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COLUMNS

NIETZSCHE AND/OR/VERSUS
DARWIN
Babette Babich

It is a peculiarity of current intellectual life that many scholars associate Nietzsche

and Darwin, some going so far as to claim Nietzsche as a Darwinian. By and large,
it is Anglo analytic philosophers, themselves red-in-tooth-and-claw competitors
for the survival and indeed hegemony of their species, who make the association.
Nietzsches New Darwinism by John Richardson is a prime example of this analytic
tendency in America, and a good friend of mine in New Zealand, Robin Small,
likewise manages to read Nietzsche as an ultra-Darwinist.1 But there are also
Continental scholars, notably Werner Stegmaier, who contend that Nietzsche
was a decided Darwinist throughout every phase of his creative work.2 These
readings accord with popular accounts linking Nietzsche and Darwin as influ1. John Richardson, Nietzsches New Darwinism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Richardson,
Nietzsche contra Darwin, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65, no. 3 (2002): 53775; Robin Small, What
Nietzsche Did during the Science Wars, in Nietzsche and
the Sciences, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer
(Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 2004), 15570, at 167. Emphasizing the distinction between natural selection and the
struggle for existence, Small notes that Nietzsches criticism is of the latter rather than the former, whereas Darwins focus was on the former rather than the latter. But
Smalls distinction elides the role of struggle in Darwins

own writings as the mechanism of natural selection, and

indeed Darwin named Malthus as his own decided inspirationa nomination that has launched any number of
tempests in the Darwinians closed teapot. For a valuable,
well researched, contrasting argument, I recommend
Dirk R. Johnsons Nietzsches Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
2. Werner Stegmaier, Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche:
Zum Problem der Evolution, Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987):
26487, at 269.

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ences on Hitler and racial theory.3 I agree with my colleagues in the history
and philosophy of science that Darwinian theory was a powerful element in the
intellectual climate of Germany in Nietzsches day. H.G. Bronn, a paleontologist, translated Darwins 1859 study On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection into German as early as 1860.4 The assimilation of Darwins key work,
therefore, began almost as immediately in Germany as in the English-speaking
world. There is, then, little doubt that Nietzsche was as profoundly affected by
exposure to Darwinian theory as anyone else of his generation in Europe. He was
broadly interested in the whole panoply of the sciences, paying close attention to
the debate over evolutionary theory and especially to Eduard von Hartmanns
Wahrheit und Irrthum des Darwinismus of 1875.
Perhaps the best place to begin discussing the Nietzsche-Darwin nexus is
with Bronns rendering of Darwins subtitle, The Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life, into German as Erhaltung der vervollkommneten Rassen im
Kampfe ums Daseyn. As Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart have pointed out, this
wording interprets Darwins Favoured Races as Perfected Races, and it does
even more damage by rendering the Struggle for Life as Kampfe ums Daseyn:

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Struggle for life could be more adequately translated into Kampf ums
Leben which would easily encompass both meanings Darwin had in
mind, namely the struggle for survival of a species in a certain environment of other species under particular ecological conditions, as well
as the individualistic struggle between members of the same species.
Kampf ums Leben or perhaps even more adequately Kampf ums berleben would suggest the unconscious, general struggle for survival in the
3. See, notably, Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler:
Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Hitlers Ethic: The
Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009). For a historical account of the association with Hitler, see Tracy Strong, Introduction to
Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Strong (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
There are exceptions to such historical readings; see, in
particular, Lewis Call, Anti-D arwin, Anti-Spencer:
Friedrich Nietzsches Critique of Darwin and Darwinism, History of Science 36 (1998): 122. Gregory Moore,
Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), is especially good on the German
reception of Darwin. In this context, see also Babette Babich, Nietzsches Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the
Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994), as well as, for an overview of evolutionary cladistics and Nietzsches philology, Babich, Towards
a Critical Philosophy of Science: Continental Beginnings
and Bugbears, Whigs and Waterbears, International
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24, no. 4 (December
2010): 34391, especially the section entitled: Nietzsches

Homer Question and Darwins Origin of Species Out of

the Spirit of Language, 34548. For a broader discussion
of the notion of progress, see Wolf Gorch Zachriat, Die
Ambivalenz des Fortschritts: Friedrich Nietzsches Kulturkritik
(Berlin: Akademie, 2001).
4. Charles Darwin, ber die Entstehung der Arten um
Their-und Pflanzen-R eich durch natrliche Zchtung,
oder Erhaltung der vervollkommneten Rassen im Kampfe
ums Daseyn, trans. Heinrich Georg Bronn (Stuttgart:
E. Schweizerbart, 1860). As Sander Gliboff reminds us,
Bronns version of The Origin of Species appeared in 1860,
mere months after the original. It was the first foreign-
language edition on the market, and it immediately provoked debates and challenged German scholars to think
about morphology, paleontology, embryology, and other
biological disciplines in new ways. Gliboff, H.G. Bronn,
Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism: A
Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2008), 4.

