Embodiedness, Embeddedness, Teleology

Abstract

Nietzsche was more than a dilettante about scientific knowledge of the human body and its functioning. A barometer of his interest in physiology is the frequency of the words ‘physiology’ and ‘physiological’ in his work. Where there is one reference to physiology in Human, All-too-Human, there are twelve in Daybreak, six in Gay Science, sixteen in Beyond Good and Evil, thirty-three in Genealogy of Morals, twenty-six in Twilight of the Idols, thirteen in Antichrist, seventeen in Ecce Homo, and hundreds more in the notebooks from 1880–1888 (Brown 2004). Nietzsche’s fascination with physiology can also be gauged by the books lining his bookshelves. He owned more than three dozen books and professional texts on physiology, medicine, and health, most of them purchased after 1875. If annotations are an accurate guide, he appears to have read many of these books cover-to-cover and some of them more than once (Brobjer 2004; Moore 2004). Moreover, Nietzsche himself acknowledges that physiology accounted for much of his reading after 1880. He wrote in Ecce Homo that by about 1880, ‘a truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more than physiology, medicine, and natural sciences’ (EH ‘Human’ 3).