Diagnosis and Prescription: Nietzsche’s Revaluing of Modernity in Human, All Too Human

Section 30 of Human, All Too Human (HH 30) raises a set of subjects Nietzsche took up in earlier works. It indicates some important changes and shifts in relation to the juvenilia and “early period”. Yet continuities between his earlier thinking and his statements on those problems in HH remain. I will start by examining the beginning of HH 30, then contrast it with earlier statements:In this passage Nietzsche takes up a theme first addressed in his 1868 notes for a dissertation tentatively entitled On Teleology Since Kant (TSK), namely a critical treatment of the Kantian notion of “conformity to an end” or “purposiveness” [Zweckmässigkeit], as it corresponds with his notion of “fitness”. In doing so he examines both natural and cultural occurrences of organicity and uses the relationship between the parts and the whole of a given organism as criteria to judge the “life” of such organic forms.