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Zarathustra's evolutionary epistemology
Zarathustra’s Evolutionary Epistemology C. U. M. Smith
Friedrich Nietzsche was the fust great philosopher to be infIuenced at the core by Darwinian ideas. He regardedAlso Sprach Zurathustru as his masterpiece and most subsequent commentators have agreed. There have been many interpretations of the Zurathustra, and lie all great works it has many levels of meaning. An exposition in terms of evolutionary epistemology, however, has not yet been attempted. ‘Ibis article rectifies this omission and shows how Nietzsche’s work cakes Darwinian ideas into the domain of philosophical anthropology. It shows through the prism of Nietzsche’s mature thought some of the consequences of an evolutionary epistemology both in opening up alternative visions of the world and in permitting a profound criticism of our commonsense metaphysics and
ontology.
And this slow spider that creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and thou in the Gateway, whispering together, whispering of things eternal, must we not all have been here before? ( Thus Spake Zaruthustru, 1883, book 3, sec. 2) articles (1986, 1987) I discussed Friedrich Nietzsche’s reaction to the Darwinian ideas of the 1870s and 1880s with especial reference to his evolutionary epistemology. I argued that although Nietzsche appeared to reject Darwinism, the theory he rejected was in fact a straw theory, owing more to the obsolete ideas of Narurphilosophie than to those expressed in The Origin ofSpecies. Nietzsche’s ideas were indeed far from inconsistent with a Darwinian “world-view.” In this article, I examine how far this “world-view” underlies what Nietzsche regarded as his most pivotal thought, the thought of the “eternal return.” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo (1888) that “the fundamental conception” of his Zururhusm is the idea of eternal recurrence, and of how “this highest formula of affiiations” came to him in August 1881 when he was staying at Sils Maria in the Oberengadine: “It was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath ‘6,000 feet of beyond man and time.’ That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me” (p. 295). In previous
C. U. M. smith, Dqrtment of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, United Kingdom Journal of Social and Evolutionary ISSN: 1061-7361
Systems 15(1):75-85.
Copyright Q 1992 by JAI Press, Inc. All rights of renroduction in anv form reserved.
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Nietzsche was, of course, a philologist and a philosopher-not a biologist. His Darwinian bent was thus applied to philosophical issues not to the problems of natural history. I argued in my 1986 article that if Descartes can be regarded as the first great philosopher to respond to the Galilean revolution of the seventeenth century, then Nietzsche can with equal justice be seen as the first great philosopher to respond to the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth. Others have suggested that another analogy might be also drawn-an analogy between the Hume-Kant dyad and a Darwin-Nietzsche dyad. This suggests that just as Kant was “awoken from his dogmatic slumbers” by the down-to-earth empiricism of David Hume, so Nietzsche found the need to respond to another seemingly unsubtle theory from across the channel (Kaufman& 1967, p. 167). However this may be, Nietzsche certainly seems to have been influenced by Darwinian ideas at a deep level, and they seem at work in his well-known criticism of some of the fundamental features of Western metaphysical thought. One of these fundamental features has been the continued preference for “being” over “becoming.” This preference of course can be traced right back to the beginning of philosophical and scientific thought in pre-Socratic Mugnu Gruecu. Nietzsche, as a classical philologist, must have been very familiar with the pre-Socratic writings. “Come now, and I will tell thee-and do thou hear my word and heed it-what are the only ways of enquiry that lead to knowledge,” says Parmenides of Elea in a famous fragment. “The one way, assuming that being is and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the trustworthy path, for truth attends it. The other, that not-being is and that it necessarily is, I call a wholly incredible course . . . ” (Nahm, 1935, p. 115). In other words, knowledge and rational thought was only of that which was constant, unchanging. All else was mere opinion, hearsay, not worthy of a philosopher’s time. From the pre-Socratic analysis of “being” and “not-being” flowed the ancient atomic theory (see Smith, 1976). Atoms, literally unsplittable, immutable, were that which “is”; they moved in the void which is “not being.” Aristotle, a little later, reported the origin of ancient atomism as follows: “ . . . Leucippus thought he had a theory which, being consistent with sense-perception, would not do away with coming-into-being or perishing or motion or the multiplicity of things. So much he conceded to appearances, while to those who upheld the One he granted that motion was impossible without void, that the void is notbeing and that no part of being is not-being. For being, in the proper sense, is an absolute plenum. But such a plenum is not One, but there is an infinite number of them, and they are invisible owing to the smallness of their bulk. They move in the void . . . and by coming together they effect coming-into-being, by their separation perishing” (De Generatime at Corruptione, sec. 325a2). We may germanely note how this theory-which in its seventeenth-century recrudescence envisaged atoms as “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles”-has “evaporated” in the twentieth-century into a haze of “uncertainty.” The idea that atoms are “unsplittable” is nowadays merely risible. Subatomic “particles” have no exact position in space, and are readily transformed into “energy” and back again, and in some cases are created ex nihilo from the vacuum only to lapse back into non-existence after a life of an instant. Nietzsche foresaw this outcome in the poetic passages at the very end of his “book for thinkers,” The Will to Power. “This world,” he writes, “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing eternally flooding back . . . eternally self creating, eternally self-destroying. . . .” (1883/1888, sec. 1067). The philosophy expressed in Zuruthustru placed a large question
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mark over such notions as “cause” and “effect,” “persistent being,” and all the commonsense categories of our day-to-day life. The ancient metaphysics of substance and attribute was also fundamental to preDarwinian biology. Species had been created-not absolutely immutable, varieties clearly existed (bigger, smaller, tamer, fiercer, etc.)-but not open to transformation beyond certain fixed bounds. Lyell, for instance, writes in The Principles of Geology (1832) that “there are fixed limits beyond which the descendants from a common parent can never deviate from a certain type” (1832, vol. 2, p. 162), and Linnaeus (1751) had earlier shared the same ancient vision: “Species tomnumeramus, quot diversae formae in primitione sunI creatae.” One of the most vivid expressions of this “essentialist” vision is to be found in Paradise Lost, where Milton writes of the days of creation, and of how, at the Creator’s command, . . . The Earth obey’d and strait Op’ning her fertil Woomb teem’d at a Birth Innumerous living Creatures, perfet fonues Limb’d and full grown; out of the ground up rose As from his Laire the Wilde Beast where he wonns In Forrest Wilde, in Thicket, Brake, or Den; Among the Trees in Pairs they rose, they walked: The Cattel in the Fields and Meddowes green; Those rare and solitaire, these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad Herds upsprung. The grassie Clods now Calv’d, now half appeer’d The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds And Rampant shakes his brinded main; the Ounce, The Libbard, and the l)ger, as the Moale Rising, the crumbl’d Earth above them threw In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground Bore up his branching head. . . .
