Sviluppo dell’organismo e Selbstregulierung in Nietzsche

Abstract

This article reconstructs the reasons that induced Nietzsche to take organisms development as an inner capacity of transformation and regulation of outer stimuli, whereby Nietzsche came to conceive of organisms as influenced by their environment and at the same time reacting to it by reorganizing both themselves and the outer informations. The contemporary scientific debate, above all that concerning evolutionist and darwinist theories, will be emphasized as momentous for his thought. Thus this article aims at showing why Nietzsche reckoned the concept of Selbstregulierung, coined by the biological anatomist Wilhelm Roux, to allow him overcoming Darwin’s supposedly mistakes, although he preserved an evolutionist and darwinist framework for the theory of living beings. Furthermore, it will be argued that his draw on the biological concept of Selbstregulierung is tied to Nietzsche’s naturalized conception – hence neither metaphysical nor vitalistic – of the will to power.