International Phenomenological Society

Nietzsche Contra Darwin Author(s): John Richardson Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Nov., 2002), pp. 537-575 Published by: International Phenomenological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3071129 Accessed: 15/06/2010 13:30
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXV, No. 3, November 2002

Nietzsche ContraDarwin
JOHN RICHARDSON

New York University

but 'will attributes power'to all livingthings, thisseemsin sharpconflictwith Nietzsche to besides.The doctrinesmacksof both other important him-and implausible positions Will to powerseems which derides. and metaphysics anthropomorphizing, he elsewhere or representational to be an intentional end-directedness, involving powershe cognitive even in persons. This to and is rightly loathto attribute all organisms, tendsto downplay and of that reading will to power-both moreplausible argues we finda stronger paper withNietzsche'sotherviews-by developing affinitieswith Darhis moreconsistent revision'to Darwinism, winism. seeing will to poweras an 'internal opposingthe By but on latter'sstress(as Nietzschethinks) 'survival', assentingto its uses of natural to that and or we selection, canground naturalize notion,congenially Nietzsche to us. Nietzsche's relation to Darwin deserves a different kind of attention than I think it has received.' Looking closely at its logic brings us quickly to the middle of his thought, where it opens up a better reading of his core notion of "will to power"-together with such allied and far more pervasive notions as "drive" and "instinct". It gives us a prospect or chance to naturalize these notions-and especially to naturalize what may seem their most 'suspect aspect: Nietzsche's teleological use of them, i.e. his suggestion that power (in particular) explains as an end. I'll offer this better sense as one main way Nietzsche views (and uses) these notions, "will to power" above all. I'll weigh how fully natural-coherent with our science-this sense lets that core notion be. The better sense for "will to power" emerges through our recognizing Nietzsche's close affinity with Darwin; my title is in this way misleading. I'll ask whether he shares enough to entitle him to Darwinian ways of grounding teleology. But to do justice to that notion of "will to power" we also need to recognize how Nietzsche aims it against Darwin-and how it makes his "drives" different from Darwin's, too. Indeed, I think we best understand both that affinity, and its limits, by focusing on those attacks, and examining how Nietzsche proposes "will to power" in pointed contrast with account. Others Stack1983, 156-94givesthemostextended this recently treating relation
are Poellner 1995, 138-73 passim, Ansell Pearson 1997, 85-122 (this chapter anticipates my title, I've lately found), and Morrison 1997, 73-87. The discussion in Dennett 1995, 181-86 and 461-67, is of special interest. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 537

a Darwinian"strugglefor survival".Our task is to map, conceptually, how far down thatoppositionextends. There are, I will argue, two ways to readthis opposition-or rathertwo ways Nietzsche does indeed(at differenttimes, even in the same breath)mean it. Most often, he conceives will to power metaphysically, as a universal force more basic than Darwinian selection. I've elaboratedelsewhere2 this "powerontology",and shown how it pulls together the greatestshare of his other main ideas; I remainconvinced thatthis is his dominantview. But this metaphysics has small plausibility for most of us. However, there is also a second, minorityway Nietzsche intends"will to power":as a kind of internal revision of Darwinism itself. While this recessive sense, by paring the notion down to a "power biology", prevents it from doing quite so much work in his system, it gives it a far betterchance to be true. My main project is to analyze and assess this recessive but promising view. It should be stressedthatthese findings bearnot only on "will to power", which some may think too isolated (and too Nachlass-bound) notion to be a worth worrying over. But drives are everywherein Nietzsche: they are his main explanatorydevices, throughout his psychology and sociology. His diagnoses of our values andpractices,which attractso much of our interestto him, all work by attributing them to drives or instincts. The question, whether Nietzsche has a viable notion of "drives"-one that can bear the weight of these diagnoses-should be harderto dismiss. Before examining Nietzsche's attacks on Darwin, we may take a first, orienting look at their context-the broad backgroundof agreement these attackspresuppose,no matter which sense they have. Although Nietzsche mentions Darwin only sporadically,and then usually to rebuke him, his thinkingis deeply and pervasivelyDarwinian.He writes afterand in the light of Darwin, in persisting awarenessof the evolutionary scenario. Here, as often elsewhere, his seemingly-dismissive remarksexpress his own sense of closeness: he sees it as his nature,to repel where he most feels an affinity.3 I'll eventually arguethat his affinity with Darwin extends much furtherthan we expect, but here let's start with some general and programmaticlinks. These also suggest the valuative aspect to his relation to Darwin, an aspect I'll later avoid, the betterto focus on his power ontology-biology.4
2

Richardson 1996, especially ChapterI. HH/11/252:"Not in how a soul draws near another, but in how it distances itself from it, do I recognize its kinship and commonalitywith the other."WP655 [1885]: "The weaker it presses itself to the stronger,from a nourishment-need; wills to slip under it, if possible to become one with it. The stronger, on the contrary, fends off from itself'. Cf. GM/III/18, EHII/7. [For my procedures in citing Nietzsche, see Cited Works, at end. Translationsare my own; I aim at consistency and literalness. For some equivalences, see Key Terms,at end.] treat this valuative aspect in a companion-piece,which I'll here call "Nietzsche contra Darwin II" (abbreviated NcD/II). JOHN RICHARDSON

538

Nietzsche associates with Darwin certain"criticar'-skeptical and nihilistic-lessons. He thinks he sees and feels the full troubling force of these lessons betterthanDarwin or his followers, but also a way to build a more positive view from and upon them.5 He takes Darwin to have these critical consequences,by his decisive step in naturalizinglife-i.e. in explaining it by processes that are non-divine and indeed non-psychic. To be sure, this broadlesson is thatof (moder) biology generally;it's not peculiarly Darwinian. Nietzsche associates it also with the older materialismin Germanbiology, which he learns especially from Lange.6He is especially interested,of course, in applying this generalnaturalizingmove to humans. We are organisms continuous with the rest, and our special capacities, above all our are "reason", to be explainedby the same physical processes.7The existential force of this lies in a way it is deflating (or insulting) to the human. Darwincan standfor thatbroadlesson, because he discovers evolution by selection, which is the most importantof these non-psychic processes, the one operatingover the longest time-scale, and producingnot just individual organisms, but even their types. Part of Darwin'sinsight is just evolution itself: species "become", are createdand destroyed, including the human species.8But more importantis his account of what drives that evolution: a struggle or competition in which all organisms-ourselves included-are engaged. Darwin shows thatorganisms,in their types, are shapedby and for such struggle, and so pursue a basic selfishness. And the applicationof this point to humans, deflates or insults us a furtherway, that is more peculiarly Darwinian; this is why Nietzsche counts Darwin so decisive a factor in modem nihilism (although Darwin himself fails to face, Nietzsche thinks, how fully deflating his own insight is). Our species, and our special capacities, are the productsof a long history of such selfish struggles, and are
5 So, familiarly, Kaufmann says [1950/1974, xiii] that Nietzsche was "aroused from his dogmatic slumber by Darwin". UM/II/9: "the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and kinds, of the lack of any cardinal distinctionbetween human and animal-doctrines that I hold to be true but deadly"; also KSA/7/19[132] [1872-3]. WP69 [1885-6] classifies Darwinism under nihilism. UM/I/7-9 attacks David Straussas too cowardly for Darwin's radical implications;Nietzsche will make a similar criticism of Darwin himself. See Leiter 1997 on Lange's influence on Nietzsche, and Leiter 1998 on Nietzsche's naturalism. Also Stack 1983. Lenoir 1989 very usefully reviews the varieties of teleology developed in 19th centuryGermanbiology. A14: "we have placed [the human being] back among the animals"; "what is generally understood today about the human, goes just as far as it is understood mechanistically [machinal]". GS109: "When will we be able to begin to naturalize [vernatirlichen] humanitywith the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature!" Also BGE230; and see the opening of Homer's Contest. Nietzsche recounts his vocational switch from philology to "physiology, medicine, and naturalsciences" at EH/HH/3;also EHII/2. D49, TSZI/P/3. In recognizing becoming, Darwin expresses a main modem advance. GS357 says that Hegel made this idea of "evolution" [Entwicklung] possible for Darwin; also KSA/ 1/34[73] [1885]. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 539

