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Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor Gregory Moore PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org C Gregory Moore 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Plantin 10/12 pt. System LATEX2ε [TB] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Moore, Gregory, 1972– Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor / Gregory Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 81230 5 1. Metaphor. 2. Human evolution – Philosophy. I. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. II. Title. B3318.M4 M66 2002 193 – dc 21 2001043121 ISBN 0 521 81230 5 hardback Contents Acknowledgements page vi List of abbreviations vii Introduction 1 Part I Evolution 1 The physiology of power 21 2 The physiology of morality 56 3 The physiology of art 85 Part II Degeneration 4 Nietzsche and the nervous age 115 5 Christianity and degeneration 139 6 Degenerate art 165 Conclusion 193 Bibliography 212 Index 225 v 1 The physiology of power Was Nietzsche a Darwinist? Or was he, as he himself often claims, an ‘anti-Darwinist’? It is typical of the misunderstandings, misreadings and misappropriations that have plagued the reception of Nietzsche’s thought that he has been so frequently identified with one of the very nineteenth- century figures whose theory of evolution he repeatedly sought to chal- lenge and whom he dismissed as an intellectual mediocrity. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself was sufficiently irritated by those who insisted on read- ing his work – and in particular his proclamation of the Ubermensch¨ –in Darwinian terms to complain: ‘learned cattle caused me on its account to be suspected of Darwinism’ (EH III, 1). And yet there can be no question that Nietzsche adopts a broadly evolutionist perspective: he believes in the mutability of organic forms; he sees morality, art and consciousness not as uniquely human endowments with their origin in a transcendental realm, but as products of the evolutionary process itself. In Human, All Too Human, he suggests that the question of how our conception of the world might differ from the ‘true’ nature of the world will be relinquished to ‘the physiology and evolutionary history of organisms and concepts’ (HA 10). And in The Gay Science, Nietzsche rebukes Schopenhauer for rejecting all evolution as chimerical and dismissing Lamarck’s insight as ‘an ingenious but absurd error’ (GS 99). But does all this make him a Dar- winist? One of the more recent writers to discuss the issue of Nietzsche’s supposed ‘Darwinism’ certainly thinks so. Werner Stegmaier argues that Nietzsche was, ‘as far as the scientific content of Darwin’s theory of evo- lution is concerned, and despite several objections, a resolute Darwinist in all phases of his creative life’.1 This seems an odd verdict to reach given 1 Werner Stegmaier, ‘Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche: Zum Problem der Evolution’, Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987), 269. Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwinism has also been discussed by, among others: Oskar Ewald, ‘Darwin und Nietzsche’, Zeitschrift f¨ur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Erg¨anzungsband 1 (1909), 159–79; Claire Richter, Nietzsche et les th´eories biologiques contemporaines (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911); Ludwig Haas, ‘Der Darwinismus bei Nietzsche’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Gießen (1932); Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph (Stuttgart: Alfred Kr¨oner Verlag, 1952), pp. 168–88; Pieter Mostert, ‘Nietzsche’s Reception of Darwinism’, 21 22 Evolution that, like the majority of educated Germans of his time, Nietzsche ap- pears never to have read a single work by Darwin himself. As with a host of earlier commentators, Stegmaier is led to this fallacious conclusion because he fails to differentiate between evolutionism in general and the specifics of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. This is not merely a dispute about terms; the lack of sharp distinctions here elides the complex historical framework within which Nietzsche expressed his ideas on evolution and without a knowledge of which any serious attempt to evaluate his ‘anti-Darwinian’ statements is impossible. The myth of the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ can sometimes foster the be- lief that the publication of The Origin of Species had an effect rather like the one Nietzsche hoped his critique of Christian morality would have – that in marking a traumatic shift from the creationist paradigm under- pinning natural theology to full-blown Darwinian evolutionary thought it broke ‘the history of mankind into parts’ (EH XIV, 8). But the idea of ‘transmutation’ was of course hardly novel, and long before Darwin there had been numerous attempts to understand how the diversity of species had been established and whether changes had occurred through time. In later editions of The Origin of Species Darwin listed over thirty predeces- sors and was still accused of a lack of generosity. Greek thinkers had held the view that life had developed gradually out of a primeval slime – an idea to which Lorenz Oken, perhaps the greatest of the German Romantic biologists, would later return. In the eighteenth century, Diderot, Buffon and Maupertuis all expressed some degree of commitment to the mu- tability of organic forms. Charles Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, postulated in his work Zoonomia (1794–6) the progressive devel- opment of all warm-blooded animals from ‘one living filament’, arguing that each one possesses ‘the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by gener- ation to its posterity’.2 But perhaps the most significant and influential pre-Darwinian theory of species change was advanced by the French nat- uralist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his 1809 treatise Philosophie zoologique. For Lamarck, conscious endeavour and reflexive habit are agents of evo- lutionary change. He supposed that an organism’s needs, imposed upon it by the environment, determine the development and modification of its physical structure. These needs dictate the way the organism will manip- ulate its body, and the effect of exercise, of use and disuse, causes some organs to expand, while others atrophy. The characteristics acquired by Bijdragen tot de Dierkunde 49 (1979), 235–46; Alistair Moles, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), chapter 3. 2 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (London: Johnson, 1794–6), vol. I, p. 505. The physiology of power 23 the result of such effort are transmitted directly to offspring. Lamarck’s best-known example involves the giraffe: ancestors of the modern giraffe stretched their necks in order to reach the leaves of tall trees; the effect of this stretching, inherited over many generations, accumulated to produce the long neck which now distinguishes the species.3 But although Darwin did not originate the idea of organic evolution, he was certainly responsible for its widespread acceptance. The chief objec- tions to the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories were based partly on the assumption of a short geological time span, which did not allow gradual evolution time to operate, and partly on the speculative and puzzling ex- planations of how the process worked. The persuasiveness of The Origin of Species derived not so much from Darwin’s assemblage of evidence from natural history and paleontology showing that evolution had taken place, but largely from his construction of a plausible theory of how it occurred. Darwin’s own attempt to explain ‘the changing history of the organic world’ and the process by which organisms adapt to their envi- ronment rests on two main premises. He begins in a deliberately minor key with a discussion of generally accepted and uncontroversial facts: the vast changes in domestic animals which can be obtained in a rela- tively short period of time through selective breeding by human beings. Having established the flexibility of nature introduced by the occurrence of variation in offspring and the power of what he terms ‘artificial se- lection’, Darwin asserts that individual organisms in a state of nature also exhibit a tendency to variation, a tendency induced largely through reproduction, but to some extent also by the effects of use and disuse of organs and the direct action of the environment. His second claim – famously inspired by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1797) – is that organisms are everywhere engaged in a struggle for life, a conflict which inevitably arises because of the high rates at which all organic beings tend to increase and their ensuing competition for the limited resources available to sustain them: ‘as more individuals are pro- duced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life’. Any variation in the structure of an organism – no matter how small – which confers on it an advantage over others in this struggle will ensure that it meets with success – as measured by its survival and ability to produce offspring. Useful variations are then inherited by descendants, and the cumulative effects of this process enable the organisms involved to mutate into varieties, species or even genera.
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