Ernst Mayr emphasizes that an escape from this essentialist paradigm was fundamental to the Darwinian revolution. Contra Goethe and the Naturphilosophen, recognition that no populations of unique “typus 9” “archetype,” Platonic “idea,” or “essence” existed-only individuals-was necessary. This had become clear to Darwin as he worked on the collections he had formed during his Beagle years, and as he researched the fossil and living Cirrepedia. Populationist thinking is central to the Darwinian position. “The fixed essentialistic species,” writes Mayr in a flamboyant passage, “was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike” (1982, p. 403). Nietzsche was caught up in the same movement of ideas. He too was unwilling to accept an essentialist metaphysics without further question. But, as a philosopher, he felt (as Heidegger was to feel after him [see Steiner, 19781) that the correct approach was to go back to the beginnings of European thought and re-examine its pre-suppositions. He concluded that the old idea of an immutable reality, of unchanging “being,” could no longer be accepted. He believed that an evolutionary approach revealed it as a mere fiction, a device evolved to enable a certain species of animal to survive and prosper in a Darwinian world.
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He believed, moreover, that its time was up-that it had been overtaken by events and revealed as mere illusion. God, in other words, was dead. Few of his contemporaries, however, had recognized what was staring them in the face. In one of his most famous passages he writes of the madman who ran into the market-place with a lantern in the bright morning hours crying incessantly “‘I am looking for God! I am looking for God!’ Where has God gone? I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” But, in the end, being met only with blank uncomprehending stares, the madman threw his lantern to the ground where it broke and went out. “‘I come too early’ he said then, ‘my time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling-it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, deeds require time after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves!“’ (1882, sec. 125). Nietzsche came to the conclusion, in other words, that humankind was still sleepwalking, was as yet incapable of recognizing the far-reaching consequence of what had been stumbled into. “Essentialism” was, in a sense, a “necessary fiction.” Humanity was not yet ready to do without it. Nietzsche thought, indeed, that in order to think at all, one needed to assume “beings. ” “In order to think and infer,” he writes, “it is necessary to assume being: logic handles only formulae for what remains the same” (188311888, sec. 517). But just because humans find assumption of persistent entities necessary does not mean, he thought, that such entities actually exist in the world. His evolutionary perspective suggested to him that the old essentialist metaphysics of substance and attribute was nothing more than an adaptation of a peculiar species of African ape-Homo sapiens-an adaptation essential for its survival in a Darwinian world. Nietzsche’s suspicions led him to trace the human predilection for “being” over “becoming” back to the origin of self-consciousness. Nowadays, of course, we know far more about the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens than was known in the nineteenth century. Many authorities trace the origin of self-consciousness back some 100,000 years into the palaeolithic period. Palaeoanthropologists have discovered burial sites in the Middle East dating back to that remote period which contain not only the skeleton but also the remains of grave goods and the pollen of the flowers and herbs with which the grave had been decorated (Solencki, 1977). Why, scientists ask, should such trouble have been taken if not for the thought that perhaps something survived bodily death to visit “that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns”? Belief in some persistent self, surviving sleep and death, perchance perhaps to dream, thus may have developed during that far-off epoch. This nascent self-consciousness, some would further argue, would very likely have been synergistically reinforced by the necessities of social living. For successful social life-the hunt, the search for suitable foodstuffs, the sharing and assignment of food, positions, duties, etc.-would have required each individual to be able to recognize the persistent characters of others in the group. This developing recognition of others would then feed back to enhance the nascent recognition of self and indeed create a foundation for the earliest system of ethics (see Smith, 1991). But this recognition, thinks Nietzsche, is merely pragmatic, forced upon Homo sapiens by the ultimate necessity of surviving in what Darwin had termed “the struggle of life.” The
Zarathustra’s Evolutionay Epistemology -79 generalization f’rom this experience to the notion of “essence,” of persisting “substance,” is illicit-an instance of what he saw as a “metastasis” (the trick of moving rapidly and unobservedly from one topic to another, much used in rhetoric). In T~JZWill to Power, he writes “ . . . that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species has nothing to do with the truth one knows from the fact that, e.g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality” (188311888, sec. 487). Nietzsche lived in the last half of the nineteenth century rather than the last half of the twentieth. Nowadays with the benefit of the twentieth-century revolution in mathematical physics-non-Euclidean geometries, relativity, quantum indeterminacy, etc.-we should be more open than Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century contemporaries to this suggestion that “space, time and motion” are more features of our “perspective” than immutable characters of the world. Yet even in the nineteenth century Nietzsche lived in the aftermath of Kant’s critical philosophy. He was also well aware of the results emerging from the laboratories of sensory physiology, especially that of Hermann Helmholtz. F. A. Lange, whose book on the history of materialism Nietzsche revered (see Vaihinger, 1935), wrote that physiology is perhaps the most important of all the sciences for a philosopher, and that, in particular, sensory physiology “is developed or modified Kantianism . . . [and] Helmholtz has employed the views of Kant [i.e., the categorizing powers of the mind] as a heuristic principle” (Lange, 1865, book 2, pp. 202-203). In the late-twentieth century, as indicated above, we have seen only too obviously that our commonsense notions of time, space, causality, matter, and energy are but the conveniences of a peculiar, albeit highly successful, group of animals, very recently evolved on the sun’s third planet, If conscious life could have evolved at the subatomic scale or at the galactic scale, its commonsense notions would be vastly different from our own! A “primitive” organism, feeling its way, sightless, about its environment, would find acceptance of a physics of action at a distance through fields of force very difficult. Perhaps Haldane was right to remark that the world may not only be stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. Nietzsche, as we shall see, was fully alive to this “uncanniness.” Nietzsche thus set himself to argue that our commonsense concept of persisting substance is nothing more than an adaptation. But this concept is, as he says, “deeply incorporated” because, as we have already noted, it derives on the one hand from our ego-concept (188311888, sec. 484) and on the other from the necessities of the type of thought we call logical (1883/1888, sec. 513). Such a concept requires a “conversion experience” to shake it-the sort of experience which Saint Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, and which twentieth-century writers have referred to as “the epoch of the natural attitude.“1 In reality, Nietzsche writes, “There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions. . . . There is no question of ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions [so that it can accumulate experience]” (1883/1888, sec. 480). Nietzsche came to believe that he was at least hundred years in advance of his time (188311888, preface). Perhaps he was right. For not only the counter-intuitive ideas of twentieth-century physics have come to support his positions, but also the findings of developmental psychology. Piaget and others have shown how much the early experience of the child conditions the growth of the concepts of space, time, causality, and logic (Gruber &
