Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (review)

Focusing on the polemical Genealogy of Morality (1887), in this book Johnson provides a critical reassessment of Nietzsche’s alleged complicity with Darwinism, as emphasized, for example, by John Richardson in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford, 2004). Whereas Richardson highlighted how Darwinian science was “the infrastructure for Nietzsche’s philosophical project” (10), Johnson argues that while Darwinism was a necessary condition for Nietzsche’s mature development, his final position was characterized by a “creative antagonism” (14) toward it.

Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to recognize the decisiveness of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and how it “necessitate[d] a radical overhaul of traditional metaphysics and ethics” (25). Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) postulated that while organisms are engaged in a struggle against other organisms for survival, central components of what is deemed “morality,” namely human sympathy, altruism, and cooperativeness, could be explained as advantageous traits that have been selected for over the course of evolutionary time. Such instincts “became more deeply ingrained through communal approbation, the force of habit, and inheritance” (166). Morality, for Darwin, is a by-product of the evolutionary mechanism of community selection, whereby in the evolutionary past, groups and tribes that were galvanized by common symbols, life-meanings, expectations for behavior, and a sense of obligation toward others outcompeted other tribes. Membership in tribes organized in this way provided great survival value, enabling individuals to call on others to help ward off predators and enemies, and to have access to their skills, goods, and labor. In addition, traits that promoted peaceful social living served to heighten the potential for reproductive success. Darwin writes, “[T]hose communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of off-spring” (40). However, from a Nietzschean perspective, Darwin’s narrative concerns the origination of herd/slave morality, having its basis in making human behavior “predictable” (143), and in heightening survival value and procreative success. Not only is such a herd morality representative of ethical egoism, it is nihilism.

Shepherded by “ascetic priests” and enforced by guilt and punishment, the herd’s “morality of custom” (158; Genealogy II) operates out of ressentiment for individuals who resist it or who create their own values. While tribes and societies can often operate in “immoral” ways (in the metaphysical sense), the sovereign individual who, in “pursuit of creative self-affirmation” (60), deviates critically from their codes is more apt to be eliminated in the struggle for existence than preserved. Nietzsche’s analysis reveals that in Darwin’s account, the herd triumphs over “the strong” in and through “slave morality,” which is the former’s “own brand of will to power” (133). For these reasons, against Darwin, Nietzsche explored “the phenomenon of distinct ‘moral’ wills” (46) and provided an alternative, multiperspectival interpretation of life, conceived of as the interplay or the clash of individual wills to power, rather than as a struggle for existence in which the “fit” are deemed to be those who have produced the most offspring. Furthermore, Nietzsche charges that the Darwinian discourse on the origin of morality tacitly assumes the evolutionary developments it describes to be “good.” But this judgment involves recourse to a metaphysical conception of “the Good” that is inconsistent with an authentic evolutionary naturalism, a logical lacuna that has admittedly plagued evolutionary ethicists ever since, including Herbert Spencer, Julian Huxley, and even some contemporary evolutionary psychologists.

With its pretense to objectively true knowledge, Darwinian science combats traditional metaphysical and religious systems like Christianity, but Johnson argues that for Nietzsche, it is actually an extension of the latter’s ascetic, otherworldly, life-denying ideal, for both “claim to offer an ultimate vantage point from outside ‘nature’” (195–96). Grounded in disinterested and disembodied causal explanation, the objectively true knowledge that is claimed by science is not considered to have originated from within the evolutionary process. Rather, it is conceived of as standing implicitly outside of it, unconditioned by the laws of...