Darwin and Nietzsche

The concept of time plays a fundamental role in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as presented in his book On the Origin of Species because it answers one fundamental question raised by his theory. One critique Darwin anticipated when elaborating his theory of evolution was the the missing biological link; that is, the “absence or rarity of transitional varieties” If two species descended from common ancestors, then one should expect to find transitional varieties at the present time and in each region: “But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me”. According to Darwin, this phenomenon can be explained only by taking into consideration both the imperfection of the fossil records and the enormous time period that has passed since the first occurrence of life on Earth. This second point leads Darwin to widen the focus on human time. By comparing natural selection with human-made selection (domestication), Darwin exclaims: “How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods”. For Darwin, this insight implicates the necessity to widen the focus on the human time concept. When comparing “domestic” and natural instincts, Darwin remarks that the former are “far less fixed or invariable than natural instincts” because they have been transmitted in a much shorter period of time. Referring to Charles Lyell's geological research, Darwin claims that the denudation of certain areas of the earth's crust has required such a long and almost inconceivable period of time that the sheer attempt to envision this geological period of limited time is comparable to the vain attempt to envision eternity.

The other revolution of the time inspired by Darwin's reading of Lyell and other geologists is the rejection of rhythmic concepts of time. Darwin stated that the old notion of a recurring catastrophe sweeping away all inhabitants of the earth is generally given up by geologists. Instead, Darwin has shown that every new variety can become extinct because it is less favored than a competing one.

The question of how deeply the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was influenced by Darwin, mainly by his conception of time, is hard to determine. On the one hand, Nietzsche polemized against Darwin's alleged “materialistic” and externalistic conception of evolution; on the other hand, he acknowledged Darwin for being one of the main exponents of a philosophy of becoming (Philosophie des Werdens). It is exactly in this regard that Darwin is seen as one of Nietzsche's antecedents. But at the same time, Nietzsche tries to downplay the actual meaning of Darwin by contrasting him with Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In a posthumously published fragment written in 1885, Nietzsche remarked: “We are historical through and through. That is the great turnaround. Lamarck and Hegel—Darwin is only an aftereffect”.

This short remark is characteristic of Nietzsche's ambivalent mind-set toward Darwin. Nietzsche honors the fact that Darwin's theory of evolution, especially his acceptance of the transformation of species, has proven that there is no eternal validity, neither of the concept of species nor of the logical categories. Nietzsche goes so far as to parallelize Darwin's transformationism with his own disbelief in eternal logical structures: Just as time transforms the species, it changes the logical categories, too. Hence, the main purpose of Nietzsche's reference to Darwin is to show that everything, even and especially the logical categories, is affected by transience.

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