designed precisely and merely to struggle so into the future.9 This diagnosis bears an obvious, broad resemblance to Nietzsche's own explanations of the human by "will to power". How does he set himself apart? Nietzsche's Darwin. These programmatic arguments against agreements with Darwin help to explain the vigor of Nietzsche's rejection of him-his eagerness to distinguish himself, his indignation at being called a Darwinist.'? Darwin and his followers are among his recurring targets; he titles sections "Anti-Darwin" and "Against Darwinism"," and attacks them often elsewhere not by name but by their phrases (for example "struggle for He existence", "adaptation""2). attacks them from the left, i.e. from a position claiming to radicalize, to carry still further, their own critical lessons. However, it must be said at the outset that the movement presents to him a broad target; he marks few distinctions among individual proponents. Tellingly, he seems not to have required of himself a direct acquaintance with Darwin's own writings, before addressing his attacks. He knows the movement primarily by way of the English and German Social Darwinists. So, in particular, he refers more often to Spencer than to Darwin; he has Spencer but not Darwin in his library.'3 This introduces several angles of misconception into his attacks. So, as we turn to his criticisms of Darwin, we find that many of these are ill-informed: he attacks him for positions he doesn't hold.'4 Often, Nietzsche's "corrections" bring him to points Darwin already intends. i) He misreads Darwinian "struggle" as physical combat, and "fitness" as muscular strength. So he takes the latter to exclude all the indirect devices he labels "cunning" [List].'5 But of course Darwin makes clear that organisms "strugUM/I/7: "accordingto Darwin, [the human] is quite thoroughly a natural being [Naturwesen] and ... has evolved to the height of the human ... by feeling himself the stronger and graduallybringing about the destructionof the other, weaker examples of his kind". EH/I1/1 says that "scholarly oxen" have suspected him of Darwinism because of what he says about the overman. "Anti-Darwin": TI/IX/14; WP685 [1888], WP684 [1888]. "Against Darwinism":WP647 [1886-7]. "Struggle for existence" [Kampf um's Dasein; Kampf um Existenz]: HH/I/224; KSA/11/34[208] [1885], WP588 [1886-7]. "Adaptation" [Anpassung]: GM/II/12; WP645 [1885], WP681 [1886-7]. Also tellingly, even Spencer he has only in translation;Nietzsche's lack of appreciation for things English is surely effect as well as cause of his disuse of the language. See Nietzsche's Bibliothek, which classes the works in biology and Darwinism partly under "Neuere Philosophie. Psychologie." and partly under "Naturwissenschaften. Mathematik." Note that the books listed under "Englische und amerikanische Literatur." are virtuallyall in translation. Dennett 1995, 182: "his acquaintance with Darwin's ideas was beset with common misrepresentationsand misunderstandings....On the few points of specific criticism he ventures, he gets Darwin utterly wrong...." But the example he goes on to give, gets Nietzsche wrong; see note 79 below. TI/IX/14: "Darwinforgot the spirit (-that is English!), the weak have more spirit".
JOHN RICHARDSON

?1.

14

15

540

gle" in many different ways; see e.g. his accountof the cuckoo's instinct to lay its eggs in other birds'nests [1859/1961, 216ff; hereafterI cite this as literalreadingof the Darwinianterm ironically OS]. Nietzsche'suncharitably foreshadowsthe similarmisreadinghis own term "power"has often received. ii) Nietzsche also misconceives the time-scale or speed of evolutionary change-for examplewhen he claims we can see that animals don't adaptto He new environments.'6 seems not to have absorbedthe extreme slowness of evolution, as Darwin so stresses [OS 108-9, 312-14]. Otherof Nietzsche's criticisms are wrong not aboutDarwin, but about the facts, as we now know them; on these points Darwin has been confrmed, and Nietzsche'sdoubts carryno weight. i) He argues, against the efficacy of selection, that since mating is random,extreme traits are not preservedbut returned the average.WP684 [1888]: "Themost disparateindividualsunite to with one another,the extremes are mixed into the mass." This is a version of the common criticism by Darwin's contemporaries,that variations will be blendedback into the average;it is answeredby Mendelian inheritance.ii) indeedpresentin Darwin,but to Nietzsche carriesmuch furthera Lamarckism a much lesser degree.Here he follows Darwin'sfollowers more than he does Darwin; Spencer and Haeckel, for example, both stress the inheritance of traits.17 This is connectedwith the way Nietzsche tends to blur or acquired the differencebetween genetic and cultural inheritance.'8He tends to ignore focus on the latter, and to extrapolatefrom there-from the human case-to the rest of life. This distortshis theory in some predictable ways; we'll often see its influence below. So we find a jumble of mistakes about Darwin, and mistakes about biology. However,the disagreementsso far are secondaryones. We can peel them away from Nietzsche's primarycriticismof Darwin, because they neitherrest on the latter, nor support it. (They are, as it were, charges that Nietzsche "tries out"-or collects from others-to support his main attack. He has is little allegiance to some of them.) That main disagreement with Darwinism's stress (Nietzsche thinks) on survival or preservation,instead of on power or growth. WP688 [1888]: "It can be shown most clearly for every

17

WP684 [1888]: "When [creatureswith exterior markings to protect them] live in places where their dress ceases to hide them, they do not by any means approach [nihern an] the new milieu." (Ironically,Kettlewell's study of melanism in moths has been the bestknown case in which naturalselection was purportedlyobserved.) Lange 1865/1950, 11/46-47 argues for Lamarck; he attributes[/60] the view to Darwin too. On Lange's influence on Nietzsche's conception of Darwin, see MUiller-Lauter 1971/1999, 232. Consider his famous account in GM/II how a "memory"was "burned into" pre-civilized humans: this memory is fixed not by selection of those who can remember, but by the acquisition of pain-associationsthat are inheritable. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 541

living thing, that it does everything, not in orderto preserve itself, but to
become more".19

I'll give a fuller accountof "power"lateron, but from the start we should hear it with the two main senses Nietzsche gives it: broadly,he uses it for any kind of growth or increase; more strictly, he limits it to growth in control over other processes. In both senses, he contrastsit with "preservation" [Erhaltung].Here Darwin attractsfire from a much broadercampaign: advanceshis idea of "will to power"by attackingoppoNietzschefrequently nents he interpretsas offering something like a will to the status quo. He particularlylinks such a theory-of a "will to existence" or "will to life"-not only with Darwin, but Spinoza.20We need to judge whether, in this main disagreement,Nietzsche is once again at odds with the facts, about Darwin,and/oraboutorganismsthemselves. His errorsabove don't encourage confidencein him here. Let's set some passages before us. First, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra to [TSZ/II/12],here is Zarathustra purporting quote life telling him a secret:
Indeed, the truthwas not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the 'will to existence [Willen zum Dasein]': this will-does not exist [giebt es nicht]! / "For, what does not exist [was nicht ist] cannot will; but what is in existence [im Dasein ist], how could that still will to existence [zum Dasein wollen]! / "Only where life is, is there also will: not will to life but-thus I teach you-will to power!

Then, in the 1886 additionto The Gay Science [GS349], and with specific referenceto Darwinism:
To will to preserve oneself [Sich selbst erhalten wollen] is the expression of distress, of a limitation of the genuinely basic drive of life [Lebens-Grundtriebes] which aims at the expansion of power [der auf Machterweiterunghinausgeht] and in this willing frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation.... The struggle for existence [Kampf um's Dasein] is only an exception, a temporaryrestrictionof the life-will [Lebenswillens]; the great and small struggle always turns upon superiority, upon growth and expansion, upon power, in accordancewith the will to power, which is just the will of life [Wille des Lebens].

Finally, in Twilightof the Idols [TI/IX/14]:

Anti-Darwin.As for the famous "strugglefor life [Kampfum's Leben]",so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total-aspect of life is not distress, not hunger, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering,-where there is struggle, one struggles for power... One should not mistake Malthusfor nature.
19

20

These passages make this criticism of Darwin or Darwinism: GS349, TI/IX/14. These make the point without (explicit) reference to Darwinism: BGE13; KSA/l1/34[208] [18851, KSA/12/2[68] [1885-6], WP650 [1885-6], WP774 [1886-7], WP488 [1887], WP651 [1887-8], WP634 [1888], WP689 [1888], WP692 [1888]. Many of these are quoted from, below. The point is touched on by Kaufmann[1950/1974, 246]; he recounts [179] Nietzsche's sister's tale about a wartime source for the contrast. BGE13, GS349; KSA/9/111[193] [1881], KSA/11/26[313] [1884], WP688 [1888].
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Our main interpretive challenge is to say precisely where-in what role-Nietzsche thinks this substitution of "power"for "survival"occurs.21 Apparently,from such passages, he conceives these two to be competing answers to the question, of the end or goal of life: he takes Darwin to claim that organismsare "towards" survival,but he argues it's power. More specifihe supposes that both of these are meant as goals of a "will" or "basic cally, drive"of life, which is "zu"or "auf' or "um"them. Nietzsche's main point is thatthis life-will [Lebenswille] is not a will to life [Wille zum Leben], but to power.22 What is the force of this "to"?What type of goal does it imply? In what sense, if any, does Nietzsche intend a teleology? Here hangs the viability of his own view, and of his critiqueof Darwin. ?2. Problems in the main attack. There are problems, however, in taking this to be Nietzsche's basic differencefrom Darwin-the claim that power not survival is living things' end or goal. We have reasons for both thinking and hoping that he here misstates his own position. First, and despite such seemingly directstatementsas the above, it's problematic how Nietzsche can consistently hold this view, given his other strong positions. For he frequently attacks "teleology", and denies any Such rejectionsindeed seem part of that [Zweck]or "goal"[Ziel].23 "purpose" radicallesson we've seen thathe drawsfromDarwin'snaturalism.24 these Yet rejectionsseem at odds with his insistence on a will "to"power.25What can thattowardness if not an end-directedness? be, This is hardlythe only case in which Nietzsche seems on the one handto attackand dismiss an idea, yet on the other to employ it in one of his princi1 22