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Voneche, 1977). There is nothing “God-given” about any of them. No less an authority than Albert Einstein, after all, suggested that what we call our commonsense is no more than the received opinion we imbibe before our seventeenth birthdays. We have now reached a position from which we can begin to say something about the doctrine of the eternal return. There have been many interpretations ranging from the religious to the statistical.2 All of them probably contain some element of the truth. Indeed, Nietzsche’s own notes suggest that he toyed with the thermodynamic ideas of late nineteenthcentury science and believed that the “the law of the conservation of energy [the first law of thermodynamics] demands eternal recurrence” (1883/1888, sec. 1063). On the other hand, he thought that eternal recurrence refuted the universal heat-death which according to Lord Kelvin was a consequence of the second law (188311888, sec. 1021). But however interested Nietzsche may have been in the world-view of late nineteenth-century physical science, his thought, as we have seen, has in fact a very different root. It grows out of his conviction that humanity was part of the evolutionary process. And, in particular, it grows out of the deontology which he derived from this evolutionary world view. That he argued that conventional ethics was a fraud is well known. A fraud by the many on the few. He saw the collectivity of less vital individuals attempting by way of a morality, “the morality of ressentiment” (as he put it; see Smith, 1987), to impose restraints on the few active, creative, souls. This concept has analogies with the Darwinian viewpoint. It arises from the foundational notions of the “will-to-power” and the “struggle for existence.” Darwin and Nietzsche were at one in believing that the individual was the engine of evolutionary change (1883/ 1888, sec. 685). Darwinists insist that selection acts only on the individual, for only the individual can survive to reproduce itself and leave offspring in the next generation. Group selection is anathema. Nietzsche believed that the collectively of more humdrum souls impeded the progress which might be effected by the creative individual: “ . . . the strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organized herd instincts, by the timidity of the weak, by the vast majority” (1883/1888, sec. 685). And part of the fraud which the many perpetrated on the few was the high value placed upon stability. Nietzsche saw that this was yet another element in the complex of forces which ensured that “being,” “immutability,” was held in such high esteem. Not only the ego concept, not only rational thought, but now morality, received morality, itself supported this estimation. The collectively of weaker individuals saw that life outside the “herd” was likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” There was in consequence a strong unconscious, sometimes conscious, motive to preserve the status quo, to reject the critical gadflies who wished to break out, start anew, do things differently. The idea of eternal recurrence is thus, as Nietzsche says, “the hardest idea.” It requires “the revaluation of all values. No longer joy in ‘certainty’ but in ‘uncertainty,’ no longer ‘cause and effect’ but the continually creative, no longer will to preservation but to power” (1883/1888, sec. 1057). But as we have noted, Nietzsche believed that advance depended upon just such critical individuals. He suspected that the great complex of forces outlined in the preceding paragraphs had, to use the modem term, “brainwashed” us into accepting a fraudulent metaphysics. He consequently sought to find some means to give to “becoming” some of the is the status enjoyed by “being”: “To impose upon becoming the character of being-that supreme will-to-power. . . . That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being” (1883/1888, sec. 617). This, he believed, would make “everything break open.” He would have savored Galileo’s ironic puzzlement at those who
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prized above all else that which was “impassable, immutable, inalterable.“s Are not the transient complexities-which, for instance, carbon assumes in the anatomies of living organisms-far more wonderful, far more “valuable,” than the crystalline immutability which it assumes in the diamond? Nietzsche would have believed so: “Against the value of that which remains eternally the same . . . the values of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita (188311888, sec. 577). This, then, was the network of concerns he struggled with in his day-long tramps around the bay of Rapallo and among the mountains and lakes of the Oberengadine. These were the problems of which the solution appeared to him that day beneath the pyramidal boulder at Surlei, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” Can we follow his thought? Human life, he felt, was “uncanny.” Later Heidegger was to coin the term gewo$enheit-“thrownness” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 321). We are as if thrown into existence; we wake and find ourselves. Pascal was also troubled by this eeriness.4 We come from we know not where, nor why now and not at some other time, nor why here and not at some other place: we simply find ourselves in this extraordinary situation. Nietzsche writes in Za~&u&ru, “Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning” (prologue, sec. 7). With the passing away of God, meaning has evaporated from the world. This also is part of the Darwinian revolution. Indeed some have seen Darwin’s prolonged illness at Down House as a psychosomatic reaction to the conscious or unconscious recognition of this seemingly inescapable implication of his theory (see Barlow, 1958, pp. 240-243; Colp, 1971). Nietzsche writes of “the nihilistic consequences of natural science” in the first section of The Will to Power. For Darwinists there can be no teleology, no end to which the evolutionary process strives:5 We see the glories of the Barth But not the hand that wrought them all: Night to a myriad worlds gives birth, Yet like a lighted empty hall Where stands no host at door or hearth Vacantcreation’s lamps appall.
Did Nietzsche, in his bare room at Sils Maria, writing away the nights beneath the white disk of the moon and the black outlines of the mountain peaks, live through this uncanniness? How is it that the human mind, which Darwinists assure us was evolved to insure that the stomach is kept well filled, can look back to a fraction of a millisecond after creation, can tackle the counter intuitive properties of subnucleonic particles, can describe the nonEuclidean geometry of a billion-galaxied universe? This is (to use the word popularized by quantum physicists)-spooky. Our reflex, as Heidegger remarked, is to flee back to the everydayness of our common concerns: “the usual pastimes and drugs and features of the press.” All we have, thought Nietzsche, is the present moment. All else is conjecture. The notion of a persistent substance is a mere intellectualization of the paleolithic passion for something to survive mutability. The contemplative spirit he likens, in a powerful metaphor, to the pale disk of the moon. The contemplative, he insists, shines, like the moon, only with reflected glory: “For he is lustful and jealous, that monk in the moon, lustful for the earth and for all the joys of lovers” (1883, book 2, sec. 15).
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Thus Nietzsche, as he approached Surlei and the pyramidal boulder of his most momenmeditated deep within himself, hardly aware of where his feet were taking him, rejecting the notion of an abiding reality as a palaeolithic-Platonic myth, fit only for “aftcrworldsmen.” The dead weight of natural science, its cause and effect, its arrow of time, indeed temporality itself, weighed upon his shoulders as if he were carrying a massive dwarf. How can we escape time’s “It was “? ‘“The will itself is still a prisoner,” he writes. “Willing liberates: But what is it that fastens fetters even on the liberator? ‘It was’: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is a spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; it cannot break time and time’s desire-that is the will’s most lonely affliction” (1883, book 2, sec. 20). But suddenly, as he sees the pyramidal boulder, it comes to him. He sees a way to conflate “being and becoming.” At the same instant he realizes that he will not be easily understood. Like may prophets before him he recognizes that his message can only make sense to a small band of initiates. Accordingly he directs his words to this small band of “outsiders”: “ . , . to the bold venturers and adventurers and whosoever has embarked with cunning sails on dreadful seas . . . for you do not desire to feel the rope with cowardly hands; and when you can guess you hate to calculate” (1883, book 3, sec. 1). And we remember what Nietzsche had said about calculation. Being, substance, had to be assumed if calculation was to be attempted. On calculation was founded the whole edifice of the commonsense world and, in particular, the world of nineteenth-century science in which he found himself. At this instant, too, the dwarf, the spirit of gravity, the spirit of “it was,” ceases to taunt him. In a flash he sees the gateway MOMENT, and in the same flash he recognizes its significance. He sees the infinite pathway leading away from it and circulating back again ultimately to its entrance. “Courage,” he says, “destroys giddiness at abysses: and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not seeing abysses?” “It was,” “spectatorship, ” “thraldom to others,” falls away; he feels the eternal return as a liberation. He feels able to say “Was t/z& life? Well then! Once more.I” He feels at last able to transform “It was” into “I willed it thus.” But this was not the end of Nietzsche’s experience. For, attached to the vision of the Gateway MOMENT, is a riddle. “Suddenly,” he says, “I heard a dog howling nearby.” The hair on his head stirred for he remembered when he had heard that sound before-in his childhood, his “most distant childhood.” And, he continues, suddenly he seemed to wake, “Between wild cliffs, alone, desolate in the most desolate moonlight” ( 1883, book 3, sec. 2). And he sees a terrible and disgusting sight. He sees beside the terrified dog, howling and bristling in the desolate moonlight, a human form, a shepherd, writhing and struggling on the ground. And from the shepherd’s mouth hung a heavy black snake which had entered his throat while he slept and now held fast with a firm bite. Is it the metaphysics of substance and attribute, the black snake of past time, which had entered his mouth and clogged his breathing? These vivid compact images express an insight inexpressible in academic prose. ‘Then,” says Nietzsche, “a voice cried from me: ‘Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!’ The shepherd . . . bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat away the snake’s head-and sprang up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a man-a transformed being surrounded with light, laughing . . . ” (1883, book 3, sec. 2). Nietzsche leaves us with the vision and the riddle. Only thus can he express his insight. For as we have seen, he argued that our normal languages and thought forms, especially our ~OUSthought,
