to all eternity chaos’ (FW 109), and this thought, basic to his philosophy, arose directly from his interpretation of Darwin. ‘The total nature of the world,’ Nietzsche wrote in Die frohliche Wissenschaft, ‘is. Natural selection was for Nietzsche essentially evolution freed from every metaphysical implication: before Darwin’s simple but fundamental discovery it had been difficult to deny that the world seemed to be following some course laid down by a directing agency after it, the necessity for such a directing agency disappeared, and what seemed to be order could be explained as random change. 1999, 72-73):ĭarwin had shown that the higher animals and man could have evolved in just the way they did entirely by fortuitous variations in individuals. Hollingdale, put it in his now classic, and still much read and praised biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge, 1965, rev. Here’s how one of Nietzsche’s seminal biographers, R.J. Thus human morality was no more grounded in some transcendent purpose than any other natural phenomenon. Instead of tracing morality to heaven, Nietzsche traced it to earth-to the historically contingent (hence Nietzsche’s On the Geneology of Morals ). Darwin had divorced life-and by extension, humankind-from metaphysics and wedded it to history. Darwin, by putting an evolutionary mechanism in place of telos had irretrievably set human beings into the realm of the contingent.
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And Nietzsche saw that the metaphysical consequences of this discovery could not be more profound.
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In other words, evolution had occurred, but it was guided by telos (some sort of purpose).įriedrich Nietzsche saw that Charles Darwin had landed upon a mechanism, natural selection, that accounted for evolution absent purpose. Prior to Charles Darwin there were a lot of 19th century people who believed that evolution must have occurred in some form, but they thought about evolution in theistic, deistic, or Platonic terms. Most specifically, contingency (chance), and the implications of contingency upon meaning.