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natural environment while Kampf ums Dasein assumed the connotation

of an individual, conscious, and ultimately lethal conflict.5

Numerous scholars writing on the history of the life sciences in the later nineteenth century and, more specifically, on the genetics community in Germany
at that time have traced the fate of the expression Kampfe ums Daseyn (or Kampf
ums Dasein, as it is spelled today) in the work of scientists like Ernst Haeckel,
Wilhelm Roux (who placed Kampf in the title of his 1881 study Der Kampf der
Teile im Organismus), William Henry Rolph, and Rudolf Virchow, who are said
to have influenced Nietzsches reception of Darwinian theory.6
Nietzsches understanding of Darwin was also filtered through his reading
of Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. It was to Malthuss 1798 Essay on the
Principle of Population that Darwin, in his autobiography of 1876, attributed his
own grasp of the struggle for existence in a world of severely limited resources.
And it was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase survival of the fittest
(albeit after reading On the Origin of Species) and usually is credited with the formulation of Social Darwinism. A great part of the conviction that Nietzsche
is to be associated with Darwin stems from the Social Darwinist rendering of
Nietzsches term bermensch as superman. George Bernard Shaw popularized
the term in his play Man and Superman, but in current English translations the
word either is left in German or is rendered as the overhuman, the transhuman,
or (as I have proposed) the posthuman. In any case, it is important to realize
that Nietzsches use of the term bermensch (and Untermensch) was satirical (he
referred to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as both a comedy and a parody) in a classical tradition descending from Lucians coinage in the second century AD. The
notion of the bermensch indeed was borrowed from Lucians coinage of the term
hyperanthropos in his Menippean satire Downward Journey, or The Tyrant (Kataplous
he tyrannos), which reveals how those who seem in this life to be hyperanthropoi, or
Higher Men, are clearly seen as all-too-human when they are brought down to
the underworld after death:
.7
The problem with connecting Nietzsche with Darwin is not only that to
do so neglects subtle matters of this kindliterary matters of history and context, tone, stance, and genrebut also and more so that the connection is made

5. Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart, Metaphors and the

Dynamics of Knowledge (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2000),
44.
6. See, in particular, Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense
of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). But
see also Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and
Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).

7. See Babette Babich, Nietzsches Zarathustra and

Parodic Style: On Lucians Hyperanthropos and Nietzsches
bermensch, Diogenes 58, no. 4 (November 2013):
5874, fordham.bepress.com/phil_babich, and Babich,
Nietzsches Zarathustra, Nietzsches Empedocles: The
Time of Kings, in Nietzsches Therapeutic Teaching: For
Individuals and Culture, ed. Horst Hutter and Eli Friedlander (London: Continuum, 2013), 15774.

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despite Nietzsches direct, explicit, and acute philosophical criticism of Darwin.

Nietzsche criticizes Darwin and associated evolutionists, beginning as early as
1873 in the first of his Unfashionable Observations, where he ridicules the theologian David Strauss for cloaking himself in the tattered vestments of our ape-
genealogists and for esteeming Darwin as one of humanitys greatest benefactors.8 Elsewhere, Nietzsche associates the admiration of Darwin (die Verehrung
Darwins) with stupidification in the sciences (Die Verdummung, auch in die
Wissenschaft).9 In Beyond Good and Evil, he points to Darwinian theory as an
instance of the scientific fondness for combining the smallest possible effort
and the greatest possible stupidity.10 Scholars may be partial now to affiliating Nietzsche and Darwin, but Nietzsche himself saw Darwins strongest philosophical connection as with HegelOhne Hegel, Kein Darwin (No Hegel, no
Darwin), as he writes in The Gay Science.11 And Nietzsche rightly claimed, for
himself, to have little in common with Hegelian philosophy generally and nothing in common with Hegels vestigially providentialist thinking.
Of course, those who associate Nietzsche and Darwin argue that Nietzsches
scorn for our ape-genealogists was superficial, while the agreement between his
worldview and evolutionary theory ran deep. The section of Twilight of the Idols
titled Anti-Darwin is naturally a focus for the analytic philosophers revisionist
interpretations, but Nietzsches anti-Darwinian arguments appear throughout
his work. In The Gay Science, for instance, he relegates the survival and extinction
of species, which were Darwins main concerns, to the status of exceptions to the
natural order of things:

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In nature, it is not distress which rules but abundance, squandering,

indeed to the point of senselessness. The struggle for survival is only
an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and
small battles turn around us on preponderance, on growth and expansion, on power, corresponding to that will to power that is indeed the
will of life.12

The economy of the natural world is, for Darwinians (as for Malthusians), anything but abundant: the environment cannot support unlimited population
growth in species; hence, only those individuals whose traits conduce to survival
will live to reproduce to their full potential. Individuals within species survive
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, David Strauss der Bekenner und
der Schriftsteller, 7, vol. 1 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1980), 194.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente,
18841885, vol. 11 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio
Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1980), 131.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a

Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (1886; repr.,
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 27, 14.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (1887; repr. New York: Random House, 1974),
324, 367.
12.Nietzsche, Gay Science, 349.

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and reproduce at the expense of other individuals survival and reproduction.

Likewise, species are in ruthless competition for limited supplies of food and
other resources. Nietzsche simply could not square this economically and existentially straitened view of nature with his own experience of the world. It is the
case that, in arguing against the Stoics ambition to live in concord with nature,
Nietzsche remarked on natures cruelty and lack of measure, but his emphasis was
again and again on natures profligate abundance, which he associated with the
will to life. The will to life or, as he more famously named it, the will to power
is not a version of the will to survive, with which Darwinians are concerned, but
rather is ecstatically counterposed against it.
For Darwin himself, the extinction of less fit individuals and species was not
only a positive fact but also normatively important.13 Here is a sample of Darwins
thoughts on the Fuegians whom he and his crewmates encountered in 1832:
These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces
bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair
entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing
such men, one can hardly make ones self believe that they are fellow-
creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of
conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy:
how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with
respect to these barbarians! At night, five or six human beings, naked
and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals.14

In isolation from the rest of Homo sapiens, these barbarians had come to live
like the lower animals, who, in their remote archipelago, were their only competitors for survival. Where Nietzsche stresses natures abundance, there is by
contrast in Darwins writing no delight in the discovery of evidence that, as Paul
Feyerabend put it, the world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination.15 Darwins focus was on the process of competition, selection, and elimination that Feyerabend dubbed the conquest of abundance. It was precisely this
abstemious process of selectionthis restrictive competition for survival among
life forms that were abundant, as Nietzsche wrote, to the point of senseless13. See also Diane B. Paul, Darwin, Social Darwinism,
and Eugenics, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed.
Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21439; Steve Jones, Darwins Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (London: Little, Brown, 2009); Adrian Desmond and James
Moore, Darwins Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest
for Human Origins (London: Allen Lane, 2008); and Donald Worster, Natures Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1845; repr.

New York: Collier, 1909), 228 (from the entry for December 17, 1832).
15. Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of
Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, ed. Bert Terpstra
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.

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nesst hat Nietzsche rejected in Darwinian theory. For Nietzsche, the aim of
life is expression, not survival, and he thinks that this aim may be served in any
number of ways. (Only the Englishman, he writes, rather unkindly, strives for
life at all costs.)16
Those who do not acknowledge this distinction or recognize its importance fail to do so because it conflicts with Nietzsches image as an enthusiast for
all things bloody and warlike. Is not the struggle for life (Kampf ums Dasein)
the very meaning of the will to power? Yes and no. Yes, if a contest or agon in
the classical sense is what is meant. Decidedly not, if the result of that contest
is selection in Darwins sense. Darwin writes of preserving the favoured
races, which Bronn renders as Vervollkommnung (a progressive perfecting tendency), whereas Nietzsche emphasizes that the will to power tends to be most
strikingly evident in the least perfect. Hear, then, my word, you who are wisest,
Zarathustra says:

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Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even
in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.... And where
sacrifice and service and loving glances are, there too is will to be master. There the weaker steals by secret paths into the castle and even
into the heart of the more powerfuland steals the power.... He who
shot the doctrine of will to existence at truth certainly did not hit the
truth: this willdoes not exist!.... The living creature values many
things higher than life itself.17