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much-prized logic, at once prejudge the issue. In Beyond Good and Evil (sec.20) he is quite explicit. “The singular family resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophising is easy enough to explain. Where there exists a language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar-I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions-to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation. . . .” And in The Guy Science (sec. 11) he remarks that “a philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise.” “There are” says Wittgenstein “ . . . things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest” (1922, sec. 6.522). This is what Nietzsche is doing in the Zaruthustru. He shows us the vision and the riddle; he challenges us to question the deeply “incorporated” metaphysics that our evolutionary struggle in a Darwinian world has built into our mentality. He challenges us to see ourselves anew, to awake “between wild cliffs” and recognize the possibility that we have been “brainwashed” into “false consciousness,” “inauthenticity.” This is salutary in the late twentieth-century, a century after Zuruthustru, when the humansized world seems to be embedded, in a puzzling way, in the counter-intuitive domains of the very big and the very small. This may also be salutary as a caution against those who would too eagerly use the sciences of “common sense” to figure what has been called “inner space” or subjectivity. But Nietzsche also shares Heidegger’s understanding that “humankind cannot stand very much reality”: the questing mind for the most part, whenever it can, flees in the face of the uncanniness of its “being-in-the-world” to “the supposed freedom of the they-self,” the familiar comfort of “others” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 277). Is this perhaps a riddle too far? Nietzsche, we remember, spent the final decade of his life silent, nursed by his mother and sister. “Man is a rope,” says Zururhusrru, “fastened between animal and beyond-man-a rope over an abyss.” Some have read this as a pre-Darwinian teleology; a vision of a predetermined destiny. Maybe it is; Nietzsche oscillates too easily between the “evolution” of an individual mind and the evolution of species. Our increasing knowledge of the world and our place in it, cultural evolution, is, however, of a Lamarckian kind. So we can perhaps forgive Nietzsche his teleonomy. “Humankind,” he concludes, has before it “a dangerous going across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and staying still.” Notes 1. Schultz (1967) defines this term in his paper “The Problem of Social Reality,” p. 229. A little further on in the same paper Schultz writes, apropos the “paramount reality of everyday life,” that “we are not ready to abandon our attitude toward it without having experienced a specific shock which compels us to break through the limits of this ‘finite’ province of meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one” (p. 231). Carlos Castaneda’s fictionalized account (1970) of his experiences with Yaqui sorcerers in Mexico makes the same points in dramatic fashion; see also Smith (198 1). 2. See the account in Kaufmann (1967); for the Buddhist influence see Elman (1983). 3. Galileo writes in Dialogue on the ZIvoGreat World Systems (1632) that “I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it attributed to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection that they are impassable, immutable, inalterable, etc., as, conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable. . . . Those men who so extol incorruptibility, and so
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on, speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death, not considering that, if man had been immortal, they would not have come into the world” (pp. 68-69). 4. Pascal often refers to his existential loneliness. Why, he asks himself (Pe&e.r, sec. 205), am I here in Paris, now, in 1650: “Who has put me here? I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” Following Nietzsche we can now see that this astonishment is an aspect of tbe old Palaeolithic world-picture so recently crystallized by Descartes into a two-substance theory of mind and brain. 5. In one of the notebook entries which Charles Darwin made in 1837 after his return from the Beagle circumnavigation, we read that “It is absurd to talk of one animal being ‘higher’ than another. We consider those, whose cerebral structure, intellectual faculties, most developed, as highest-a bee doubtless would where the instincts were” (transcribed in Gruber & Barrett, 1974). Darwin makes the same point in several other places, and his modem followers are in no doubt that the selective mechanism leaves no place for “clairvoyance.” References Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione. Trans. H. H. Joachim in Hutchins, R. M. ed. Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 8. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1952. Barlow, N., ed. (1958) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. London: Collins. Castaneda, C. (1970) The Teachings ofDon Juan. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Colp, R. (1971) To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elman, B. A. (1983) “Nietzsche and Buddhism.” Journul of Hist. Ideas, 44, 671-686. Galileo, G. (1632) Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, de Santillana, G., ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press Gruber, H. E. and Barrett, P. H., eds. (1974) Darwin on Man. London: Wildwood House. Gruber, H. E and Vontche, J. J., eds. (1977) The Essential Piaget. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heidegger, M. (1927) Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaufman& W. (1967) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton; Princeton University Press. Lange, F. A. (1865) The History of Materialism. Trans. E. C. Thomas. Iserlohn: Baedeker. Linnaeus, K. (1751) Philosophiu Botanica. Stockholm: Kiesewetter. Lyell, C. (1832) The Principles of Geology London: John Murray. Mayr, E. (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nahm, M. C., ed. Selectionsfrom Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Crofts. Nietzsche, F. (1882) The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1883) Thus Spuke Zuruthustru. Trans. A. Tille, rev. M. M. Bozman. London: Dent, 1946. Nietzsche, F. (1883/1888). The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann & R. J Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Nietzsche, F. (1886) Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972. Nietzsche, F. (1888) Ecce Homo. Trans. and ed. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969. Pascal, B. (1670) Pensees. Trans. H. F. Stewart. New York: Pantheon, 1950. Schultz, A. (1967) “The Problem of Social Reality, ” in Schultz, A., ed. Collected Papers, I, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Smith, C. U. M. (1976) The Problem of Life: An Essay on the Origins of Biological Thought. London: Macmillan. Smith, C. U. M. (1981) “Don Juan and the Vision of Vision.” Perception, 10, 235-253.
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Smith, C. U. M. (1986) “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Biological Epistemics.” Journal of Socialand Biological Structures, 9, 3X-388. Smith, C. U. M. (1987) “‘Clever Beasts Who Invented Knowing’: Nietzsche’s Evolutionary Biology of Knowledge.” Biology and Philosophy, 2, l-27. Smith, C. U. M. (1991) “Kant and Darwin.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures, I#, 35-50. Solencki, R. S. (1977) “The Implications of the Shanidar Cave Neanderthal Flower Burial.” Ands of NY Academy of Sciences, 293, 114-124. Steiner, R. (1978) Heidegger. Glasgow: FontanalCollins. Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of ‘As If’. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. About the Author C. U. M. Smith is Dean of the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. His research includes the neurodegenerative diseases of old age and the history and philosophy of neuroscience. A frequent contributor to the Journal on the interrelations of philosophy and Darwinian theory, he is author of more than 40 other papers and 6 books, including Elements of Molecular Neurobiology.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the fust great philosopher to be infIuenced at the core by Darwinian ideas. He regardedAlso Sprach Zurathustru as his masterpiece and most subsequent commentators have agreed. There have been many interpretations of the Zurathustra, and lie all great works it has many levels of meaning. An exposition in terms of evolutionary epistemology, however, has not yet been attempted. ‘Ibis article rectifies this omission and shows how Nietzsche’s work cakes Darwinian ideas into the domain of philosophical anthropology. It shows through the prism of Nietzsche’s mature thought some of the consequences of an evolutionary epistemology both in opening up alternative visions of the world and in permitting a profound criticism of our commonsense metaphysics and
ontology.
