Getting in touch with your “inner animal” may have more profound implications than you think. Indeed, according to Vanessa Lemm's provocative interpretation of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, what modern life desperately requires is a reconsideration of the place of the “animal” in our conception of the human being. For Lemm, modern philosophical views of human nature have for too long been beholden to Christian assumptions about the superiority of the human being, the gulf between the human and the animal, and hence the legitimate authority of the human over the animal. Nietzsche is one of the first thinkers to take seriously the Darwinian challenge to the distinctiveness of the human being, to try to grasp how the continuity between human and animal species transforms our self-understanding and our social and political relationships. Accordingly, Nietzsche's views of the nature of the human being deserve careful and close study, and this is precisely what Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy provides. The first exhaustive account of Nietzsche's use of “animality,” Lemm's study makes a strong, albeit ultimately unconvincing, case that Nietzsche seeks to reverse the traditional priority of the human over the animal.

For Lemm's Nietzsche, the superiority of the human over the animal is expressed in “civilization.” Civilization seeks to squelch the animal in us. It “tames and breeds” the animal through the “moral and rational improvement of the human being” (pp. 10–11). Yet this so-called improvement, this moralization and rationalization of human behavior, is actually destructive of “life” (p. 19). Civilization binds the human animal in a “straightjacket,” as its general norms hamper the free development of individuality. In “its depreciation of what cannot be universalized, of the individual, the detailed, the marginal, and the peripheral,” civilization eradicates the natural source of individual creativity and plurality (p. 97). Furthermore, since human beings are not naturally civilized, we need to be made so. Civilization must employ radical techniques of “domination” to effect the undesirable end of silencing the natural animal in us.

In this account of the problem of civilization in Nietzsche, Lemm draws heavily but effectively on Nietzsche's Nachlass. In his published works, Nietzsche tends to refer to the problem of “morality” [Moral or Sittlichkeit], which gives the impression that either he was not concerned about politics or he saw politics as a tool to advance the aristocratic rule of naturally gifted Übermenschen over the rest of us. Lemm impressively marshals a good deal of evidence to offer an alternative Nietzschean political theory, one that remains critical of the coercive rationalism of the modern political community and that upholds the aesthetic pluralism of “culture.”

Culture, in its celebration of the animal in the human being, is thus the solution to the problem of civilization for Lemm's Nietzsche. Culture has two tasks. First, its “function is to show that rationalization and moralization are techniques of domination directed against the animality of the human being,” that the supposed “improvements” of civilizations are really garlands of flowers thrown over more chains (p. 11). Second, culture provides an alternative form of community that respects the singularity, creativity, and freedom of the animal in us. Lemm argues that for Nietzsche, the singularity of human individuals stems from our animal natures, that which precedes discursive classification and is the perpetual source of creativity so long as we are open to the generative nature within us and others. Human beings open to our animal natures become free ironically by “forgetting,” by refusing to be bound by civilized “memory,” so that we can see the past as “something that has to be formed and transformed, interpreted and reinterpreted” (p. 95). In an insightful discussion of the “gift-giving” virtue, Lemm argues that our animality forges bonds of friendship that do not forcibly “make singularities common.” Rather, what “friends have in common is what distinguishes them,” their ineffable uniqueness (p. 82). This is not to say, however, that “animality” should be liberated entirely from civilization. For Lemm's Nietzsche, the struggle (or “agon”) between civilization and culture is salutary, because civilization can tame the violent, destructive animal tendencies within us while culture can be stimulated to cultivate a “plurality of inherently singular forms of life” (pp. 18–19).

Lemm is a shrewd interpreter of Nietzsche's texts and defends a unique philosophical position in Nietzsche scholarship, yet hers is a solidly “postmodern” Nietzsche. She peppers her discussion with helpful comparisons to the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. She also situates the thesis of her book within Foucault's project of “biopolitics” (p. 154). The interpretation of Nietzsche as the champion of “difference” and “pluralism,” once dominant in the 1980s, has, however, come under sustained attack in recent years from different quarters—the naturalist Nietzsche of Brian Leiter, the Kantian Nietzsche of Michael Steven Green, the aristocratic Nietzsche of Frederick Appel, among other “Nietzsches,” could be mentioned. Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy suffers at the end of the day from insufficient justification of Nietzsche's commitment to “singularity,” “pluralism,” and, indeed, “biopolitics.”

Yet the deeper problem with her book is that Lemm's thesis—that Nietzsche sought to overturn the traditional priority of the human over the animal—is unconvincing for two reasons. First, despite all Nietzsche's exclamations about the continuity between the animal and the human, he does not unconditionally valorize the animal. On the contrary, he argues that our animal instincts are often brutish and shallow, as embodied in the “blond beast” of the Genealogy essay 1. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the primary source of creativity in the human being seems precisely to be our humanity, rather than our animality. The “sovereign individual” of the Genealogy essay 2, for instance, requires tremendous discipline to develop a “second nature,” not a return to an animal, first nature. Artistic creativity in a Shakespeare or Goethe, Nietzsche emphasizes in his middle period onward, comes less from an innate capacity than a studied engagement within historical practices of accumulated human meaning called “culture.” Second, Lemm errs in arguing that Nietzsche envisions “culture” as the free self-development of our unique animal natures (see, e.g., pp. 126–27). Throughout his career, Nietzsche rejects this optimistic Romantic view of culture, associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. For Nietzsche, following Goethe's wisdom in “Nature and Art,” “boundless” individuals fail to be creative and free, and by contrast require a disciplining to meaningful historical traditions within which their creative activities can make sense. Nietzsche's early lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions outline a conservative project to shape and focus German culture by resisting Enlightenment impulses to a diverse, democratic education, and by retaining conservative standards of rigorous education in the classics. Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche maintains that a healthy culture necessitates a “will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility across centuries, to solidarity joining the chain of generations forward and backward to infinity” (Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1988, 6: 141).

Lemm's important contribution lies in complicating Nietzsche's political theory, in distinguishing between a politics of civilization and of culture. Yet in attributing to Nietzsche a Romantic longing for the natural animal, the book unfortunately fails to complicate his view of the human being.