Untimely Meditations 113riger ... were to go out in search of prey!" (1,184; DS § 4). The young
tiger had already made his appearance in The Birth of Tragedy as a symbol
of die spirit of wild Dionysian art It enraged Nietzsche to watch the edu-
cated classes recast feral forces in a cozy light
Nietzsche's indignation was directed at their view of nature as well.
Strauss played down Darwinism, which was becoming extraordinarily
influential at the time, and failed to recognize its momentous conse-
quences, as Nietzsche noted critically. People tended to use Darwinism
as a source for atheism, and the monkey replaced God as an object of
inquiry. Although Strauss draped himself "in the shaggy garment of our
monkey genealogists" (1,194; DS § 7), he stopped short of realizing the
ethical implications of this genealogy of nature. Had he been daring, he
would have been "able to derive a moral code for life from the bellum
omnium contra omnes and the privileges of stronger individuals" (1,194; DS
§ 7), thereby inciting the "philistines" against himself. To satisfy their
need for security and comfort, Strauss sidestepped the nihilist conse-
quences of materialism and gave his deliberations a cozy and heart-
warming twist by discovering in nature a new "revelation of eternal
goodness" (1,197; DS § 7). For Nietzsche, by contrast, nature was the
epitome of ferocity.
In the third Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche outlined his Dionysian
interpretation of nature, which he contrasted with the insipid, optimistic
view of nature advanced by the cultivated philistines. His aim was to dis-
tinguish himself from naturalists and materialists. Nietzsche considered
it utterly incredible that out of the entire hierarchy of nature, from the
inanimate to the vegetative and the animal, it was in man that con-
sciousness had emerged. Why did nature use man as a forum for con-
sciousness? A stone does not know that it exists. An animal is aware of
its environment, but remains inextricably bound to that environment.
Only in man does the awareness of awareness come into play, and with
it a distancing consciousness. Man does not merely exist in his environ-
ment; he experiences it as a wide panorama. Man emerges from the
dazed state of animal existence, and in this moment the world takes on