And this slow spider that creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and thou in the Gateway, whispering together, whispering of things eternal, must we not all have been here before? ( Thus Spake Zaruthustru, 1883, book 3, sec. 2) articles (1986, 1987) I discussed Friedrich Nietzsche’s reaction to the Darwinian ideas of the 1870s and 1880s with especial reference to his evolutionary epistemology. I argued that although Nietzsche appeared to reject Darwinism, the theory he rejected was in fact a straw theory, owing more to the obsolete ideas of Narurphilosophie than to those expressed in The Origin ofSpecies. Nietzsche’s ideas were indeed far from inconsistent with a Darwinian “world-view.” In this article, I examine how far this “world-view” underlies what Nietzsche regarded as his most pivotal thought, the thought of the “eternal return.” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo (1888) that “the fundamental conception” of his Zururhusm is the idea of eternal recurrence, and of how “this highest formula of affiiations” came to him in August 1881 when he was staying at Sils Maria in the Oberengadine: “It was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath ‘6,000 feet of beyond man and time.’ That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me” (p. 295). In previous
C. U. M. smith, Dqrtment of Vision Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, United Kingdom Journal of Social and Evolutionary ISSN: 1061-7361
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Nietzsche was, of course, a philologist and a philosopher-not a biologist. His Darwinian bent was thus applied to philosophical issues not to the problems of natural history. I argued in my 1986 article that if Descartes can be regarded as the first great philosopher to respond to the Galilean revolution of the seventeenth century, then Nietzsche can with equal justice be seen as the first great philosopher to respond to the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth. Others have suggested that another analogy might be also drawn-an analogy between the Hume-Kant dyad and a Darwin-Nietzsche dyad. This suggests that just as Kant was “awoken from his dogmatic slumbers” by the down-to-earth empiricism of David Hume, so Nietzsche found the need to respond to another seemingly unsubtle theory from across the channel (Kaufman& 1967, p. 167). However this may be, Nietzsche certainly seems to have been influenced by Darwinian ideas at a deep level, and they seem at work in his well-known criticism of some of the fundamental features of Western metaphysical thought. One of these fundamental features has been the continued preference for “being” over “becoming.” This preference of course can be traced right back to the beginning of philosophical and scientific thought in pre-Socratic Mugnu Gruecu. Nietzsche, as a classical philologist, must have been very familiar with the pre-Socratic writings. “Come now, and I will tell thee-and do thou hear my word and heed it-what are the only ways of enquiry that lead to knowledge,” says Parmenides of Elea in a famous fragment. “The one way, assuming that being is and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the trustworthy path, for truth attends it. The other, that not-being is and that it necessarily is, I call a wholly incredible course . . . ” (Nahm, 1935, p. 115). In other words, knowledge and rational thought was only of that which was constant, unchanging. All else was mere opinion, hearsay, not worthy of a philosopher’s time. From the pre-Socratic analysis of “being” and “not-being” flowed the ancient atomic theory (see Smith, 1976). Atoms, literally unsplittable, immutable, were that which “is”; they moved in the void which is “not being.” Aristotle, a little later, reported the origin of ancient atomism as follows: “ . . . Leucippus thought he had a theory which, being consistent with sense-perception, would not do away with coming-into-being or perishing or motion or the multiplicity of things. So much he conceded to appearances, while to those who upheld the One he granted that motion was impossible without void, that the void is notbeing and that no part of being is not-being. For being, in the proper sense, is an absolute plenum. But such a plenum is not One, but there is an infinite number of them, and they are invisible owing to the smallness of their bulk. They move in the void . . . and by coming together they effect coming-into-being, by their separation perishing” (De Generatime at Corruptione, sec. 325a2). We may germanely note how this theory-which in its seventeenth-century recrudescence envisaged atoms as “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles”-has “evaporated” in the twentieth-century into a haze of “uncertainty.” The idea that atoms are “unsplittable” is nowadays merely risible. Subatomic “particles” have no exact position in space, and are readily transformed into “energy” and back again, and in some cases are created ex nihilo from the vacuum only to lapse back into non-existence after a life of an instant. Nietzsche foresaw this outcome in the poetic passages at the very end of his “book for thinkers,” The Will to Power. “This world,” he writes, “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing eternally flooding back . . . eternally self creating, eternally self-destroying. . . .” (1883/1888, sec. 1067). The philosophy expressed in Zuruthustru placed a large question
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mark over such notions as “cause” and “effect,” “persistent being,” and all the commonsense categories of our day-to-day life. The ancient metaphysics of substance and attribute was also fundamental to preDarwinian biology. Species had been created-not absolutely immutable, varieties clearly existed (bigger, smaller, tamer, fiercer, etc.)-but not open to transformation beyond certain fixed bounds. Lyell, for instance, writes in The Principles of Geology (1832) that “there are fixed limits beyond which the descendants from a common parent can never deviate from a certain type” (1832, vol. 2, p. 162), and Linnaeus (1751) had earlier shared the same ancient vision: “Species tomnumeramus, quot diversae formae in primitione sunI creatae.” One of the most vivid expressions of this “essentialist” vision is to be found in Paradise Lost, where Milton writes of the days of creation, and of how, at the Creator’s command, . . . The Earth obey’d and strait Op’ning her fertil Woomb teem’d at a Birth Innumerous living Creatures, perfet fonues Limb’d and full grown; out of the ground up rose As from his Laire the Wilde Beast where he wonns In Forrest Wilde, in Thicket, Brake, or Den; Among the Trees in Pairs they rose, they walked: The Cattel in the Fields and Meddowes green; Those rare and solitaire, these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad Herds upsprung. The grassie Clods now Calv’d, now half appeer’d The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds And Rampant shakes his brinded main; the Ounce, The Libbard, and the l)ger, as the Moale Rising, the crumbl’d Earth above them threw In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground Bore up his branching head. . . .
Ernst Mayr emphasizes that an escape from this essentialist paradigm was fundamental to the Darwinian revolution. Contra Goethe and the Naturphilosophen, recognition that no populations of unique “typus 9” “archetype,” Platonic “idea,” or “essence” existed-only individuals-was necessary. This had become clear to Darwin as he worked on the collections he had formed during his Beagle years, and as he researched the fossil and living Cirrepedia. Populationist thinking is central to the Darwinian position. “The fixed essentialistic species,” writes Mayr in a flamboyant passage, “was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike” (1982, p. 403). Nietzsche was caught up in the same movement of ideas. He too was unwilling to accept an essentialist metaphysics without further question. But, as a philosopher, he felt (as Heidegger was to feel after him [see Steiner, 19781) that the correct approach was to go back to the beginnings of European thought and re-examine its pre-suppositions. He concluded that the old idea of an immutable reality, of unchanging “being,” could no longer be accepted. He believed that an evolutionary approach revealed it as a mere fiction, a device evolved to enable a certain species of animal to survive and prosper in a Darwinian world.
