By Gregory Moore
This examine explores the German philosopher's reaction to the highbrow debates sparked via the e-book of Charles Darwin's starting place of Species. by means of reading the abundance of organic metaphors in Nietzsche's writings, Gregory Moore questions his contemporary acceptance as an eminently subversive and put up sleek philosopher. The e-book analyzes key subject matters of Nietzsche's thought--his critique of morality, his philosophy of paintings and the Übermensch--in the sunshine of the speculation of evolution, the nineteenth-century experience of decadence and the increase of anti-Semitism.
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Extra resources for Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor
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The physiology of power 39 This conception of the aggregate structure of the will expressed here is by no means as outlandish as it might at first appear. Nietzsche is again simply employing metaphors prevalent in contemporary biological theory. 23 The movement of protoplasm is the result of a stimulus triggering an explosion of previously latent energy. 24 In other words, volition is not a product of complex organisation, something that emerges only in more highly evolved structures, but is present even in unicellular organisms.
For a start, he did not regard Darwin as the originator of a new world-view; rather, the theory of evolution is for him merely an ‘after-effect’, an echo of the philosophy of becoming first expounded by Heraclitus, Empedocles, Lamarck and, tellingly, Hegel – a sign of how widespread already was the notion of ‘development’ or Entwicklung in pre-Darwinian German Naturphilosophie (VII 3, 34[73]). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche even suggests that Hegel anticipated Darwinism when he introduced the idea that ‘the species concepts [Artbegriffe] develop out of each other .
II, p. 186. The physiology of power 27 at least some combination of external, environmental factors – was the mechanism of species mutation, a significant number of prominent biologists either wholly rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection or attached less importance to it. In its place, many articulated a pre-Darwinian basic commitment to non-adaptive models of evolutionary change. Loyal to the vitalistic traditions of their science, nineteenth-century German biologists resurrected Blumenbach’s concept of the Bildungstrieb, the nisus formativus, and held an intra-organic directive or transformative force to be the main engine of evolution.