23

24
5

This substitutionalso has a valuative aspect which I will, as I've said, largely defer to NcD/II. Also GM/II/ 1: "the genuine life-will, that is out for power [auf Macht aus]"; BGE259: "the will to power ... is the will of life". But Nietzsche isn't always faithful to this contrast;in places he posits a "will to life". TIX/4: "Forit is only ... in the psychology of the Dionysian state that the basicfact of the Hellenic instinct expresses itself-its 'will to life'." See the rest of that section, and the next. Also germane are the many passages criticizing the "self-preservation drive" [Selbsterhalungstrieb], e.g. BGE13; KSA/9/11[108] [1881], KSA/11/26[2771 [1884]. GS109: "no purposes ... no accidents". TI/V/8: "We have invented the concept 'purpose':in reality purpose is absent". KSA/11/25[96] [1884]: "My presuppositions:1) no end-'causes'. Even in human actions the intention [Absicht] of the doing explains not at all." KSA/ 1/26[432] [1884]: "When I think on my philosophical genealogy, I feel myself connected with the antiteleologists,i.e. the Spinozistic movement of our time, but with the difference, that I also hold 'the purpose' and 'the will' in us to be a delusion." Also WP666 [1886-7]. Consider BGE14 on "the Darwinistsand antiteleologists".See note 7 above. Often rejection and insistence coincide; e.g. WP552 [18871: "That the apparent 'purposiveness' ... is merely the result of that will to power playing out in all events". Nietzsche treats will to power as occupying a middle ground between teleology and mechanism, which he also rejects.
NIETZSCHECONTRA DARWIN 543

pal positive thoughts.26Here on the issue of teleology, as often elsewhere, there are so many passages on both sides of the issue-both positing and rejectingends (we'll look at samples of both below)-that we can't dismiss either large set as "not Nietzsche's real view". Charity requires,I think, that we attemptto readhis positive ideas in ways consistent with his refutations. So we must work to reconcile his critique of teleology with his own continued reliance on it. We must do so by distinguishingsenses: the one in which ends are denied,the other,novel sense in which life has power as its end. A main challenge in the following, will be to analyze the lattersense. There'sa second kind of problem with readingNietzsche's main objection so: it makes him seem amateurishlywrong about Darwin, who surely says nothing about any "will to life". This would add, to all those local and sporadic mistakes I cataloguedabove, a more fundamentalerrorabout the logic of Darwin's view. It's worth examining what kind of mistake this would be-what it misses in Darwin's core point about naturalselection. Nietzsche seems guilty of a twofold confusion: aboutwhat the "end"of selection is, and how it's an end. First, he misidentifies the selective criterionin Darwinism, the standard by which natural selection selects: this is reproduction,not survival, and emphaticallynot the organism'sown coming-into-existence,as in the TSZ passage.27Darwin warns against this misreading of his terms: "I should premise that I use the term Strugglefor Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, includingdependenceof one being on another,and including (which is more important)not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." [OS 62] Nietzsche seems to hear that tag-phrasemuch too literally. In currentneo-Darwinism,survivalthroughmaturityis only one factor in an organism's reproductivesuccess-which indeed includes not just the numberof its offspring, but their viability, and even their fertility, and so reacheswell beyond the organism itself. Naturalselection occurs, when the "fitter"-those with a greater"propensity" such success-do in fact outfor their competitors. The possibility that this propensity might fail, reproduce and chance factorsfavor the less fit, shows the non-tautologousstatus of '"he fittest reproduce best".28The selective criterion, then, is this "reproductive fitness", not survivalor existence. I think this first point is answerable. Often enough, Nietzsche uses "survival"in the same extendedway Darwin does: for survival not of the
26 27

Other importantexamples are "will" and "true". See also WP651 [1887-8]. Nietzsche is misled, perhaps, by Darwin's own chosen terms; the rest of the title of On the Origin of Species, is "by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of FavouredRaces in the Strugglefor Life";one of the book's key chapters is entitled "Strugglefor Existence". 2 The standardly-cited statementof this point is Mills and Beatty 1979.
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individual,but of the type or lineage. Often, indeed, he seems to concur with Darwin, so understood.So GS1 says that "to do what is good for the preservation of the human species ... this instinct is the essence of our kind and herd".2When he elsewherepresses power as his alternativeto survival, it is as often the survivalof the lineage or type he has in mind, as of the individual. Let's use "survival"in this largersense below. But a second problem is more serious. Nietzsche seems to misread Darwiniansurvivalas an "end"in too literal or concretea sense: as the goal of a will or drive or instinct inherentin organisms,analogous to that suspect will to power with which he replacesit. So BGE13: "Physiologists should drive [Selbsterhaltungstrieb] as considerbefore positing the self-preservation the cardinaldrive of an organic being. Something living wills above all to discharge[auslassen]its force-life itself is will to power-: self-preservation is only one of the indirectand most frequentresults." Nietzsche's terms "will" and "drive" suggest an intentional end-directedness-thateither power or survival is an intendedgoal. But Darwin's point about natural selection drive", nothing that "aims" or "steers" posits no such "self-preservation at reproduction. ratherdescribesa long-termstructuralproperty It organisms of evolution: traits that improve fitness tend to persist and accumulate;this mechanism, operatingover long periods, explains organisms' most striking features.By virtue of this source, those features have been "designedfor" it but reproduction, they need no more "will" or "intend" than brooms do to sweep. Reproductivefitness is at most a structuralend, in the logic of the selective process producingthose features.So it appearsthat Nietzsche offers in power to replace survival (reproduction) a role the latter was never meant to play. This seems to me the doubt againstNietzsche's critiqueof Darwinism that reaches deepest into his thought,and most threatensto uprootit. It reinforces our strongest reservationagainst his notorious "will to power". For I think we immediately hear this notion to mean that will "aims" at power in a quasi-humanway, by intendingor wanting it. And this worry extends to his notions of "drive" "instinct",which are so extremely widespreadin his and Here too Nietzsche appearsto anthropomorphize life, by reading diagnoses. either consciousness or intentionality into it (all). Many passages suggest that he means such a "psychic"(by which I mean conscious and/or intentional)will-indeed the term "will" itself suggests it.30And since he seems to place this will beyond any materialor mechanistic explanation, it appears to be "vitalist"(by which I mean extra-physical)as well. GM/II/12 opposes
29

Also GS4 (entitled "Thekind-preserving."), TI/X/4. KSA/11/25[401] [1884]: "There must be an amount of consciousness and will in every complex organic being.... The smallest organic creature must have consciousness and will." Poellner 1995, e.g. 276, 281, reads him so. Also supportiveare passages saying that it's the 'feeling of power" that is the end, e.g. WP649 [1886-7]; see note 84 below.
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"theruling instinct and currenttaste ... which would ratherendurethe absolute fortuitousness [Zufalligkeit],even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory of a power-willing playing itself out in all events." Quoting this, Dennett seems right to judge such will to power "one of the strangerincarnationsof skyhook hunger, and, fortunately,few find it attractive today"[1995, 466]. These points suggest a diagnosis of Nietzsche's error:he slips back to that psychic model because he misses the unconventionalform of Darwin'steleology-the precise sense in which organisms "strugglefor existence".3'He the misunderstands logic of naturalselection, and how it makes survival an "end".And this misleads him into a farfetchedalternative, of a psychic that inhabits and directsorganisms. If organisms don't get their power-drive ends in that Darwinianway, it's hardto avoid the conclusion that they get them by the presenceof something conscious or intentional. Missing that alternative,perhapsNietzsche can only find goals by positing a quasi-mind. So he would fall into Leibniz's implausibility-his wills merely another kind of monads-and would fail ignominiously in his effort to out-radicalize Darwin. In sum: if his main criticism is indeed this claim about "power,not survival",this apparentlygives him not just a weak attack, but one that threatensto unravelbasic ideas of his own. However, this criticism also shows us, in negative, how Nietzsche might save drives and will to power from psychism and vitalism, by cleaving closer to Darwin than we've supposed. What if his criticisms of Darwin are more local or secondarythan we've supposed?What if he gets right, after all, the sense of Darwinianselection-how it is and isn't teleology-and builds his own "will to power"and "drives" parallel?By rooting these in selection, in he would free them from the need to be conscious or intentional; he would have a way for power to be life's "end",without illicitly anthropomorphizing. We should considerwhetherNietzsche might grasp that sense after all, and then adaptit to make his own point about power.32If he does, then his criticism "power,not survival"would play the role of an internalamendment to Darwinism itself; he could make it while still claiming that he's accepting and radicalizingDarwin'snihilistic thrust.I'll arguethatNietzsche sometimes takes this view.
3 Consider WP646 [1885] on evolution: "Thereare analogies, e.g. to our memory another memory, which makes itself noticeable in heredity and evolution in forms. To our inventing and experimenting, an inventing in the application of tools to new purposes, etc.". Taken one way, Nietzsche here anthropomorphizesevolution itself (though taken another,he doesn't mean "memory"and "inventing"literally, as intentional). 3 Nietzsche can be presumed familiar with the option of reading Darwin as grounding rather than demolishing teleology, since Lange sees it; cf. 1865/1950, 111/33-4,/36, /66 ("a teleology which is not only compatible with Darwinism, but is almost identical with it"), /68. Dennett too says [1995, 65, 126] that we can read Darwin either as (in Marx's words) dealing a death-blowto teleology, or as finally giving it adequategrounding.
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We have more reasons than wishful thinking for exploring such a reading of "will to power":while some passages suggest a psychic will, I think there are many more that reject it. Nietzsche attacks not only the "anthropomorphizing"extension of consciousness and intentionalityto the rest of life, but even their role in explaining the paradigm,human case. He frequently raises doubts against the causality of conscious purposes, and often states these as attackson "will". So TII/V3: "The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anythingeither-it merely accompanies events, it can also be absent. The so-called 'motive': another error."33 Again we have reason to searchfor a non-psychic, non-vitalist will to power, that can be consistent with Nietzsche's criticalremarks. ?3. Kinds of teleology. But in what sense can Nietzsche think wills are "towards" power (or drives towards their respective goals), if not in this way?4 The challenge is to catch the precise force of purposing,quasi-human his teleology, to give him neither too much teleology-this is what a psychic readingof will to power (and drives) does-nor yet too little. I think it will be helpful to step a bit back from Nietzsche, to distinguish the main options for a naturalized teleology, as they are presentedin a wellfunctions.35 This excursion will help us to known recentliterature analyzing our unfocusedsense of teleology. What makes it the case that the sharpen heart-to take this literature'sfavorite example-is "for"pumping blood? What makes this its function?The main answers in that literatureoffer us potentialways to naturalizeNietzsche's claim that wills are "towards" power. We can clarify the logic of his "will to power", by locating it among these options. A first, most austerepossibility is this: pumping blood is a function of the heart,just because this is something the heart(usually) does. A thing's functions are simply the results it tends to produce. In parallel, we might take Nietzsche to think of wills as "to"power, merely in the sense that this is a (or the) result they tend to cause. Then his wills or drives would be mere causal dispositionsor tendencies,and powerjust theirtended-result.36
3 34 See also GS360, TI/III/5, A14; also note 23 above. Elsewhere, he argues that will occurs only in a few organisms:GS127. Nietzsche shows his interest in finding some nonpsychic account of purpose in WP526 [1888]: "We will guardourselves against explaining purposivenessthroughspirit: there is no groundat all for ascribingto spirit the properties of organizing and systematizing. /... [Consciousness] plays no role in the total process of adaptation [Adaptation] and systematization."WP660 [1885-6]: "The 'purpose'. One should start from the 'sagacity' of plants."Note the subtitleof a book by Wilhelm Roux that much influenced Nietzsche: "A Contribution the Completionof the Doctrine of Mechanistic Purposiveness"; see to note 70 below. A recent selection from this literatureis Allen et al. (eds.) 1998. Evidence here is KSA/8/23[9] [1876-7]: "In general the word drive is only a convenience and will be used everywhere that regular effects [regelmlssige Wirkungen] in NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 547