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He believed, moreover, that its time was up-that it had been overtaken by events and revealed as mere illusion. God, in other words, was dead. Few of his contemporaries, however, had recognized what was staring them in the face. In one of his most famous passages he writes of the madman who ran into the market-place with a lantern in the bright morning hours crying incessantly “‘I am looking for God! I am looking for God!’ Where has God gone? I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” But, in the end, being met only with blank uncomprehending stares, the madman threw his lantern to the ground where it broke and went out. “‘I come too early’ he said then, ‘my time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling-it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, deeds require time after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves!“’ (1882, sec. 125). Nietzsche came to the conclusion, in other words, that humankind was still sleepwalking, was as yet incapable of recognizing the far-reaching consequence of what had been stumbled into. “Essentialism” was, in a sense, a “necessary fiction.” Humanity was not yet ready to do without it. Nietzsche thought, indeed, that in order to think at all, one needed to assume “beings. ” “In order to think and infer,” he writes, “it is necessary to assume being: logic handles only formulae for what remains the same” (188311888, sec. 517). But just because humans find assumption of persistent entities necessary does not mean, he thought, that such entities actually exist in the world. His evolutionary perspective suggested to him that the old essentialist metaphysics of substance and attribute was nothing more than an adaptation of a peculiar species of African ape-Homo sapiens-an adaptation essential for its survival in a Darwinian world. Nietzsche’s suspicions led him to trace the human predilection for “being” over “becoming” back to the origin of self-consciousness. Nowadays, of course, we know far more about the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens than was known in the nineteenth century. Many authorities trace the origin of self-consciousness back some 100,000 years into the palaeolithic period. Palaeoanthropologists have discovered burial sites in the Middle East dating back to that remote period which contain not only the skeleton but also the remains of grave goods and the pollen of the flowers and herbs with which the grave had been decorated (Solencki, 1977). Why, scientists ask, should such trouble have been taken if not for the thought that perhaps something survived bodily death to visit “that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns”? Belief in some persistent self, surviving sleep and death, perchance perhaps to dream, thus may have developed during that far-off epoch. This nascent self-consciousness, some would further argue, would very likely have been synergistically reinforced by the necessities of social living. For successful social life-the hunt, the search for suitable foodstuffs, the sharing and assignment of food, positions, duties, etc.-would have required each individual to be able to recognize the persistent characters of others in the group. This developing recognition of others would then feed back to enhance the nascent recognition of self and indeed create a foundation for the earliest system of ethics (see Smith, 1991). But this recognition, thinks Nietzsche, is merely pragmatic, forced upon Homo sapiens by the ultimate necessity of surviving in what Darwin had termed “the struggle of life.” The
Zarathustra’s Evolutionay Epistemology -79 generalization f’rom this experience to the notion of “essence,” of persisting “substance,” is illicit-an instance of what he saw as a “metastasis” (the trick of moving rapidly and unobservedly from one topic to another, much used in rhetoric). In T~JZWill to Power, he writes “ . . . that a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species has nothing to do with the truth one knows from the fact that, e.g., we have to believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling compelled to grant them absolute reality” (188311888, sec. 487). Nietzsche lived in the last half of the nineteenth century rather than the last half of the twentieth. Nowadays with the benefit of the twentieth-century revolution in mathematical physics-non-Euclidean geometries, relativity, quantum indeterminacy, etc.-we should be more open than Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century contemporaries to this suggestion that “space, time and motion” are more features of our “perspective” than immutable characters of the world. Yet even in the nineteenth century Nietzsche lived in the aftermath of Kant’s critical philosophy. He was also well aware of the results emerging from the laboratories of sensory physiology, especially that of Hermann Helmholtz. F. A. Lange, whose book on the history of materialism Nietzsche revered (see Vaihinger, 1935), wrote that physiology is perhaps the most important of all the sciences for a philosopher, and that, in particular, sensory physiology “is developed or modified Kantianism . . . [and] Helmholtz has employed the views of Kant [i.e., the categorizing powers of the mind] as a heuristic principle” (Lange, 1865, book 2, pp. 202-203). In the late-twentieth century, as indicated above, we have seen only too obviously that our commonsense notions of time, space, causality, matter, and energy are but the conveniences of a peculiar, albeit highly successful, group of animals, very recently evolved on the sun’s third planet, If conscious life could have evolved at the subatomic scale or at the galactic scale, its commonsense notions would be vastly different from our own! A “primitive” organism, feeling its way, sightless, about its environment, would find acceptance of a physics of action at a distance through fields of force very difficult. Perhaps Haldane was right to remark that the world may not only be stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. Nietzsche, as we shall see, was fully alive to this “uncanniness.” Nietzsche thus set himself to argue that our commonsense concept of persisting substance is nothing more than an adaptation. But this concept is, as he says, “deeply incorporated” because, as we have already noted, it derives on the one hand from our ego-concept (188311888, sec. 484) and on the other from the necessities of the type of thought we call logical (1883/1888, sec. 513). Such a concept requires a “conversion experience” to shake it-the sort of experience which Saint Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, and which twentieth-century writers have referred to as “the epoch of the natural attitude.“1 In reality, Nietzsche writes, “There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions. . . . There is no question of ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions [so that it can accumulate experience]” (1883/1888, sec. 480). Nietzsche came to believe that he was at least hundred years in advance of his time (188311888, preface). Perhaps he was right. For not only the counter-intuitive ideas of twentieth-century physics have come to support his positions, but also the findings of developmental psychology. Piaget and others have shown how much the early experience of the child conditions the growth of the concepts of space, time, causality, and logic (Gruber &
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Voneche, 1977). There is nothing “God-given” about any of them. No less an authority than Albert Einstein, after all, suggested that what we call our commonsense is no more than the received opinion we imbibe before our seventeenth birthdays. We have now reached a position from which we can begin to say something about the doctrine of the eternal return. There have been many interpretations ranging from the religious to the statistical.2 All of them probably contain some element of the truth. Indeed, Nietzsche’s own notes suggest that he toyed with the thermodynamic ideas of late nineteenthcentury science and believed that the “the law of the conservation of energy [the first law of thermodynamics] demands eternal recurrence” (1883/1888, sec. 1063). On the other hand, he thought that eternal recurrence refuted the universal heat-death which according to Lord Kelvin was a consequence of the second law (188311888, sec. 1021). But however interested Nietzsche may have been in the world-view of late nineteenth-century physical science, his thought, as we have seen, has in fact a very different root. It grows out of his conviction that humanity was part of the evolutionary process. And, in particular, it grows out of the deontology which he derived from this evolutionary world view. That he argued that conventional ethics was a fraud is well known. A fraud by the many on the few. He saw the collectivity of less vital individuals attempting by way of a morality, “the morality of ressentiment” (as he put it; see Smith, 1987), to impose restraints on the few