“Vernatürlichung”: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder by Andrea Christian Bertino (review)

A common approach to the relationship between two authors—especially if one of them is Nietzsche—is to search for textual evidence that can prove their reciprocal or univocal influence. An alternative approach focuses on common features even if no direct influence can be shown. While the former approach often sacrifices philosophical creativity to philological detail, the latter risks neglecting the authors’ distinctiveness.

In his book, “Vernatürlichung”: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder (a revised version of which is published in Italian, as “Noi buoni europei”: Herder, Nietzsche e le risorse del senso storico, Mimesis, 2013), Andrea Bertino shows a remarkable ability to overcome the limits of these two approaches. He succeeds in demonstrating his hypothesis that Herder and Nietzsche share a common interest in “naturalizing” humanity, understood as a project that shapes the methods and the content, the theory and the practice, of their philosophies. In particular, Bertino succeeds in showing how both philosophers adopt, first, a methodological yet nonreductive naturalism that guides their reflections on man, language, and history, and allows them to deconstruct human illusions—of metaphysics, scientific conceptuality, mind-body dualism, and, at least for Nietzsche, faith in a moral God—while allowing that human beings understand themselves historically and re-create themselves culturally; second, a nontraditional methodological experimentation that reflects their pragmatic and functionalist view of human activities, philosophy included; and, third, an attempt to deconstruct and escape the fixity of metaphysical language by using metaphors and analogies to express both the impossibility of reaching the truth about reality and the imperative to try.

Nonetheless, in the introduction Bertino acknowledges essential differences between the two thinkers. Nietzsche’s approach is more radical than Herder’s because he is able to go beyond the moral and the theological perspectives, is more aware that philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, and historical reflections are as conditioned as humanity itself, and refers to vital needs in a more consistent and focused way. In these pages Bertino also provides an accurate analysis of the texts in which Nietzsche directly engages with Herder and a precise account of the scholarship on their relationship, which will satisfy readers’ philological queries and anticipate Bertino’s ability to make critical and constructive use of textual references.

The first part of the book examines concepts and methods of naturalization, providing a better understanding of how elaborate the naturalization project actually is. First of all, in order to reduce the distance between nature and culture, both Nietzsche and Herder temporalize human production—and especially language—through a genealogical inquiry that reveals their historical, and thus nonmeta-physical, character. However, Herder’s reference to God makes his project differ significantly from Nietzsche’s. Specifically, Herder considers the divine as the limit of naturalization, the ground of reality, and the (possible) meaning of scientific knowledge. In contrast, Nietzsche is more radical: first, he places no limit on naturalization except the limits of human consciousness itself; second, the ground of reality, far from being God, is what he calls “the terrible fundamental text homo natura” (BGE 230); and, third, the sciences cannot reach any absolute truth but are valuable only for the discipline of their methods. Nonetheless, Bertino’s approach allows him to show the extraordinary affinity that remains between Herder’s and Nietzsche’s projects. Their nonreductive naturalism is here specified as a threefold method, consisting of, first, a nondeterministic functionalism, according to which human beings are physiologically influenced, and therefore lack an ontologically “pure” unity; second, a reevaluation of metaphors and analogies as playing a central role in the genesis of language and as a means of expression that overcomes the fixity of concepts; and, third, a genealogical inquiry that Herder identifies with the history of nature...