Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor Gregory Moore Cambridge University Press Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor explores the German philosopher’s re- sponse to the intellectual debates sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. By examining the abundance of biological metaphors in Nietzsche’s writings, Gregory Moore questions his recent reputation as an eminently subversive and (post-) modern thinker, and shows how deeply Nietzsche was immersed in late nineteenth-century debates on evolution, degeneration and race. The first part of the book provides a detailed study and new in- terpretation of Nietzsche’s much disputed relationship to Darwinism. Uniquely, Moore also considers the importance of Nietzsche’s evolu- tionary perspective for the development of his moral and aesthetic phi- losophy. The second part analyses key themes of Nietzsche’s cultural criticism – his attack on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his diagno- sis of the nihilistic crisis afflicting modernity and his anti-Wagnerian polemics – against the background of fin-de-si`ecle fears about the imminent biological collapse of Western civilisation. GREGORY MOORE is Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cam- bridge. His research interests include German intellectual and cultural history. He has published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Nietzsche- Studien, and German Life and Letters. This Page Intentionally Left Blank Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor Gregory Moore PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org © Gregory Moore 2002 This edition © Gregory Moore 2003 First published in printed format 2002 A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 81230 5 hardback ISBN 0 511 01442 2 virtual (netLibrary Edition) 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 Acknowledgements Thanks first and foremost to Barry Nisbet, who supervised the thesis on which this book is based. I should also like to thank the staff at the Goethe- and Schiller-Archiv of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik for making available to me the contents of Nietzsche’s library; the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for electing me to a Research Fellowship, which allowed me to prepare this book for publication; and the anonymous readers at CUP, whose comments on an early draft helped me to make substantial improvements to my argument. Versions of chapters 2 and 5 have been published in vol. 23 (Spring 2002) and vol. 19 (Spring 2000) of The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. A ver- sion of chapter 6 has appeared in Nietzsche-Studien, 30 (2001). Permission to reprint is here gratefully acknowledged. vi Abbreviations Translations of Nietzsche’s works are abbreviated as follows: A The Antichrist, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). BGE Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marion Faber (Oxford University Press, 1998). BT The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999). This volume also contains On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense and The Dionysiac World View. CW The Case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). D Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1997). EH Ecce Homo, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). GM On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Douglas Smith (Oxford University Press, 1996). GS The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974). HA Human, All Too Human, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986). NCW Nietzsche Contra Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1971). TI Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford University Press, 1998). UM Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). vii viii List of abbreviations Quotations from Nietzsche’s notebooks are taken from the Kritische Gesamtausgabe of his works, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–). References follow the standard method of citation for this edition. All quotations which do not bear an abbreviation are taken from here. Quotations from letters to and from Nietzsche are taken from Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (abbreviated as KGB), ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975–84). All translations from the notebooks and letters are my own. In the interests of consistency and accuracy, I have occasionally modified the translations of Nietzsche’s published works. Introduction Even the most careless of Nietzsche’s readers – and there have been many – cannot fail to notice the prevalence of biological and medical metaphor in his writings. All too often his predilection for the rhetoric of health and sickness has been portrayed as an idiosyncratic response to, and preoccupation with, his own well-documented medical crises.1 This is at least partially true: his chronic illness undoubtedly shaped his perception of the world and left an indelible imprint on his thought. But such an approach necessarily ignores the fact that Nietzsche’s texts are informed by the same hopes and anxieties that haunted the fin-de-si`ecle Europe in which he lived, an increasingly medicalised culture that was obsessed with defining and policing the frontiers of the normal and the pathological. His work, which both espouses an anti-Darwinian theory of evolution and evinces an enduring concern with the decadence of Western civilisation, was not immune from the influence of what the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert termed the ‘biologism’ of the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries – the dissemination of the language of evolutionary naturalism and racial degeneration beyond the bound- aries of the rapidly specialising biomedical disciplines and into the wider cultural debates of ethics, politics, anthropology, history and aesthetics.2 It is my contention that Nietzsche’s recourse to biological and medical idiom is both a reflection and an ironic distortion of this pervasive biol- ogism, and can only be truly appreciated once the contemporary force 1 See e.g. J¨org Salquarda, ‘Gesundheit und Krankheit bei Fr. Nietzsche’, Studi Tedeschi 17 (1974), 73–108; Thomas A. Long, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Medicine’, Nietzsche- Studien 19 (1990), 112–28; Eberhard Falcke, Die Krankheit zum Leben: Krankheit als Deutungsmuster individueller und sozialer Krisenerfahrung bei Friedrich Nietzsche und Thomas Mann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992). 2 Heinrich Rickert, ‘Lebenswerte und Kulturwerte’, Logos 2 (1911–12), 131–66. On the phenomenon of biologism, see e.g. Gunter Mann (ed.), Biologismus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1973). See also the following articles by Mann: ‘Biologie und Geschichte: Ans¨atze und Versuche zur biologistischen Theorie der Geschichte im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 10 (1975), 281–306; ‘Medizinisch-biologische Ideen und Modelle in der Gesellschaftslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 4 (1969), 1–23. 1 2 Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor and significance of his metaphor is reconstructed. I believe that new light can be thrown on his thought by situating it within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration. Nietzsche and nineteenth-century biologism In the preface to his Naturliche¨ Schopfungs-Geschichte¨ (History of Creation) in 1868, the zoologist Ernst Haeckel boasted that evolution was the ‘magic word’ which would one day unlock all the mysteries of the universe. At the time of his writing, nine years after the epochal publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, biology had already become one of the dominant dis- courses of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The supremacy of the biological sciences is illustrated by the work of Haeckel himself, Darwin’s most ardent and influential disciple in Germany. For he not only brought evolutionary theory to the masses in a series of best-selling popular works, but also used it as the basis for formulating an ambitious biologistic phi- losophy that sought to account for the origins and behaviour of all natural entities, from the microscopic cell to the cosmos as a whole. A vociferous proponent of the simian ancestry of humans and an implacable enemy of the Church, his attempt to construct a secular theory of human nature often assumed the form of biological reductionism. He saw in biology a natural basis for ethics, psychology and art, and regarded Darwinism as an objective foundation for nationalism and as an ideology of social integration. As with many of his contemporaries, Haeckel’s insistence on the central role he believed biology should play