ABSTRACT
A human being thus conceived is what Friedrich Nietzsche calls homo natura. Nietzsche’s descriptions of the architectural metaphors of knowledge and culture, beautifully abridged by Sarah Kofman, provide invaluable material for psychotherapy. Despite M. Heidegger’s insistence that it should be seen as the truth of being, Nietzsche’s notion of will to power is merely a symbolic name that, like life itself, takes several forms and different mythic and poetic guises, from Apollo to Dionysus to Oedipus. Nietzsche focuses on transformative rather than adaptive forces; he emphasizes what is noble over what is merely reactive. The axiological and naturalistic view proposed by Nietzsche and heralded by the death of God is a hypothesis among others. Nietzsche’s turn, in his middle works, from art to psychology, the “queen of the sciences”, was a change of heart motivated by loss and disappointment. Nietzsche seems to move in the direction when he hints at the “terrible basic text homo natura”.
