence metaphysically” (UM III § 5).
However, Nietzsche suggests that, in spite of our ability to turn this thorn against itself, we usually “fail to emerge out of animality” because we usually only desire “more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse”: namely, the “universal green-pasture happiness of the herd,” rather than the opposite—rather than those conditions which are necessary for the cultivation of humanity. As long as we desire happiness, we will remain just like the animals whose “suffering seems to be senseless” (UM III § 5).
Yet, Nietzsche does not so much criticize our desire for happiness as our desire to make sense of suffering through metaphysical reasoning—it is this, which, in Nietzsche’s view, makes it nearly impossible for us to ‘emerge out of animality.’ Nature, Nietzsche asserts, “presses toward the human being,” and, in this way, “intimates that [the human being] is necessary for the redemption of nature from the curse of animal life” (UM III §5). However, thus far, we have not responded to our vocation. Rather than attempting to affirm suffering as “a genuine seduction to life,” we have instead “brought forward [suffering] as the principle argument against existence, as the worst question mark” (GM II §7). Indeed, Nietzsche claims that, before the ‘ascetic priest’ invented the ‘ascetic ideal,’ “the human animal had no meaning” (GM II §8). [And another long quote]
His existence on earth contained no goal; “why [the human being] at all?” was a question that was lacking; the will for [the human being] and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded a refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!’ This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that [the human being] was surrounded by a fearful void – he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning…He was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question “why do I suffer?” (GM III §28).
Because they had no answer, people turned to the ‘ascetic priest,’ who took advantage of their bad conscience, their “sense of guilt,” by renaming it ‘sin.’ The priest told people that that they suffer because of their sin; that suffering is a punishment (GM III §20). Which is to say that, the priest invented what, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to as an ‘imaginary cause,” “It never suffices,” Nietzsche writes, “to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact—become conscious of it—only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind” (TI, The Four Great Errors § 4). It is this form of reasoning, Nietzsche asserts, which demonstrates “reason’s intrinsic form of corruption” and which, moreover, counts “among the most ancient and most recent habits of [human] kind: it is even sanctified among us, it bears the names ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ (TI, the Four Great Errors § 4).
While Nietzsche asserts that the ascetic priest’s justification of suffering ‘closed the door’ to “any suicidal nihilism,” it ultimately led us down the road toward a “hatred of the human, and even more of the animal,” and, ultimately, toward “a will to nothingness.” That is, toward an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life” (GM III §28). To counter this will toward nothingness, we would have to return to the pre-Homeric Greeks and confront that ‘abyss of hatred,’ which Nietzsche found in their tigerish eyes. But this, would require—at the same time—that we acknowledge a “lack of any cardinal distinction between [human] and animal”—a doctrine which, as Nietzsche proclaims, belongs to those doctrines which are ‘true but deadly’ (UM II §9).

[1] One of the first academic references to the 'animal turn' can be found in Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus 136, no. 4 (October 2007): 118–22. For a report on the ‘animal turn’ see Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” Differences 21, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 1–23.
[2] Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” 118.
[3] Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” 3.
[4] Aaron S. Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 20
[5] Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) 161. I would like to emphasize right away that by claiming that Nietzsche took seriously the ‘Darwinian discovery’ that humans are animals, I do not mean to imply that Nietzsche accepted all of Darwin’s ‘discoveries.’ It appears clear that while Nietzsche agreed with Darwin that human beings, animals, and plants evolved from a single source, Nietzsche did not accept Darwin’s claim—or, that is, what Nietzsche took as Darwin’s claim—that the drive for self-preservation and the preservation of the species represents the driving force behind evolution. Nietzsche believes that the struggle for preservation, or that is, “the struggle for existence is only an exception...the great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will to life.” Thus, Nietzsche believe that the will to power more adequately describes the driving force behind evolution and all life-processes. That said, when Nietzsche purports be attacking Darwin, he is attacking his own, or at perhaps a common, misconception of Darwin. As Matthew Day notes in his review of Dirk R Johnson’s Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism, “we have good reasons for thinking that he never read a single word of On the Origin of Species or Descent of Man. Therefore, anything that Nietzsche learned about Darwin, he learned second-hand, mainly from conversations with friends and colleagues in Germany. For those interested in exploring Nietzsche’s indebtedness to and relationship with Darwin, I would recommend John Richardson’s, Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[6] 1 C.f. GM II §16).
