Nietzsche and Nature

In class last week I pointed out what I perceived as the incongruity between Nietzsche's metaphors comparing humans to animals and his claims that, from the perspective of nature, humans are at the very least anomalous. Amy pointed out, rightly I think, that Nietzsche doesn't really come right out and say that humans are "unnatural." Nevertheless, I understood him as implying this. I went back and tried to find passages that support my contention. On p. 1171, he writes, "One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature." So, humans may not be completely out of place in nature, but they do at least appear, according to Nietzsche, a bit awkward. He further claims that nature "conceal(s) most things from him...in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness." (1172) Now that I think about this quote, though, perhaps Nietzsche is not saying so much that humans don't fit into nature, but more that it is "natural" for them to be different from the rest of nature: after all, it is nature, and not humans themselves, who have made humans this way, according to Nietzsche. I also gave a lot of thought to Dr. Cadle's response to my claim. She said that writers often state that one thing is something that it isn't in order to make their point: good old-fashioned irony, in other words. This made a lot of sense, too. In other words, from this perspective, yes humans are somewhat unnatural in their drive for truth but it is not odd that Nietzsche would use animals to compare humans to in this respect; the irony of the metaphors underscores the incommensurability between humans and nature all the more. I am thinking so much about this aspect of Nietzsche's essay because I am writing on the essay. Ultimately, I think Nietzsche in the essay is doing a lot of intricate weaving and even intentional blurring of rigid categories, thus putting into practice the very platform that he advocates for the artist/"intuitive man" at the end of his essay. Thanks to Amy and Dr. Cadle for getting me to consider possibilities other than my first instinct.