1 - Anthropomorphic Projection

Summary

It is impossible to see any limit to the distance anthropomorphism can extend… . This transference of our feelings is … found everywhere, and in such manifold forms it is not always easy to identify it.

Georg Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

One of the central themes that runs through Nietzsche's polymorphic writings is the influence of anthropomorphism upon our conceptions of truth and reality. The “humanization” of the world for the sake of life and its enhancement and the “humanization” of nature for the sake of mastery of it are core ideas in his thought. In some of his earliest writings Nietzsche examined under a skeptical microscope the language and concepts that we take for granted. He detected traces of an ineluctable tendency to describe and understand the nonhuman in terms of human sentiments, attitudes, and feelings. He raises serious doubts about our capacity to comprehend anything that is not filtered through notions derived from our social relations, our psychology, or the metaphorical language we use to describe ourselves and our experience. His attitude towards this tendency of anthropomorphic transformation is not, however, unambiguous. Though Nietzsche often presents anthropomorphism as a naïve mode of thinking, it also evolves in his thought to the point at which it is self-consciously employed in his numerous metaphorical images of actuality, nature, and the multiple dimensions of the self and human experience.

In his later philosophical appropriation of a dynamic world-interpretation in physical theory Nietzsche occasionally seeks to transcend the “anthropomorphic idiosyncrasy”—that is, the tendency to conceive of the cosmos in terms of a purely anthropic perspective. Especially in notes from the late 1880s he seems to delete man from his conceptual landscape and to conceive of actuality as a dynamic system of interacting “force-centers” or “powerquanta.” This de-anthropomorphic perspective characterizes reality as the particular action and reaction of each “center of force” in relation to others and man is reduced to “a multiplicity of forces.” But Nietzsche does not settle in this depersonalized, dehumanized vision. He seeks to create a human meaning for this radical physical-theoretical reductionism. A reconstituted anthropomorphism is then introduced in order to picture reality as a dynamically striving, waxing and waning, struggling field of forces analogous to human experience.