35
36

(1) W--P = D>R(=P) [Will to power is the disposition to cause a certainresult, i.e. power.37] On this reading, Nietzsche makes the empirical claim that all or most organisms tend towards this same (type of) result: their own growth, and especially their growth by incorporatingor controlling other organisms. Living things are towardspower, insofaras theirbehaviorstend to produce it. So even an amoeba "wills to power",just by its causal tendenciesto grow and to eat. However, in this bare form the definition is clearly too weak to capture our notion of functions or ends. Familiarly,the hearthas many other tededresults, such as its thumping sound, that we would not count as functions. And if this were all Nietzsche meant by "will to power" or "drive",these notions wouldn't be teleological after all. We don't count just any dispositional state as "towards" results as ends-not the raindrop's its tendency to or the sun's to heat, for example. In some moods Nietzsche treats even fall, nonliving things as wills.38 But in doing so he imagines them as "towards" their outcomes in more than just the sense of tending to producethem. He has in mind a richerkind of directedness,in his ideas of both "will to power" and"drive". It'snaturalto seek sufficiency by adding conditionsto (1), e.g. by specifycount as goals. ing some kind of disposition, as that whose tended-results differentsuch added conditions are of course feasible here-and many Many have been offeredas analyses of function. We can treat the whole family of these analyses as "dispositional"; they build on a common stem, (the suppositionof) a causal tendencyto some result. I think we can distinguish in the literaturetwo main versions of this dispositional approach.The first addsconditions by specifying the disposition, the latter by specifying the result.

organisms are still not reducible to their chemical and mechanical laws." Anderson [1994] may read him so; he argues that Nietzsche's will to power biology denies the purposivenessof Darwin's struggle for existence, since "it appeals to a simple instinctual drive to expend force in the environment",which "operateswithout any particularend in mind, i.e. withoutany particular idea of how the environment ought to be transformed" [738]. Later he argues that Nietzsche allows teleology only where there are "intentions". I use "-+" for the teleological relation, "towards",as will is towards power, and ">" for the causal-dispositionalrelation between something (that is or has a disposition) and its tended-result.(I offer these formulaeonly as displays of positions' structures;I won't try to do any logic with them.) Considerin this regard GS310's elaborate image of will as a wave-which then claims there's something really in common: 'Thus live waves,-thus live we, the willers!-more I shall not say." And (to the wave): "You and I, we are indeed from one species [Geschlecht]! -You and I, we have indeed one secret!" 548 JOHN RICHARDSON

The first requiresthatthe dispositionbe "plastic"in its tendencyto bring about its R: if one route is blocked, it shifts to another.3 The disposition bifurcates(trifurcutes etc.) but then reconverges:its output differs in different conditions, in such a way that the same result ensues. Such plasticity might plausibly be denied the raindropand the sun, but seems pervasive among organisms and their parts: they adjust their output in response to circumstances, in such a way that they consistently reachcertainoutcomes. So the heart'srate adjusts,to maintainan adequatesupply of blood to other parts of the body. And what makes eating the amoeba'sgoal, is not just that it tends to that result, but how it does: it respondsto stimuli from prey with behaviors appropriate that outcome. (Among other things, perhaps,it changes for directionin response to the prey's movements.). Might Nietzsche mean by "will"or "drive",something like such a plastic disposition?Then: (2) W-P = pD>R(=P) [Will to power is a plastic disposition to cause a certainresult, i.e. power.] I think it's clear that Nietzsche thinks of wills or drives as plastic in this way; this is obvious, for example, whereverhe treats their responses to obstacles, or the adjustments they make in reaching"balancesof power"with other drives. This plasticity importantlycontributesto the teleological sense in which wills are "towards"power, or drives towards their goals. Yet is Nietzsche insists that such "adaptation" a secondaryand derivativefeature We of drives, a "mere reactivity".40 need to look elsewhere for what their directednesschiefly involves. The other main version of the dispositional approachto functions addsa differentcriterion,and adds it in a differentplace-to qualify not the disposition itself, but its result. What makes a result a function is not the way the process tends to it, but an independentfeatureof that R-something about R in its own right, apartfrom how the process is towardsit. It's not (just) how the heartaccomplishes pumping, but something about that outcome itself, that makes it an end. In the literatureanalyzing functions, we find several candidates this featurethat makes an R an E; for our purposes two are for most relevant. At the root of this strategyis the intuitionthat it's the goodness of certain results that constitutes them as functions or ends. So, among the various results the hearttends to produce,it's those thatare good or beneficial that ar
39 See e.g. Braithwaite1953 and Nagel 1977. Woodfield 1976, 45ff. presents this convergence diagrammatically. GM/II/12 complains against the prevailing (Darwinist) tendency to place "'adaptation' in the foreground, that is, an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity". See note 87 below. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 549

picked out as its functions, what it's "for".Similarly, among the outcomes ones thatare its the amoebatends towards,it's only the good or advantageous ends-and not, for example, the one result that every organism might tend towards,its death. If Nietzsche thinksthat wills are towardspower in this way, then: (3) W-P = D>gR(=P) [Will to power is a disposition to cause a certaingood result, i.e. power.] Again I think it's clear that this is part of his conception of will to power: power is a "good result",inasmuchas willing power involves valuing power, which is thereby"good for" what wills it. Similarly, Nietzsche stresses that drives involve valuings of their results-which are thereby their "goods".41 However, it seems clear he would deny that these results are independently good: it's the valuing involved in wills and drives that determinesthem as its good.42So it's not goodness that determinesa will or drive as "towards" results. This is fortunate,if we are going to naturalizewill to power and drives. We still need an account of what kind of disposition would make their results-and in such a way as to "value" wills and drives "towards" them. In that literatureanalyzing "function",one prominent such substitute for goodness-as the function-makingfeature of R-is "contributingto some We system's working".43 pick out the heart's function, from among its many tended-results, identifyingits role in the system to which it belongs. But by once again we can see that this is not Nietzsche's point. He does indeed recognize such functionality of drives-how they can serve encompassing such funcsystems. But he denies that this is the crux of their directedness: tionality is imposed upon drives that are already"towards" goals of their own.4 Wills and drives have theirprimaryends prior to such self-subordinating service. Another approachin the function-literature more germane: a result is might be rendereda functionby virtue of its being "fit"-i.e. by its enhanc-

