Nutrition, Place, and Climate. Nietzsche’s Environmental Ethics.

The debate on Nietzsche and environmental ethics was started by Max O. Hallman in 1991.

Despite underlining Nietzsche’s affinities to ecological thought, he maintained that we cannot infer any environmental ethics from Nietzsche’s philosophy. Most scholars agree with Hallman.

By contrast, the main objective of this project is to demonstrate for the first time that Nietzsche’s thought provides a coherent environmental ethics based on the notion of metabolism.

This environmental ethics may pave the way for a new paradigm of sustainability at the intersection between diverse disciplines such as philosophy and sociology which can mitigate the impact of the Anthropocene.

In his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche affirms that the issues of nutrition, place, and climate must be placed at the centre of philosophy.

For Nietzsche, ‘""spirit"" itself is just a type of metabolism’, and I aim to demonstrate that he considered humans parts of nature’s metabolism. With this view, Nietzsche, I shall argue, responded to the physiology debate of his time.

In the light of this, I will address the following questions: What are the most recent contributions in the field of environmental ethics? What are the main positions on metabolism within the 19th-century physiology debate? What are Nietzsche’s stances on nutrition? How does Nietzsche elaborate an ethics of place?

And how does Nietzsche respond to the physiology debate of his time?

I will analyse Nietzsche’s works chronologically in order to show the development of Nietzsche’s ecological thinking.

I will use Martin Muslow’s method of the Konstellationsforschung which examines the perspectives of the various thinkers who addressed the same problem in the same historical period, regardless of whether they were familiar with similar ideas of other philosophers or not.

Following this method, I will reconstruct the debate on metabolism at Nietzsche’s time and put it into dialogue with Nietzsche’s works.