ABSTRACT
Animal nature is at the centre of Nietzsche’s thought. His inquiries belong to the philosophy and criticism of culture but they speak the language of natural history. He regularly refers to man as the ‘animal species “Man”’ [‘das Tier “Mensch”’], fitting the precise description to the nature of the case. Thus man is ‘an animal in the highest degree subject to fear’, a fact which explains human laughter as a response to welcomly non-lethal surprises (1 558f).1 He is a ‘fantastic animal in his need, unique among species, to believe that he knows the reason for his existence (11 35). He is ‘the most endangered animal’, and therefore developed means to communicate his situation and needs, which in turn became the basis for his reflective self-consciousness (11 219ff). He is ‘the not yet fixed animal’, i.e. a species still malleable about which evolution has not yet said the last word (11 623). He is ‘the cruellest animal’, especially towards himself (11 464), and he is ‘the bravest animal’, having overcome all the others (11, 407). He is, in his aberrations from the path of instinct, ‘the sick animal’ (11, 862); and yet precisely these aberrations make him ‘the most interesting animal’ (11, 1174). Indeed, he only became an interesting animal at all, with a ‘depth’ denied to other species, as a result of one such aberration (11, 778).