41

42

43

KSA/11/25[433] [1884]: "In all willing is valuing-and will is there in the organic." KSA/1 1/26[72] [1884]: "Every 'drive' is the drive to 'something good', seen from some standpoint". TSZ/I/15: "Firstthrough valuing is there value". Again, I treat issues about values in NcD/11. Cummins 1975 is the best-known statement of this. Cumminsleaves it to our interest to determinewhich system the R will be considered as functional for; hence he denies that functions are explanatory,or teleological. GM/II1/2: "all purposes,all utilities are only signs thata will to power has become master over something less powerful and has imprintedupon it the sense of a function". JOHNRICHARDSON

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On ing the organism's reproductive capacityor "propensity".45 this view the heart's blood-pumpingcounts as its function because this result (but not, perhaps, its thumping) increasesfitness. This analysis has obvious ties to Darwinism (whereas(2) is rooted ratherin behaviorism and cybernetics). It identifies fitness as the end-constitutingfeature of (some) results, because fitness seems a kind of "Darwiniangood", or a naturalizedsubstitute for "good".The very logic of naturalselection seems to assign organisms the overall end of surviving-to-reproduce, making it naturalto single out results promoting this, as functions. Might Nietzsche think of will as a disposition to results that tend to reproducethe disposition?And of power as an end, by being such a result? (4) W->P = D>fR(=P) [Will to power is a disposition to cause a certainfitness-enhancingresult, i.e. power.] In this case something would be "towards" power not just by tending to nor even by doing so plastically. Also neededto make power its cause it, end, is a featureof power itself-that it helps the thing to sustain or reproduce itself. Similarly, drives would be "to" those results, that serve this reproductiveend. Again I thinkthis is often partof Nietzsche's conception of wills and drives, but let me defer the evidence for now.46 For I think we can see the inadequacy all our options so far--(), (2), of (3), and (4), whethersingly or in combination-by noting something basic they all leave out. Each gives an element in Nietzsche's (and our) sense of but end-directedness, none supplies the crucial ingredient;so they make his view less teleological than it is. For I take it to be crucial to teleology that its ends are explanatory,and (I think) Nietzsche thinks this of power: power explains the wills that are "to" it, and wills are "to" it due to this way it explains them. Wills tend to cause power, because of what power is, and it's this causing of thattendency, thatconstitutesthe tendency as teleological. So too for drives and their more diverse goals: the goals explain why the drives are "to" them, ratherthan to other results. But none of the above analyses capturesthis. They cannot, so long as they referonly to present featuresof the disposition (its plasticity) and/orto future featuresof its result (its goodness, its fitness), for they thus omit referenceto a certainpast cause of the disposition, neededfor teleology. They give only marks or signs of enddirectedness,not the thing itself.
45 Bigelow and Pargetter1987; also Canfield 1964, Ayala 1970. Often this view is presented as an addition to the previous: it specifies which system is relevant (the organism), and what properworking of this system (its fitness) the R must be functionalfor. See note 59 below. I defer it because this evidence is entangled with evidence for the next option, (5) below. At issue will be, whetherwills' and drives' ends are constituted by what does, or by what has enhanced fitness, and the evidence is often ambiguous between these.

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To be sure, the disposition-at least as embodied in a certain material state-can itself explain some things: the process ensuing, and its result. Indeed,the dispositioncan explain more tellingly if it is either plastic (when it explains the shifting outputs), or fitness-enhancing (when it explains futureDarwiniansuccess). Both criteriaare explanatory-but not of the right is explananda.In both, the tended-result what's explained, not what explains; so the result can'tyet be an end. (If it appearsin the explanation,this is only as a shorthandway of specifying the tendency.) And in neither case is the disposition itself explained;so it can'tbe end-directed. contrast, I'll try to By show, Nietzsche thinks power is more than just what organisms (and their parts)tend to bring about; it's a result that shows why they are as they are. This is what makes it not just a result, but an end. Because the above analyses fail to capturethis explanatoryforce, they give "teleology" too thin a sense, even for Nietzsche. I think it's Nietzsche's conviction thatpower must explain as an end, that so tempts him to psychic models of will to power. For psychism-positing consciousness and intentionality,explicit "purposes"-is an obvious way to convert ends into explainingcauses. It gives the result a kind of causal presence in advance, as the intentional object of a desiring or aiming. A "preview"of the result steersbehavior,and this is what constitutes the result as an end, and lets it explain the behavior. But since Nietzsche is otherwise convinced thatpsychism is false, he has need of anotheroption here. Darwinism supplies anotherkind of "presencein advance" the result. for The organ's function-result explains the organ, inasmuch as "ancestral" resultscaused by the organ'sancestorsexplain its presenceand structurenow. By the logic of natural selection, some of the organ's tended-resultsare singled out as of special causal relevance:it was by pumping blood, that this heart'slineage survived;it was by (increasingly)betterpumping blood, that its main featuresevolved, were "designed". "The heart"--thinkingof it now as a type or lineage-was incrementallybuilt and then preserved,because the having this "result"-treating it too as a lineage--rendered heart (or its more reproductively Here, by contrast with (4), it is past fit. organism) fitness that's at issue, not present; only past fitness can be genuinely explanatory(of somethingpresent). This point is capturedby anothermain approachin recent analyses of functions and goals-the "etiological" or "historical".47 This approach denies thatthe presentdispositionalstate (even if it's plastic, even if it's fit) is sufficient to constituteit as "towards" results-it also needs to have had its a certainpast, a certaincausal history. So, it's not an organ's "fitness-for-thefuture" that constitutes its (present) functions, but its "fitness-from-thepast"-or not the way this organ is fit, but the way it's an adaptation.What
47

The chief statementsof the view are by Wright (e.g. 1973) and Millikan (e.g. 1989).
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makes it the heart's function to pump blood, is the way its parts and processes have been selected for this result. By contrast with the dispositional analysis, I think this catches a genuinely teleological sense, by making the resultproperlyexplanatory. This etiological analysis not only allows results to explain in the manner of ends, it also shows how all organismscan, in a sense, have the same end. For each biological item and its specific function, the latter explains the formerin the same general way: that result has enhancedthe reproductive fitness of the item. In each case we can distinguish between the generaland structural of survival/reproduction, the specific result(s) this item has end and which it has furthered that "highest end". Organisms have had, by recurrently many differentfunctions,but all of them are subjoined to the same structural end; by this subjunction, Darwinism justifies attributing to organisms a common end. Now if Nietzsche means by "will" or "drive" more than this kind of no teleology sanctionedin Darwinism, then his scattergunattributionsof these to organisms won't necessarily sink him. He can avoid psychism, by some such analysis as this: (5) W-P = D>R(=P) & past-Rs>>D [Will to power is a to cause a certainresult, i.e. power, and past such results disposition caused (produced) disposition.48] this This would give him a thin sense of "will" consistent with his many attacks on the notion. Indeed,I suggest that it's only if Nietzsche means this, that his claims about "will to power"can be non-psychic.And the same applies to his much more common claims about "drives"-each identifiedby what it is "to". Without selection to make each end explanatory-to give it presencein the past, to let it have causedthe tendencytowards it-he can't avoid slipping mentality back into these wills and drives, by implicitly positing an intention or desire or some other representation the end, as an alternativepast of cause of the tendency.Nietzsche means to explain wills and drives by citing what they are "towards", he can only do so non-psychically,if he grounds but that "towards" naturalselection. But does he do so? in ?4. Drives as selected. I think the evidence is much clearer that Nietzsche treatsdrives as selected, than that he treats will to power so. The eventual harderquestion will be, whetherwill to power is a separateprinciple
48

Here a third kind of pointer, ">>", stands for the causal relation (in contrast with the teleological and the causal-dispositional).It is an importantand difficult task to specify how this causing works-to determinemore precisely the logic of "selection"; I forego a closer look here.

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from selection, that also has a role in explaining drives. This will be so if, as often seems, Nietzsche thinks of will to power as the source of the "variation", over which selection then operatesin generatingdrives. I'll deferthese furtherquestions about "will to power" until ?5. I begin with the clearer point aboutdrives-how selection explains them. These drives or instincts are, as I've said, themselves the principal explainersin Nietzsche's rich and influentialpsychologicaland social diagnoses.49 Leaving aside (as we generally are) the evaluative aspect of these diagnoses, it's clear thatthey arecruciallyexplanatory:they explain our pracsuch drives. Citing tices, feelings, and attitudes,as expressions of particular the drives, Nietzsche claims, shows the sense or significance of those practices or attitudes. But this explanatoryscheme is rendered suspect, by the dubious character of these drives. They have the same ambiguous teleology as will to power. Each drive is identifiedin termsof a certainoutcome it is "to" ("zu"),so that Nietzsche speaks of drives "to" life, knowledge, etc.50 And-I submit-he thinks something strongerhere, than just that these drives tend to cause or bring about life, knowledge, etc. He thinks that by citing these outcomes, he is explaining what the drive does: it does x because x tends to bring about life, knowledge, etc. For example, it's because of what eating is, that the drive to eat enacts or produces the specific behaviors it does. Indeed-I suggest further-Nietzsche identifieswhat the drive is "to",notjust with any outcomes it has, but with those that explain in this way. It's not just because they all result in eating, that we collect those behaviors together undera "driveto eat",but because eating is why those behaviorsoccur. This makes it sound as if the drive has foresight of that outcome, which threatensto turn it into something psychic-a conscious representation of that outcome, in advance.Yet it's key in Nietzsche's story that we are not, generally,conscious of or in these drives or instincts.51They are prepsychic dispositions, which we share with animals and even plants. They are not to transparent us, but must be dug up with craft and labor. Nietzsche makes
The term "Trieb"is extremely common in Nietzsche's books and notebooks. It occurs in the first section of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy,applied decisively to the Apollinian and Dionysian "art-drives" (renderedby Kaufmann"artimpulses"). And it is still just as common in his last books, and in the same explanatory role; see its use in Twilightof the Idols IX/39, for example. It is used togetherwith a host of related expressions, including "Antrieb","Getriebe","Betrieb",and the verb "treiben" (commonly built up as "iibertreiben", "zutreiben" etc.). Most of these occurrences are not evident in the available English translations.By contrast, "Instinkt"is less common in Nietzsche's early works, but becomes remarkablypervasive later on; this term tends to survive English translation. 5 is By contrast,"Instinkt" said to be "fUr" something. 1 D115 says that we have language and consciousness only for the extreme degrees of our drives, whereas "the milder, middle degrees, and especially the lower degrees which are constantlyplaying, elude us, and yet it is they that weave the web of our character and our destiny." Also D119. 554 JOHNRICHARDSON 4