The stress here falls on Zarathustras claim that the weak and mediocre
slavesalways accede to mastery. The theme is Hegels, but Nietzsche differs
radically from Hegel in that he sees the weak and mediocre as continuing to be
weak and mediocre even after achieving mastery. Nietzsche also claims that it is
only by including the weak and mediocre that humanity has come to be as rich
and interesting as it is.
When it comes to dominance and perdurance, Nietzsche argues, there is
only one type that does and can manage to survive in the face of all odds: the
incurably mediocre (die unheilbar Mittelmssigen).18 This last pronouncement
appears in Beyond Good and Evil, where, in the section titled What Is Noble,
Nietzsche addresses typically Darwinian concerns about species, breeding,
variations, and the conditions that favor them. Going by vocabulary alone,
it is not difficult to see how Nietzsche could be misread as an ultra-Darwinist,
but it is also in the same section, What Is Noble, that he reaches his ultimately
16. If we possess our why of life we can put up with
almost any howMan does not strive for happiness; only
the Englishman does that. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight
of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 1968), Maxims and Arrows, 12, 33.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Of Self-O vercoming, in Thus

Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), bk. 2, 13738.
18.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 262.

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counter-Darwinian conclusion that nothing is capable of enduring beyond the

day after tomorrow, one species of humanity excepted, the incurably mediocre.19
A year after the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche went on to discuss the triumph of slave morality in On the Genealogy of Morals, repeating that
it is the lowest values that flourish, while the highest devalue themselves.20
And in Twilight of the Idols, in Anti-Darwin, Nietzsche writes: As regards
the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been
rather asserted than proved. It does not occur, but as the exception; the general
aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd
prodigalitywhere there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.21 Nietzsche
observes further, adding his own ellipsis here: One should not mistake Malthus
for nature.
Above all, we need to recognize that Nietzsche did not share Darwins
ardent interest in drives that might be common to Homo sapiens and the sea horse.
When discussing questions relevant to evolution, Nietzsches focus was always
on what he called the Urknstler or Aeon. By these terms he meant more or less
what the Stoics and certain Pre-Socratics meant by nos; that is, the mind of the
cosmos, or the universe itself. Thus, the early Nietzsche invoked Heraclituss
aphorism to illustrate the playful, childlike freedom common to human artists
and the temporal life of the cosmic mind: Lifetime [Aeon] is a child playing,
moving checkers here and there; kingship is the childs.22 Nietzsches thinking
about developmental issues followed the schemes of Heraclitus and Empedocles
much more than those of Darwin. What is generally regarded as growth, increase
and decrease, or development Empedocles viewed instead as the aggregation
and segregation of indestructible and unchangeable elements. Changes occur
because the universe is pervaded by forces of attraction (Love) and repulsion
(Strife) that wax and wane cyclically. Nietzsche himself, at the beginning of his
career, drew a parallel between Empedocles and Darwinian theory, by which
presumably Nietzsche meant that Empedocles was operating at a high level of
theoretical sophistication and was treating processes related to what Darwin
called evolution and natural selection.23 Still, for Empedocles, whose theories Nietzsche preferred to Darwins, if all motion is reduced to the workings

19.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 262.

20.Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 18871889, vol. 13
of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 321.
21. Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, in
Twilight of the Idols, 14, 85.
22. Herakleitos 52, Fragmente, vol. 1, 5th ed., ed. Herman Diels and Walther Kranz (Berlin: Weidmannsche
Buchhandlung, 1934), 162. For a more extended discussion, see my chapter 10, Chaos and Culture, in Words in

Blood, like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in

Hlderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 17183.
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, ed.
and trans. Greg Whitlock (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 116. This translation is excerpted from
part 2, vol. 4 (ed. Fritz Bormann and Mario Carpitella)
of Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 30 vols., ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 196772).

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of incomprehensible forces, then science basically dissolves into magic.24 To the

degree that those forces might be comprehensible, Nietzsche figured them as in
the hands of an intelligent designert hat sovereign child who played a kind of
bead game with chance and (as Nietzsche put it in his notes on Empedocles) also
with every possible random combination of elements, of which some are purposive and capable of life. Aeon is clearly is not the intelligent designer whom we
know from Genesis, but neither is it the unconscious forces of natural selection.
What scientists like Darwin miss, but that the Pre-Socratics and many artists
have comprehended, is that design can be both aleatory and intelligent, since the
creative cosmic mind, uninhibited by laws or principles, is free.

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24.Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 119.

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