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Nietzsche, Darwin and the Origin of Morals
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Jean Gayon |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Nazi's combination of "social Darwinism" with "Nietzscheism" has produced the current intellectual climate where the reality of the relationship between these two nineteenth-century intellectual giants is frequently misunderstood. Yet, Darwin's theory was a major concern for Nietzsche, especially in the field of morality. Jean Gayon of the University of Paris demonstrates how Darwin, and English science and philosophy more generally, provoked many of Nietzsche's most famous insights. |
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| Friedrich Nietzsche: he questioned the notion of altruism. | |
 ietzsche's friendship with Paul Rée was the starting point for his interest in the question of the origin of human moral behavior. That friendship began in 1873 and led to an important correspondence. Rée was a young scholar who had previously published a book entitled Psychological Observations. In 1877 he published another book, The Origins of Moral Feelings, that proposed to reduce all moral facts to natural causes. Rée thought that all morality originated in two primary instincts: an egoistic instinct, which was aimed at conservation of the individual, and an altruistic instinct, which made individuals act for the interest of other people. With Darwin, he accepted the existence of altruism in animals, believing that it had been developed by natural selection because it favored the survival of groups. In man, the notions of good and evil were but special developments of that basic tendency: good always referring to social utility, and bad referring to what was harmful to other people. On the basis of that identification between morality and altruism, Rée explained the origins of punishment, remorse, moral consciousness, freedom (a necessary illusion), and responsibility. For each of those classical moral notions he proposed a functional and relativistic interpretation: Morality always boiled down to categories of actions that would maintain society as such. |
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| Charles Darwin: Nietzsche attacked him and other English thinkers. | |
Rée's denial of any absolute criterion in morals delighted Nietzsche. As early as 1878, in Human All-Too-Human, he praised Rée and began to think about the "history of moral feelings." Through Rée, he discovered Darwin's speculations on the origins of morals and also became interested in the English utilitarian philosophers (especially Bentham and Mill) and in Spencer. However, he soon became convinced that Rée's work was weak. Some commentators have argued that he believed that from the beginning. Whatever the case, he did not criticize Rée, probably because they were friends. Instead, he began attacking the English authors who had influenced Rée: Darwin, Spencer, and the utilitarian philosophers. In the writings of his last period, Nietzsche often referred to that triad and polemicized against it on the question of the origin of morals. Many of Nietzsche's allusions to "Darwinism" must be understood in this perspective: not criticisms specifically addressed to Darwin, but criticisms of the collective entity "Darwin, Spencer, and the utilitarian philosophers." |
From geneology to morality
On one occasion, at least, Nietzsche provided a relatively precise description of the circumstances in which he became interested in the problem of the origin of morals:
The first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality was given me by a clear, tidy, and shrewd--also precocious--little book in which I encountered distinctly for the first time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypotheses, the genuinely English type, that attracted me--with that power of attraction which everything contrary, everything antipodal possesses. The title of the little book was The Origin of the Moral Sensations; its author Dr. Paul Rée; the year in which it appeared 1877. Perhaps I have never read anything to which I would have said to myself No, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion. [On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Foreword, Section 4]
What Nietzsche did not accept in the English "genealogical hypotheses" with regard to morals was not the idea of providing a naturalistic and evolutionary account of morals (a program that, in fact, he praised highly). It was "the altruistic evaluation of morals." That was the common presupposition he found in "all English genealogists of morals" (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Foreword, Section 4). Nevertheless, a few pages later, in the same Foreword, Nietzsche had an ironic comment on the equivocal role Darwin played in that kind of literature:
[Dr. Rée] had read Darwin--so that in his hypotheses, and after a fashion that is at least entertaining, the Darwinian beast and ultramodern unassuming moral milksop who "no longer bites" politely link hands, the latter wearing an expression of a certain good-nature and refined indolence, with which is mingled even a grain of pessimism and weariness, as if all these things--the problems of morality--were really not worth taking quite so seriously. [On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Foreword, Section 7]
