Anthropocentrism and the Long-Term: Nietzsche as an Environmental Thinker

Nietzsche has been advanced as an authoritative support for nearly every political aim since his death in 1900. Recent work has focused on his potential to contribute to environmental ethics. I defend the view that Nietzsche can contribute to both environmental ethics and aesthetics, and moreover, that his philosophy cannot be fully understood without the conceptual resources of environmental philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of morality and positive ethical views cannot be understood independent of conceptual distinctions of anthropocentrism and topics such as future generations and biocentric discussions of axiology. Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature emerges from his rejection of both metaphysical and axiological anthropocentrism and he advances a long-term ethical outlook for the future of humanity as a species understood as integrated within his overall conception and evaluation of nature.