Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands: Nietzsche’s Geophilosophy and the Direction of the Earth

Nietzsche attempts to construct a cartography of philosophy—past, present, and future—in terms of how it describes, redescribes, and inscribes itself within territories and spaces. It is this project, rather than Nietzsche’s accounts of his travels, his love or hate of specific sites, or the meticulously recorded responses of this human barometer and seismograph to landscapes, climates, and microclimates, that led Deleuze and Guattari to call Nietzsche the inventor of geophilosophy.¹ They take as exemplary Nietzsche’s inquiries into the national characters of English, French, and German philosophy and his analysis of how the Greek milieu provided a ground in which philosophy could flourish. Deleuze and Guattari see Nietzsche’s notion of the “untimely” (unzeitmässig)—as in Untimely Meditations—to involve the opening of a geographic rather than a historical perspective. Nietzsche anticipated these issues and questions. His hero Zarathustra challenges his listeners and readers to ask: “What shall be the direction [or ‘meaning’ Sinn] of the earth?” urges them to “remain true to the earth,” to think with an “earthly head” (Erden-Kopf [Z I “On Believers in a World Beyond”]), and to create a truly human earth (Menschen-Erde [Z I “On the Bestowing Virtue” 2, III “The Convalescent” 2]). Robert Gooding-Williams writes that “earth” here is a metaphor for the human body and its passions.² Certainly Nietzsche is concerned with what it means for human life to flourish in a thoroughly immanent world. But this, I suggest, involves more than individuated human bodies; Nietzsche could have agreed with Marx, who called the earth the human’s inorganic body. There is still some reluctance to give Nietzsche’s question about the Sinn der Erde the importance that he attached to it and to acknowledge its more ordinary senses. I suspect that this stems less from a deconstructive suspicion of surface meanings than from the fear that such questioning cannot avoid the vexed issue of fascist and Nazi appropriations of Nietzsche or anxiety about placing Nietzsche within Heidegger’s metanarrative of technological mastery. Nevertheless, in a time that is wrestling with issues of globalization, environmental crisis, and multiculturalism, we should read Nietzsche with an eye to see what resources he can offer us for thinking our situation on the earth.

In the course of his work, Nietzsche’s horizon expands from a focus on Greece and Germany to a European perspective, and he eventually says that even an understanding of Europe requires a “trans-European eye” (KSB 8:222). I suspect that reading Nietzsche through the prism of Hölderlin’s Greek and German earth, in a Heideggerian mode, risks what Foucault called the return and retreat of the origin and the nostalgia and site fetishism that mar Heidegger’s thought. In contrast, a feminist phenomenological and psychological critique of Nietzsche, such as Luce Irigaray’s in Marine Lover, challenges us to ask what is involved in Nietzsche’s complex play of elemental and geographic tropes.³ Irigaray charges that Nietzsche valorizes the air, mountain heights, and flight, consequently obscuring and marginalizing the fluidity and depths of the sea. While freeing him from the burden of history, Irigaray makes Nietzsche’s language of the earth into one more expression of patriarchal essentialism, missing the fluidity that he sees in the “elements” of the earth and implicitly rejecting his experimentalism. Both approaches are oddly reminiscent of Ernst Bertram’s once widely read Nietzsche: Essay at a Mythology of 1918.⁴ Bertram’s World War I–era book attempts the construction of a new Germanic mythology, extracted diagonally from Nietzsche’s texts, concentrating on historical figures and geographic sites, such as Venice and Portofino. Bertram mines Nietzsche’s writings to construct an escape from modernity and all but ignores his theme of the emergence of the “good European” in a globalizing world endangered by the “insanity of nationalism,” maintained by the proclamation of states of exception that are enforced by deception and fearmongering (HH 472–75).

A different perspective emerges when we look into Nietzsche’s reading of works such as Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropo-Geographie (1882...