(Written for the course Modernism and Postmodernism Period by Wesleyan University)
“Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
Based on this Darwin’s quote, we can infer he is in a way defending a not well understood theory by most of the readers as we can see in the history of the debates about the evolutionary progress in biology from 1860, which his crucial idea consisted in a proximity between two concepts of progress: first, the competitive growth which correspond to a better adaptation due to the natural selection, then the organic complexity according to the comparative embryology of Karl Ernst von Baer and the zoology of Henri Milne Edwards. The Darwinian hypothesis suggests that there is an adaptative advantage allowing the survival increasement through the organism reproduction. It is about a non-trivial thesis which lead us to consider the complex process for such coincidence.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, wrote:
Development is the history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal with a right to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more urgent prior task of making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among many other like him, regular and consequently predictable.
It is inferred clearly that the Darwinian progressivism is wrong if we consider the evolution of the man, which Darwin can’t explain satisfactorily because humankind would be an exception of the natural selection.
Nietzsche complements, “The immense task in what I have called the ‘morality of custom’, the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification”, leading to a conclusion that Darwin is mistaken, theorizing about human history as being an axiological process based on its own system of values. At this point, we can argue that it wasn’t the most complex individual who survived, but the one who could win the battles according to his impulses to the punctual competition, which goes beyond adaptation.
It is possible to conclude that Nietzsche is right when he accuses Darwin to defend a progression without convincing arguments. Darwin himself mentions objections which unable his official position because naturalism is tied to a progressive cultural context which is not only about instincts but also morality, where it has considered intellectual faculties apart from anthropology characteristics.
For Nietzsche, progress is an anthropological complexity opposite to simplicity, where preferences and life conditions are based on the perspective of a specific living organism. Although relativism is not an option to Nietzsche, we know that progress is not a mere objective reality.