active, creative, souls. This concept has analogies with the Darwinian viewpoint. It arises from the foundational notions of the “will-to-power” and the “struggle for existence.” Darwin and Nietzsche were at one in believing that the individual was the engine of evolutionary change (1883/ 1888, sec. 685). Darwinists insist that selection acts only on the individual, for only the individual can survive to reproduce itself and leave offspring in the next generation. Group selection is anathema. Nietzsche believed that the collectively of more humdrum souls impeded the progress which might be effected by the creative individual: “ . . . the strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organized herd instincts, by the timidity of the weak, by the vast majority” (1883/1888, sec. 685). And part of the fraud which the many perpetrated on the few was the high value placed upon stability. Nietzsche saw that this was yet another element in the complex of forces which ensured that “being,” “immutability,” was held in such high esteem. Not only the ego concept, not only rational thought, but now morality, received morality, itself supported this estimation. The collectively of weaker individuals saw that life outside the “herd” was likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” There was in consequence a strong unconscious, sometimes conscious, motive to preserve the status quo, to reject the critical gadflies who wished to break out, start anew, do things differently. The idea of eternal recurrence is thus, as Nietzsche says, “the hardest idea.” It requires “the revaluation of all values. No longer joy in ‘certainty’ but in ‘uncertainty,’ no longer ‘cause and effect’ but the continually creative, no longer will to preservation but to power” (1883/1888, sec. 1057). But as we have noted, Nietzsche believed that advance depended upon just such critical individuals. He suspected that the great complex of forces outlined in the preceding paragraphs had, to use the modem term, “brainwashed” us into accepting a fraudulent metaphysics. He consequently sought to find some means to give to “becoming” some of the is the status enjoyed by “being”: “To impose upon becoming the character of being-that supreme will-to-power. . . . That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being” (1883/1888, sec. 617). This, he believed, would make “everything break open.” He would have savored Galileo’s ironic puzzlement at those who
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prized above all else that which was “impassable, immutable, inalterable.“s Are not the transient complexities-which, for instance, carbon assumes in the anatomies of living organisms-far more wonderful, far more “valuable,” than the crystalline immutability which it assumes in the diamond? Nietzsche would have believed so: “Against the value of that which remains eternally the same . . . the values of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita (188311888, sec. 577). This, then, was the network of concerns he struggled with in his day-long tramps around the bay of Rapallo and among the mountains and lakes of the Oberengadine. These were the problems of which the solution appeared to him that day beneath the pyramidal boulder at Surlei, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” Can we follow his thought? Human life, he felt, was “uncanny.” Later Heidegger was to coin the term gewo$enheit-“thrownness” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 321). We are as if thrown into existence; we wake and find ourselves. Pascal was also troubled by this eeriness.4 We come from we know not where, nor why now and not at some other time, nor why here and not at some other place: we simply find ourselves in this extraordinary situation. Nietzsche writes in Za~&u&ru, “Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning” (prologue, sec. 7). With the passing away of God, meaning has evaporated from the world. This also is part of the Darwinian revolution. Indeed some have seen Darwin’s prolonged illness at Down House as a psychosomatic reaction to the conscious or unconscious recognition of this seemingly inescapable implication of his theory (see Barlow, 1958, pp. 240-243; Colp, 1971). Nietzsche writes of “the nihilistic consequences of natural science” in the first section of The Will to Power. For Darwinists there can be no teleology, no end to which the evolutionary process strives:5 We see the glories of the Barth But not the hand that wrought them all: Night to a myriad worlds gives birth, Yet like a lighted empty hall Where stands no host at door or hearth Vacantcreation’s lamps appall.
Did Nietzsche, in his bare room at Sils Maria, writing away the nights beneath the white disk of the moon and the black outlines of the mountain peaks, live through this uncanniness? How is it that the human mind, which Darwinists assure us was evolved to insure that the stomach is kept well filled, can look back to a fraction of a millisecond after creation, can tackle the counter intuitive properties of subnucleonic particles, can describe the nonEuclidean geometry of a billion-galaxied universe? This is (to use the word popularized by quantum physicists)-spooky. Our reflex, as Heidegger remarked, is to flee back to the everydayness of our common concerns: “the usual pastimes and drugs and features of the press.” All we have, thought Nietzsche, is the present moment. All else is conjecture. The notion of a persistent substance is a mere intellectualization of the paleolithic passion for something to survive mutability. The contemplative spirit he likens, in a powerful metaphor, to the pale disk of the moon. The contemplative, he insists, shines, like the moon, only with reflected glory: “For he is lustful and jealous, that monk in the moon, lustful for the earth and for all the joys of lovers” (1883, book 2, sec. 15).
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Thus Nietzsche, as he approached Surlei and the pyramidal boulder of his most momenmeditated deep within himself, hardly aware of where his feet were taking him, rejecting the notion of an abiding reality as a palaeolithic-Platonic myth, fit only for “aftcrworldsmen.” The dead weight of natural science, its cause and effect, its arrow of time, indeed temporality itself, weighed upon his shoulders as if he were carrying a massive dwarf. How can we escape time’s “It was “? ‘“The will itself is still a prisoner,” he writes. “Willing liberates: But what is it that fastens fetters even on the liberator? ‘It was’: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is a spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; it cannot break time and time’s desire-that is the will’s most lonely affliction” (1883, book 2, sec. 20). But suddenly, as he sees the pyramidal boulder, it comes to him. He sees a way to conflate “being and becoming.” At the same instant he realizes that he will not be easily understood. Like may prophets before him he recognizes that his message can only make sense to a small band of initiates. Accordingly he directs his words to this small band of “outsiders”: “ . , . to the bold venturers and adventurers and whosoever has embarked with cunning sails on dreadful seas . . . for you do not desire to feel the rope with cowardly hands; and when you can guess you hate to calculate” (1883, book 3, sec. 1). And we remember what Nietzsche had said about calculation. Being, substance, had to be assumed if calculation was to be attempted. On calculation was founded the whole edifice of the commonsense world and, in particular, the world of nineteenth-century science in which he found himself. At this instant, too, the dwarf, the spirit of gravity, the spirit of “it was,” ceases to taunt him. In a flash he sees the gateway MOMENT, and in the same flash he recognizes its significance. He sees the infinite pathway leading away from it and circulating back again ultimately to its entrance. “Courage,” he says, “destroys giddiness at abysses: and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not seeing abysses?” “It was,” “spectatorship, ” “thraldom to others,” falls away; he feels the eternal return as a liberation. He feels able to say “Was t/z& life? Well then! Once more.I” He feels at last able to transform “It was” into “I willed it thus.” But this was not the end of Nietzsche’s experience. For, attached to the vision of the Gateway MOMENT, is a riddle. “Suddenly,” he says, “I heard a dog howling nearby.” The hair on his head stirred for he remembered when he had heard that sound before-in his childhood, his “most distant childhood.” And, he continues, suddenly he seemed to wake, “Between wild cliffs, alone, desolate in the most desolate moonlight” ( 1883, book 3, sec. 2). And he sees a terrible and disgusting sight. He sees beside the terrified dog, howling and bristling in the desolate moonlight, a human form, a shepherd, writhing and struggling on the ground. And from the shepherd’s mouth hung a heavy black snake which had entered his throat while he slept and now held fast with a firm bite. Is it the metaphysics of substance and attribute, the black snake of past time, which had entered his mouth and clogged his breathing? These vivid compact images express an insight inexpressible in academic prose. ‘Then,” says Nietzsche, “a voice cried from me: ‘Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!’ The shepherd . . . bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat away the snake’s head-and sprang up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a man-a transformed being surrounded with light, laughing . . . ” (1883, book 3, sec. 2). Nietzsche leaves us with the vision and the riddle. Only thus can he express his insight. For as we have seen, he argued that our normal languages and thought forms, especially our ~OUSthought,