many attacks on the psychic model for explaining persons, and offers his model of drives as alternativeto it. But then, how else might he think that the drive's outcome explains?Whatelse might he mean by that "to"?I suggest he means, thatthe drive has been selectedfor the outcome by which it is identified. (therefore) I thinkthere's overwhelmingevidence that Nietzsche does think of drives as products of selection. However, this evidence does not include any This is partlydue, I think, to how thoroughly he statements.52 programmatic has absorbedthis Darwinian way of explaining things: he uses its logic, without thinking of himself as explaining "by Darwinian selection".53The point is also obscuredby Nietzsche's preoccupationwith his differencesfrom Darwin. I'll try to show that he agrees with Darwin on the generallogic of selection-on how survival/reproduction explain. But he associates 'Darwin" not with explanationby selection generally, but with the furtherclaim that what selection most favors are "instinctsfor survival".Drawing his difference from Darwin here, he underrepresents truecontinuitywith him.54 his An importanthint to Nietzsche's recognition of selection is his fascination with "breeding" His attention shows that he sees how [Zuchtung].55 differential success (a generic "selection")can cause and explain reproductive in biological characters. "Breeding" the strict sense-our (by-)human selection, whetherof humansor not-redirects a formativeprocess alreadyat work in nature. To be sure, Nietzsche often applies the term to that process as well, speaking as if nature "herself' breeds.6 Does he mean that nature's selection is likewise intentional and foresighted-so that he has misread
52

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Though note KSA/7/19[132] [1872-3]: "The horrible consequence of Darwinism, which by the way I hold to be true.... [I]nstincts are already the product of an endlessly long continued process." And KSA/11/26[69] [1884]: 'The thought, that only the life-capable is left remaining,is a conception of thefirst rank." This evidence of his use is also less evident to us, because we take such explanations for granted. Another motive I mentioned above: Nietzsche's "agonal"inclination to stress differences even or especially where he sees similarities;see note 3 above. See note 86 below for an especially clear case of Nietzsche arguing against a "preservation-drive"with an argument that is in fact Darwinian. E.g. BGE62, BGE262, TI/VII/2-5. Note that Nietzsche conceives of his thoughtof eternal returnas a "meansof breeding and selection" (WP462 [1887]; also WP1058 [18834], WP1053 [1884]). KSA/12/2[100] [1885-6]: "The hammer: a teaching, which by unchaining of death-seekingpessimism works a selection [Auslese] of thefittest [Lebensfahigsten]."Conversely, one of Nietzsche's complaintsagainst Christianityis that it interferes with (natural)selection, and "breeds"mediocrity:again BGE62, BGE262; also A7,

56

WP246[1888]. EH/IV/8; KSA/13/14[5] [18881,

The beginning of GM/II/1: "To breed up [heranzichten] an animal that may promise [versprechen darfl-is this not indeed that paradoxical task which nature has set itself with regardto the human?"Laterin the section he speaks of the human species "breeding itself'. (Here some of "nature's"work might be done by deliberate social selection, so the psychic model could in this case have special point.) See UM/IIU/6[p163](nature "presses towards humans")and /7[pp177-78]. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 555

Darwin after all? But elsewhere he shows himself alert against any such which I think is clearly at odds with his skeptical "anthropomorphizing",57 and debunkingheart.Those personificationsof naturemust be as metaphorical as Aristotle's.58 Nietzsche recognizes a formative naturalselection that is neitherintentionalnor foresighted. The drives that Nietzsche is most concernedto explain are not such "animal"instincts as hunger or sex. Insteadthey are our dispositions for complex social and cognitive practices.Nietzsche diagnoses these practices, showing what they are "to" or "for",by showing what selective advantages they have conferred.Our logic, our concepts, our beliefs, our virtues and values are all as they are, because they enabledour ancestorsto survive and They are, as Nietzsche says repeatedly, our "existence-condireproduce.59 And I think he clearly means, that we have these practicesbecause tions".60 they have been such conditions.Whatthose social and cognitive practicesare really after, their identity or meaning, lies in what they have done, as such conditions. And this entitles Nietzsche to an etiological analysis of the ends he ascribesto the drives.61
57

59

60

Against anthropomorphizing: UM/I/7[p31]; PTAG4,11. The metaphoricalcharacterseems clear in UM/IIIV6[p162]: "Andjust this attitude should be planted and grown in a young person, that he understand himself as so to speak [gleichsam] a failed work of nature, but likewise as a witness to the grandest and most wonderfulintentionsof this artistess;it turnedout badly for her, he should say to himself, but I will honor her grandintentionby serving her so that one day it turnsout better." KSA/9/6[184] [1880]: "Ourthoughtsare to be viewed as behaviors, correspondingto our drives, like all behaviors. Darwin's theory is to be applied." Some notes conveniently grouped in The Will to Power: WP497 [1884], WP496 [1884], WP498 [1884], WP493 [1885], WP494 [1885], WP520 [1885], WP505 [1886] ("we have senses for only a selection [Auswahl] of perceptions-those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves"), WP507 [1887] ("/all our knowledge-organs and -senses are evolved only with regard to preservation- and growth-conditions"),WP515 [1888]. Also WP480 [1888]: "The usefulness of preservation ... stands as motive behind the evolution of the knowledge-organs". Cf. On Truthand Lie in an Extramoral Sense: "intellect ... was certainly allotted to the most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for keeping them a minute in existence." The point is common in his books, too. GS1: "Whether I view humans with a good or evil eye, I find them to always at one task, all of them and each one in particular: do what helps the preservation of the human species. Not indeed from a feeling of love for this species, but simply because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct,-because this instinct is even the essence of our kind and herd." See Poellner's discussion [1995, 138ff.] of "Nietzsche and EvolutionaryEpistemology". "Existence-conditions": GS1, GM/I110,EH/IV/4; WP507 [1887], WP515 [1888]. "Lifeconditions": BGE4, BGE62, BGE188, BGE276, A25. "Preservation-conditions": EH/BT/2. So a Nietzschean drive is a disposition that was selected for a certain result; this result is its individuatinggoal, that explains its presence and its character.In most cases the drive will also be plastic towards this R. And of course this R will also, usually, continue to enhance fitness (though not if e.g. the drive's environment changes). Hence the drive's relationto its result will usually also satisfy criteria (1), (2), and (4) above. A drive is a plastic dispositionto a resultenhancingfitness. But it's (5)-the etiological criterion-that
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Contraryto the tendency of most "evolutionaryepistemologists" since,

Nietzsche's main thrust is that it's errors (as well as lies62) that have been

thus functional.Ourcognitive practicesare cruciallybuilt out of dispositions designed to get things wrong-out of drives to simplify and otherwise distort reality. The most basic such error is that involved in our general terms; alreadyin grouping individuals into types, we misidentify them as "the same". So GS111: "Those ... who subsumed too slowly, who were too cautious in subsumption, had lesser probabilities of surviving [Fortleben],
than those who, for all similar things, guessed immediately at equality."63

