Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions Science Can't Ask

Chapter Three: What Darwin and Nietzsche Saw

1 Chapter Three What Darwin and Nietzsche Saw The Vitalist philosophers made no such mistakes. Nietzsche, for example, thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power instead of cutting off mouse-tails, had no difficulty in concluding that the final objective of this Will to Power was power over self, and that the seekers after power over others and material possessions were on a false scent. —George Bernard Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah Some Background on Darwin and Nietzsche Charles Darwin’s enduring contributions to science and natural history are astonishing in their scope and detail. He is best known as an evolutionist whose book The Origin of Species revolutionized the way biologists interpreted the natural world.1 He is less well known for his extensive and magnificent monographs on such subjects as earthworms, orchids, barnacles, and carnivorous plants. As readers of these works will find, his love and delight in the natural world are infectious. His powers of observation, wealth of 45 46 Leaving Us to Wonder detail collected from other observers, and careful reporting and analysis of problems set a standard which very few biologists can hope to equal. Darwin was capable of both grand theories like that in Origin of Species and the minute attention to details and recognition of the small differences among individual organisms that we find in his monographs. The theory advanced in Origin of Species has been the subject of continual controversy since its publication attracting , as we have seen, equally passionate detractors and defenders . The position Darwin propounded in this book is distinctly pluralistic. He certainly stresses natural selection as the material cause by which species are modified and eventually changed into new species. This aspect of his work is the one most often cited and exploited in contemporary appeals to his thought. However, and this is often obscured in contemporary discussions, he also invokes many other causes alongside natural selection. These include habit, use and disuse, judgment, and various unknown laws of growth and variation. Even “Lamarckian” factors, by which learned habits can become fixed through inheritance, factors many believe Darwin rejected, are invoked, though they are not given center stage. Today’s biologists are apt to claim that our current theories and knowledge of genetics allow us to do away with extraneous causes, that these nonmaterial factors invoked by Darwin himself have been subsumed under natural selection or other chance mechanisms. Contemporary authors committed to the evolutionary stance, such as those discussed in the first chapter, seem quite sure that Darwin would have been pleased, for example, with the theory of kin selection that attributes all our seemingly altruistic traits to an underlying selfishness. Though recognizing the possibility that all could be due to chance and selfishness, Darwin is not inclined to attribute our highest faculties to these causes and takes pains in his work to argue against this position. He offers us instead a more complicated vision in which selfishness, reason, social instincts, and religion all 47 What Darwin and Nietzsche Saw play a role. Thus, says Darwin “the reproach is removed of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of selfishness.”2 Perhaps the Darwin of Origin of Species and Descent of Man is not the Darwin so often defended and attacked in the name of Darwinism.3 Darwin came to the problem of the moral and intellectual faculties of humankind from his evolutionary perspective . The book with which we are chiefly concerned here, The Descent of Man, is his attempt to analyze these difficult problems from the standpoint of natural history. Darwin believed that for evolutionary theory, the high standard of our intellectual powers and moral disposition is the greatest difficulty that presents itself. In this Darwin was not alone, for from a genealogical perspective, Nietzsche understood this to be the greatest difficulty as well. While they shared this concern for the evolution of our moral and intellectual powers, Nietzsche’s training and intellectual life was very different from Darwin’s. He studied intensely and then briefly taught philology, and had a special love for the great Greek tragedies. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, revolutionized our understanding of what tragedy meant for the Greeks and introduced one of his lifelong obsessions—the tension between the rational and the irrational in...