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much-prized logic, at once prejudge the issue. In Beyond Good and Evil (sec.20) he is quite explicit. “The singular family resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophising is easy enough to explain. Where there exists a language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar-I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions-to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation. . . .” And in The Guy Science (sec. 11) he remarks that “a philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise.” “There are” says Wittgenstein “ . . . things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest” (1922, sec. 6.522). This is what Nietzsche is doing in the Zaruthustru. He shows us the vision and the riddle; he challenges us to question the deeply “incorporated” metaphysics that our evolutionary struggle in a Darwinian world has built into our mentality. He challenges us to see ourselves anew, to awake “between wild cliffs” and recognize the possibility that we have been “brainwashed” into “false consciousness,” “inauthenticity.” This is salutary in the late twentieth-century, a century after Zuruthustru, when the humansized world seems to be embedded, in a puzzling way, in the counter-intuitive domains of the very big and the very small. This may also be salutary as a caution against those who would too eagerly use the sciences of “common sense” to figure what has been called “inner space” or subjectivity. But Nietzsche also shares Heidegger’s understanding that “humankind cannot stand very much reality”: the questing mind for the most part, whenever it can, flees in the face of the uncanniness of its “being-in-the-world” to “the supposed freedom of the they-self,” the familiar comfort of “others” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 277). Is this perhaps a riddle too far? Nietzsche, we remember, spent the final decade of his life silent, nursed by his mother and sister. “Man is a rope,” says Zururhusrru, “fastened between animal and beyond-man-a rope over an abyss.” Some have read this as a pre-Darwinian teleology; a vision of a predetermined destiny. Maybe it is; Nietzsche oscillates too easily between the “evolution” of an individual mind and the evolution of species. Our increasing knowledge of the world and our place in it, cultural evolution, is, however, of a Lamarckian kind. So we can perhaps forgive Nietzsche his teleonomy. “Humankind,” he concludes, has before it “a dangerous going across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and staying still.” Notes 1. Schultz (1967) defines this term in his paper “The Problem of Social Reality,” p. 229. A little further on in the same paper Schultz writes, apropos the “paramount reality of everyday life,” that “we are not ready to abandon our attitude toward it without having experienced a specific shock which compels us to break through the limits of this ‘finite’ province of meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one” (p. 231). Carlos Castaneda’s fictionalized account (1970) of his experiences with Yaqui sorcerers in Mexico makes the same points in dramatic fashion; see also Smith (198 1). 2. See the account in Kaufmann (1967); for the Buddhist influence see Elman (1983). 3. Galileo writes in Dialogue on the ZIvoGreat World Systems (1632) that “I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it attributed to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection that they are impassable, immutable, inalterable, etc., as, conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable. . . . Those men who so extol incorruptibility, and so
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on, speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death, not considering that, if man had been immortal, they would not have come into the world” (pp. 68-69). 4. Pascal often refers to his existential loneliness. Why, he asks himself (Pe&e.r, sec. 205), am I here in Paris, now, in 1650: “Who has put me here? I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” Following Nietzsche we can now see that this astonishment is an aspect of tbe old Palaeolithic world-picture so recently crystallized by Descartes into a two-substance theory of mind and brain. 5. In one of the notebook entries which Charles Darwin made in 1837 after his return from the Beagle circumnavigation, we read that “It is absurd to talk of one animal being ‘higher’ than another. We consider those, whose cerebral structure, intellectual faculties, most developed, as highest-a bee doubtless would where the instincts were” (transcribed in Gruber & Barrett, 1974). Darwin makes the same point in several other places, and his modem followers are in no doubt that the selective mechanism leaves no place for “clairvoyance.” References Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione. Trans. H. H. Joachim in Hutchins, R. M. ed. Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 8. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1952. Barlow, N., ed. (1958) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. London: Collins. Castaneda, C. (1970) The Teachings ofDon Juan. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Colp, R. (1971) To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elman, B. A. (1983) “Nietzsche and Buddhism.” Journul of Hist. Ideas, 44, 671-686. Galileo, G. (1632) Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, de Santillana, G., ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press Gruber, H. E. and Barrett, P. H., eds. (1974) Darwin on Man. London: Wildwood House. Gruber, H. E and Vontche, J. J., eds. (1977) The Essential Piaget. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heidegger, M. (1927) Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaufman& W. (1967) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton; Princeton University Press. Lange, F. A. (1865) The History of Materialism. Trans. E. C. Thomas. Iserlohn: Baedeker. Linnaeus, K. (1751) Philosophiu Botanica. Stockholm: Kiesewetter. Lyell, C. (1832) The Principles of Geology London: John Murray. Mayr, E. (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nahm, M. C., ed. Selectionsfrom Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Crofts. Nietzsche, F. (1882) The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1883) Thus Spuke Zuruthustru. Trans. A. Tille, rev. M. M. Bozman. London: Dent, 1946. Nietzsche, F. (1883/1888). The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann & R. J Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Nietzsche, F. (1886) Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972. Nietzsche, F. (1888) Ecce Homo. Trans. and ed. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969. Pascal, B. (1670) Pensees. Trans. H. F. Stewart. New York: Pantheon, 1950. Schultz, A. (1967) “The Problem of Social Reality, ” in Schultz, A., ed. Collected Papers, I, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Smith, C. U. M. (1976) The Problem of Life: An Essay on the Origins of Biological Thought. London: Macmillan. Smith, C. U. M. (1981) “Don Juan and the Vision of Vision.” Perception, 10, 235-253.
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Smith, C. U. M. (1986) “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Biological Epistemics.” Journal of Socialand Biological Structures, 9, 3X-388. Smith, C. U. M. (1987) “‘Clever Beasts Who Invented Knowing’: Nietzsche’s Evolutionary Biology of Knowledge.” Biology and Philosophy, 2, l-27. Smith, C. U. M. (1991) “Kant and Darwin.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures, I#, 35-50. Solencki, R. S. (1977) “The Implications of the Shanidar Cave Neanderthal Flower Burial.” Ands of NY Academy of Sciences, 293, 114-124. Steiner, R. (1978) Heidegger. Glasgow: FontanalCollins. Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of ‘As If’. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. About the Author C. U. M. Smith is Dean of the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. His research includes the neurodegenerative diseases of old age and the history and philosophy of neuroscience. A frequent contributor to the Journal on the interrelations of philosophy and Darwinian theory, he is author of more than 40 other papers and 6 books, including Elements of Molecular Neurobiology.