This instinct "functions"to assimilate unequals,not just by tending to do so, but by having evolved for this role; it "aims"at this end not by intendingor wanting it, but by having been selected for it. Our thinking is the upshot of a struggleamong many such adaptedinstincts.64 In explaining these social-cognitive practices, Nietzsche uses a second kind of selection, besides the (strict) Darwinianselection among inheritable traits. For these practices are replicatednot only by inheritance ("in the Hence they are selected not ("in habits").65 blood"), but by training-learning the comparative fitness (for surviving-reproducing) these habits only by confer on the persons who possess them, but also by these habits' comparative propensity to diffuse through society by persons' learningor imitating them. The latteris a kind of "fitness"these practiceshave in their own right,

says how the drive'sresult is its end, since this is what lets the end explain. That the disposition is plastic, and that its resultraises fitness, are signs of a drive and its end, but what counts is that source in selection, since only this gives R a past causal role. In this sense, Nietzsche can plausibly attributedrives not just to persons, but to all organisms, and their parts. 62 On Truthand Lie in an Extramoral Sense: "The intellect, as a means to preservation of the individual,unfolds its main forces in dissimulation". 63 HH/I/18 expects it to be shown how this tendency began to evolve in the lower organisms. GS 110: "a few of these [errors]proved to be useful and kind-preserving: those who hit upon these, or inherited them, fought their fight [Kampf] for themselves and their progeny with better luck." Also HH/I/16. KSA/9/11[286] [1881] says that without this "faith"neither humannor animal would be fit" [lebensfahig]. 6 GS 11: "The course of logical thoughtsand inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and struggle of drives that are individually all very illogical and unjust; we ordinarilyexperience only the result of the struggle: so quickly and so secretly does this primeval mechanismnow play itself out in us." 65 In his Lamarckism, Nietzsche blurs the boundary between these: he thinks that habits become blood-that they become inheritable if practiced for long enough. GS143 describes animal species as having completely translatedtheir "customs" [Sittlichkeitder Sitten] into "flesh and blood". And see BGE213 on how the philosopher must receive in his "blood" virtues worked up by his ancestors. I develop this second level of selection-"social selection"-in much more detail in NcD/II. I show there how Nietzsche thinks that Darwin's failure to see this second kind of selection, is linked to his failure to see how human practices and values are often not conducive to individuals' surviving and reproducing(why the human is the "sick animal"). NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 557

to copy themselves independentlyof the genetic route.66And this latter fitness partlydependson how a certain habit is viewed from other social and cognitive practices,includingthe practiceof explicitly deliberatingover practices. In this last case, selection becomes cognitive and deliberate-becomes, in the strictsense, "breeding". But Nietzsche thinks this deliberateengineering of practices has played much less of a role than we suppose, in shaping what we do. His main idea is of these practices themselves interactingand competing over the whole society, and as evolving by this overall, unsupervisedstruggle, ratherthan underthe directionof any social planners. He commonly extends the term to selection as well. It's their devices for "breeding" cover this non-deliberate success in this struggle that mainly explain our practices, and that his penetratingdiagnoses are needed to uncover.For example it's in this way that the "herdinstinct"has been bred into us: by its own replicative success, against competing dispositions.67 It'sbecause drives'identitiesareetiological-lie in what they'reselected to be-that Nietzsche requiresa genealogical methodto discoverthem. He looks to the past, because this is where their ends are assigned or constituted.This is why genealogy tells us not only what morality (e.g.) was, but what it is: what it is for, is what it was selectedfor, which genealogy bares. Nietzsche insists on the persistence of even deep past functions, as contributing to present identity-they persist in minority or occasional expressions, even when some new and conflicting function is laid over them. So the "meaning" of a drive today is a layering of the functions it was serially selected for, in
becoming what it is.68 All of these go into explaining why the drive is here

now. Such is Nietzsche's quasi-Darwinian scenario. It shows, in some aspects, a certainsophisticationandprescience:he anticipatesideas recently promoted in neo-Darwinism.While most are traceablein Darwin himself, they'relittle
66 Familiarly,Dawkins develops such a point about "memes";e.g. 1976/1989, 192. Compare KSA/7/19[87] [1872-3]: "Darwinism has tite [Recht] also in picture-thinking: the stronger picture consumes the lesser." And WP588 [1886-7]: "Not a struggle for existence will be fought among representationsand perceptions,but for mastery". 67 BGE199: "obedience has been practiced and bred best and longest among humans". Considerhow explicit or implicit this breedingis conceived to be, in BGE62. 6 The remnantsigns of prehistoricfunctions are a theme in the early sections of HH/I; for example /12-13 say that we reenact primitive thinking in our dreams, and /43 gives earlier stages physical presence in "grooves and convolutions" in our brain, "no longer the bed in which the streamof our experience runs".Also HH/II/223 ("the past flows on within us in a hundred waves") and GM/11/3 (how the terrible mnemotechnic "nachwirkt"in our seriousness). GM/II/13 makes the point more conceptually, about the social practice of punishment:because of its history of conversions to different functions, this "no longer has one meaning, but a whole synthesis of 'meanings': the previous history of punishmentin general, the history of its utilizationfor the most different purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is hard to disentangle, hard to analyze, and ... completely indefinable."
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acknowledgedby his early followers (through whom Nietzsche mainly knew Darwin). Let me quickly list a few. i) Exaptation:Nietzsche stresses that functional roles can change. Usually, an organ or drive is not built "fromthe ground up" by and for the same function-the same way of enhancingsurvivability.In a well-known passage in GM/II/12:"the entire history of a 'thing', an organ, a practicecan ... be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretationsand adaptations[ZurechtA machungen]". drive, as a tendencyto cause some resultR, can be appropriated into differentfunctionalcontexts, so that doing-R enhancessurvivability in differentways. Anotherdrive appears,for example, thatcan use it in some new way: can give it a differentway to improve fitness, so letting selection work on it in a new direction;usually R and the process to R will then be graduallyredesignedfor that new role.69Nietzsche thinks of these roles as layeredinto the currentmeaning of the drive or organ; it still carries those past senses and ends, precisely because they still explain why it's here as it
is.

ii) Sub-individualcompetition: Nietzsche insists that this competition occurs at the level of the drives, and that the whole organism is merely the upshot of their intramuralstruggles. In recent terms, the "unit of selection"-the unit upon which naturalselection primarilyworks-is the drive. WP647 [1886-7]: "Theindividualitself as a struggleof parts(for food, space, etc.): its evolution tied to a victoryor predominanceof individualparts, to an atrophyor 'becomingan organ' of otherparts".70 iii) "Population thinking": Nietzsche rejects the "essentialist" view of species as constitutedby some abstractform which individual members are

69

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On exaptation, compare Gould and Vrba [1982, 6]: "characters ... evolved for other uses (or for no function at all), and later 'coopted' for their currentrole". Dennett [1995, 465] calls this "Nietzsche's most importantcontributionto sociobiology". He and others have denied Gould'sclaim to novelty here; cf. Dennett [1995, 281], Kitcher [1993, 386]. Nietzsche analyzes the logic of this successive redesign, through a detailed look at the social practice of punishment,in GM/II/12-13; here functions are seen as superimposed on preexistingones. KSA/10/7[172] [1883] is an especially clear statement of this point. Elsewhere Nietzsche suggests that functions can accrue to things that arise quite without functions (i.e. arise not by selection); see GSI 1. (Sometimes, however, he is thinkingthe source of such things is not random mutation,but again that ur-tendency to power; see WP647 [1887].) Here Nietzsche was influenced by the anatomist Wilhelm Roux and his book The Struggle of Parts in the Organism;see Muller-Lauter1971/1999, 163ff. While reading Roux's book Nietzsche writes: "As cell stands beside cell physiologically, so drive beside drive. The most general picture of our being is an association of drives, with ongoing rivalries and alliances with one another."(KSA/10/7[94] [1883]) The famous statement of "gene selectionism" is Dawkins 1976/1989; its great antecedent is Williams 1966/1996. This view is not in Darwin, who makes the individualthe unit of selection-and in one case (in explaining humanmorality)the group.
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explainedby.71WP682 [1887]: "the species is a mere abstractionfrom the multiplicity of these chains [of members] and their partial similarity". Nietzsche takes seriously this ontological point. The primarybiological entities are neither individual organisms, nor kinds or types, but these "chains"-what I have called "lineages".72 Now the point aboutexaptation might seem to underminemy claim that Nietzsche intends an etiological sense for terms like "purpose"and "function". GM/II/12:"the cause of the arising of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie toto coelo apart".In distinguishingorigins from purposes,he might seem to be denying thata drive'sends are determined its "design-history". I don't think he But by is. Insteadhe's directingour attentionto a drive'smost recentdesign-history, as most determinativeof what it's for now. An organ or drive may arise by and for some role, which then becomes defunct:doing-R no longer raises fitness, and the drive ceases to be selectedfor it. Or, that role may be superceded by some new role-by some new R* that raises fitness more than R. But we've seen thatNietzsche takes these old roles not to be left in the past, but layeredinto the complex, indefinablemeaning the drive has now. The new role is only the largest part of this meaning; the drive'snew "employment andplace in a system of purposes",is what it has most recently been selected for. ?5. Is will to power selected? However, all of this ignores the role of will to power itself. We can't be satisfied with this accountof drives until we settle that role, since it so often seems that Nietzsche thinks will to power also explains drives. All those drives with theirdiverse goals are also wills to power", as well: "every drive seeks mastery power-are somehow "towards [ist herrschsuchtig]" (BGE6). The question is what the role of will to power is in drives, and whetherit introducesa non-selective factor. Granting that Nietzsche gives Darwinianexplanationsof those various drives and instincts, does he give one for will to power itself-explaining it too by selection? So what is the relation between will to power and naturalselection, for Nietzsche?Therearetwo options here, both I think represented his texts: in (a) he offers will to power as a life-will that is, explanatorily,fully basic, and to prior in particular naturalselection; or (b) he offers will to power as a of naturalselection, anduses selection to explain (why or how there product
71