What did the Darwin-Spencer-utilitarian association really mean for Nietzsche? Why did he need to attack them collectively? The key word, of course, is "altruism." Nietzsche was not particularly worried as to whether Darwin did or did not actually use that Spencerian term. What mattered to him was the tendency of modern English authors to root altruism in the history of life and to make it an old, natural, and widely shared feature of organisms. In that respect, all authors who emphasized "social instincts" (e.g., "sympathy" or "parental affection") as the origin of moral behavior argued that altruism did indeed exist in "nature" and that it was a major biological phenomenon: "One tries to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with naturalness, one seeks altruism in the foundations of life; one seeks egoism and altruism as equally founded in the essence of life and nature" (The Will to Power, III, Section 786 [Spring-Fall 1887]). Darwin, Spencer, and Rée could serve as interchangeable examples of that philosophical thesis, which Nietzsche rejected without the slightest concession. For Nietzsche, probably the most extreme philosophical apologist for individualist and aristocratic values who ever existed, altruism could not be an essential feature of "life":
Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation .... "Exploitation" does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life. If this should be an innovation as a theory--as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: people ought to be honest with themselves at least that far. [Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, Section 259]
What were Nietzsche's arguments against biological altruism? One of them would look quite familiar to contemporary evolutionary biologists. Nietzsche contested the altruistic nature of reproductive behavior and parental care: "Producing offspring has no altruistic aspect. Left to itself, an animal abandons itself to reproduction, to the extent that this pleasure often causes its death. To sacrifice oneself to one's offspring is to sacrifice oneself to what is closest, to one's own production, etc., this is certainly not altruism" (posthumous fragment [1879-80], Nietzsche, Oeuvres philosophiques compèhtes, 1970-97, IV, 1 [110]). In other words, individual organisms did not reproduce for the benefit of their "race" of their "society," or of their "species." They reproduced for their own benefit. No altruism there, only egoism. |
Natural selection
Besides that conventional argument against the notion of biological altruism, Nietzsche used a second, puzzling argument. It consisted in the suggestion that the very concept of natural selection was built as an unconscious transposition of some sort of altruistic and egalitarian moral into biological discourse. That argument (or rather suspicion) was related to a repeated criticism that Nietzsche developed against the notion of "selection of the species" (a notion that he attributed to both the Darwinians and Spencer). Nietzsche considered it absurd to hypothesize the existence of a natural process that would aim at the conservation of the species: "This is a wrong position: in order to conserve the species, many individuals are sacrificed. This kind of 'in order to' simply does not exist! Neither does the species exist; there are merely many different particular beings! ... Nature does not want to 'conserve the species'! In reality many similar individuals are more easily conserved than other, abnormal individuals, in similar conditions of existence" (Nietzsche, Oeuvres philosophiques complétes, 1970-97, V, fragment 11 [289], 1881). To a modern reader, such declarations are redolent of the debates over species selection. However, one should not misinterpret Nietzsche's intention: He rejected the notion of species selection, but he did not have the Darwinian notion of "individual selection." Remember that "natural selection" was an extremely rare expression in Nietzsche's writings, whereas "selection" (alone) was reserved for the artificial selection of humans. |
When he wanted to refer to natural selection, Nietzsche generally used two strange expressions: "selection of (or in) the species" and "utilitarian selection." Those terms first appeared in the early 1880s (posthumous fragments [1881-2], Nietzsche, Oeuvres philosophiques complètes, 1970-97, V, 11[67], 11 [69]); they were used again in The Will to Power (e.g., I, Section 54; see also posthumous fragments, Kröner, XII-1, Sections 235, 243), together with other equivalent phrases, such as "selection for utilitarian purposes" (posthumous fragment, Kröner, XII-1, Section 243) and "general selection" (The Will to Power, II, Section 244). All of those texts had similar contents: They argued that "utilitarian selection," because it involved adaptation of the whole species to a definite environment, would essentially be a conservative force and therefore would fail to explain evolutionary change. That argument, of course, would have been unacceptable for Darwin, who emphasized individual competition. But that was precisely what Nietzsche did not see. For him, natural selection meant selection of traits advantageous to the species as such, and for that reason he believed that it was a fiction. It was a fiction unconsciously invented by a category of naturalists who tended to project their idealistic moral convictions onto nature. Darwin, Spencer, and others, because they thought that altruism was the first and last word on morals, adhered to the old (Christian) ideal of a "uniform," "egalitarian," "gregarious" human species. "Selection of the species" was merely a generalization of that ideal and its symbolic projection in the field of natural history. Thus, as strange as it may seem, Nietzsche criticized the Darwinian view of nature for being "plebeian" and "Christian." |
That shows us what probably was Nietzsche's deepest motive for rejecting Darwinism. As a theory of the origin of morals, Darwinism claimed that altruism (and therefore morals per se) was a natural phenomenon, widely spread among organisms, and deeply rooted in the general history of life. Nietzsche, of course, had another theory of the origin of morals, which he laid out in a systematic manner in The Genealogy of Morals. I shall not analyze that famous theory here, but I want to indicate how the key theses of that book were constructed as a deliberate rejection of the common Darwinian-Spencerian-utilitarian schema. The three "dissertations" that made up the book developed three major theses on the origin of morals, each of which corresponded to a certain stage of cultural development. As noted by Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995), the organization of the book was misleading, because the first and second stages were discussed in reverse chronological order. Following Dennett's advice, I shall restore the chronology. |
Moral behavior
According to Nietzsche, the first stage in the development of human moral behavior involved the breeding of "an animal able to keep a promise," in other words, a "responsible" being (The Genealogy of Morals, II, 1,2). In that process, the key event was the emergence of a guilty conscience. The overall thesis of the second dissertation was that the guilty conscience emerged as the result of incredible amounts of violence and tyranny within human societies. The emergence of the guilty conscience could not be described as the result of a progressive and adaptive process. It did not originate as a complex development of social and altruistic instincts, but through a terrible internalization of man's aggressiveness. In other words, the guilty conscience was not an (altruistic) adaptation, but the historical effect of a fantastic increase in the "will to power" and of the hierarchical relationship between men (The Genealogy of Morals, II, 12 17, which refer to Spencer). |
The second stage in the development of morals was the emergence of moral judgment and the correlated construction of the categories of "Good" and "Evil." Nietzsche contested the utilitarian assimilation of "Good" and "non-egoistic actions." On the basis of philological evidence (which probably should be carefully checked), he argued that "Good" originally applied to the spontaneous feeling of superiority of dominant castes (The Genealogy of Morals, I, 2). The rest of the second dissertation was devoted to explaining how Jewish and Christian cultures succeeded in reversing the original evaluation. However, the overall message of the dissertation was clear: The utilitarian account of the origin of moral values was plain wrong. |
Finally, in the third dissertation, Nietzsche argued that the general trend of European morals had been to expand "the ascetic ideal" in all areas of human culture. In that case, again, he formulated his central thesis against the Darwinian-Spencerian-utilitarian camp, with explicit reference to Darwin's struggle for existence: "The ascetic ideal springs from the protecting instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion .... The case is therefore the opposite of what those who reverence this ideal believe: life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death. The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life" (The Genealogy of Morals, III, 13). The key word, of course, is "conservation." Nietzsche denounced a conception of morals based on "conservation" (will to survive, strategy of the "weak") instead of "augmentation" (will to power, strategy of the "strong"). At that level of discussion, the criticism of Darwinism and the criticism of Christianity do fuse. |
I do not pretend, of course, to have provided an analysis of The Genealogy of Morals, which contains many things that I have not mentioned. My intention has been merely to show that Nietzsche's speculation on the origin (and value) of morals was profoundly motivated and structured by a controversial debate with Darwinian evolutionary ethics. |
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