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Here he takes over Lange's attack on the "absolute idea of species" [1865/1950, III/27, n.54]. See also KSA/9/11[178] [1881] and WP521 [1887] on species; compare Sober's defense [19801 of "populationthinking".Nietzsche's claims for the chain or lineage resemble recent argumentsfor the "species as individual";cf. Hull [1978]. Nietzsche depicts the whole lineage as somehow present in each individualorganism, not as merely its cause; see WP678 [1887], WP687 [1887], WP785 [1887], WP379 [1887], WP373 [1888]. Godfrey-Smith 1994 develops such an analysis of functions. JOHN RICHARDSON

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are) these wills. On the first line, Nietzsche treatswill to power as a primorin dial ur-tendency nature,and Darwinianselection as merely its consequence on the latter, he recognizes selection as basic, but argues or by-product; against Darwinism that it fashions wills to power, not to survival. Thereare also two ways of applying these options to Nietzsche, and here too we must decide: they can be read either (1) as competing hypotheses about his one real position, or (2) as coexisting aspects or moments of his position, as layers or levels within it. I preferthe latter.Each of (a) and (b) is a view Nietzsche sometimes expresses; the challenge is to see which is "morehis". We shouldjudge this partly by the frequencyand directnesswith which he expresses these views, but also by their comparativefit with the rest of his positions. a. The dominant view: will to power is explanatorily basic. Let's begin with the evidence that will to power precedesselection-that it's a pre-existing life-force, not itself the productof selective processes.74So, althoughdrives may well be shapedby selection, this selection works on raw materials given it by will to power itself. Selection is a secondaryprocess, that shapes and prunes tendenciesthat are independentlypresent, "supplied" by will to power. The passage most explicit on will to power'spriorityto selection, may be WP690 [1887-8]: "Onecannotdiscover the cause that there is any evolution [Entwicklung]at all by way of researchon evolution; one should not will to understand as 'becoming', even less as having become- /the 'will to it cannot have become". But there'sa great bulk of other evidence that power' suggests this priorityless directly. Generally, Nietzsche's frequentinsistence on will to power as primary seems to count against its having been due to natural selection. The great numberof times he explains by citing will to power-and doesn't go on to say how this will in turn results from selection, all weigh indirectlyagainst
his explaining it so.75

Anotherpiece of evidence may seem decisive: he attributeswill to power even to the non-living. WP692 [1888]: "It is even less a matterof a 'will to life': for life is merely a special case of will to power,-it is quite arbitrary to maintain that everything strives to enter into this form of will to Nietzsche thinks he can do not just biology with his concept, but power".76
74 Schacht [1983, 247] reads Nietzsche so: "'will to power' for Nietzsche is a disposition that is both conceptually and actually distinct from the promotionof the kind of utility associated either with natural selection or with the emergence of successively 'higher' forms of life." I develop this "powerontology" viewpoint in detail in my book. TSZ/II/12: "the will to power-the unexhausted procreative life-will [der unerschbpfte zeugende Lebens-Wille]". A6: "Life itself I count as instinct for growth, for duration, for accumulationof forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline." 7 See also WP619 [1885], WP1067 [1885], WP634 [1888], WP692 [1888]. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 561

chemistry and physics too. If even atoms have will to power, how could selection be what sets thatend? To be sure, Nietzsche stresses that this application to the inorganic is an hypothesis, a tentative extrapolationfrom the primarycase, that of life.7 And he more often attributes will to power to life, than to everything. Still, if he thought that will to power is formedby selection, how could he even hazardthis guess? Doesn't the hypothesis alone show that he thinks of will to power as not constituted etiologically, by selection? If the inorganiceven could be will to power, it seems the "to" can'thave its teleology grounded selection, underthe etiological analysis. in BGE36 counts stronglythis way; it hypothesizes matter:
as a more primitive form of the world of affects, in which everything still lies closed in a powerful unity, which then branchesoff and develops in the organic process ..., as a kind of drive-life, in which all organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation,nourishment, elimination,and metabolism,are syntheticallybound,-as a pre-form of life?

Here Nietzsche expresses a kind of "preformationism": the basic life-func-

tions are prefigured the inorganicwill to power. Elsewhere he describes in how the inorganic "ramifies" into these organic functions. For example the nutritive drive, or hunger, "is a specialized and later form of the drive, an expression of a division of labor, in the service of a higher drive that rules over it" (WP651 [1887-8]). But most relevantfor our Darwiniancomparison is Nietzsche's use of "will to power"to explain, and limit, organisms' interest in reproduction; here he offers a direct alternativeto selection. Notice WP680 [1886-7]:
Against the theory that the single individualhas in view [im Auge hat] the advantage of the species, of his posterity, at the cost of his own advantage: that is only appearance /the tremendousimportancewith which the individualtakes the sexual instinctis not a consequence of its importancefor the species: but procreationis the genuine achievement [Leistung] of the individualand consequentlyhis highest interest, his highest expression of power (naturally not judged from consciousness, but from the center of the whole individuation)[.]78

It's clear this is a thick strandin Nietzsche's view: he often thinks of will to power as a sort of cosmic force, priorto selection-as a positive and creative principlethat must alreadybe there, before selection can begin to work negatively upon it. He does most to elaboratethis view in his notebooks, but it's strongly present in his published works too. In this "power ontology", he denies that selection-"unconscious selection", he calls it in
77 WP689 [1888]: "The will to accumulationof force as specific for the phenomena of life, for nourishment,procreation,inheritance,/for society, state, custom, authority/should we not be permitted to assume this will as a motive cause in chemistry also? /and in the cosmic order?"See also BGE36. WP660 [1886]: "Procreation, crumblingthat ensues through the powerlessness of the the ruling cells to organize what has been appropriated." Also WP658 [1885], WP654 [1886], WP653 [1887].
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WP684 [1888]79-plays a genuinely constructiverole in evolution, after all. This was of course a common response to Darwin; we find it in Lange, who posits [e.g. 1865/1950, III/51-58] a "law of development",as a purposeful force that supplies possible forms, from which naturalselection chooses the actual forms. On this view, selection works merely to prune a variety generated by a more fundamental will, whose teleology must be differentlybased. as we've seen above, such a "cosmic" teleology is deeply at However, odds with other positions Nietzsche takes. By undercuttingselection, it leaves him no other way to groundhis power teleology than psychically. If not by selection, ends can have causal presence only by being represented, in mood, quasi-cognitionsof them. In his metaphysical(and Schopenhauerian) Nietzsche toleratesand even embracesthis result, but elsewhere he sees good reasons to reject it. This more naturalisticmood goes with another set of passages, in which he explains wills in Darwinianfashion. b. The recessive view: selection explains will to power. Let's turn to the evidence that Nietzsche (also, sometimes) subordinateswill to power to naturalselection-treats it as the productof selection. Consider first this more generalremark:"--that we do not place our end-formsof evolution (e.g. spirit) back as an "in itself' behindevolution" (WP709 [1887]). Given this general caution, and given how commonly Nietzsche uses the logic of naturalselection to explain drives, it is unsurprising that he sometimes treats will to power this way as well. I claim that he sometimes thinks of will to power so, and that this is his best view-the one that best fits both the facts, and the other positions important to him. In particular, it gives him a plausible account how all or most drives, besides being towards their distinctive goals, are also towardspower. I'll try to show that as we reread line rendersthem more importantpassages accordingly,this quasi-Darwinian plausiblethanthey had seemed before. I think Nietzsche accepts that organisms are "designedfor" reproductive that most pervasively and effecfitness, but argues that the design-feature maximizes this, is (some kind of) drive towards"power".As we saw tively above, he uses this term both broadly,for any kind of growth, and narrowly, for growth in control over (other) processes. He claims that it's drives to power ratherthansurvivalthathave therebybeen "designedinto"biotic structures.80
Incidentally, Dennett [1995, 182] misreads this as claiming that Darwin denies unconscious selection; instead Nietzsche attacks him for asserting it. (Kaufmann's edition misleads, by inserting a paragraph break.) See note 14 above. This reading can account for Nietzsche's sometime attributionsof will to power even to the inorganic. We need not conclude from these that he can't be thinkingof selection, and must mean a psychic point. For even nonliving things and forces can be subject to a kind of selection-what has been called the "survivalof the stable". Brandon 1981/1996, 34 calls this "physical evolution", of which "biological or genetic evolution is a special
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Selection is, in a certainway, for power; but in what way? There are two options here: power is either i) a function or goal sharedby some or many selected tendencies,or ii) a (higher-level) structuralend in selection itself, thatsomehow squeezes in alongside or underDarwiniansurvival. For power to be a universalend, it seems it might need to play the latter,structuralrole. But perhapsit need not be universal, to merit the priority Nietzsche claims for it. I begin by arguingfor i), then explore his options for ii). i. Power as the fittest strategy. We've seen that Nietzsche-in his bettermoments-agrees with Darwin that organisms are "designedfor" Darwinian survival.Now, he furtherclaims that the most importantway evolution "finds"for maximizing these organisms' survivability, is by crafting plastic dispositions (drives):physical states with causal tendencies that are plastic towardsresults (Rs) of their own, differentfrom type-survivalitself. Just as the utilitarianmight maximize utility best by adoptingor imposing non-utilitarian rules, so selection may maximize reproductivefitness by crafting drives aiming at differentgoals than reproductionitself. Indeed,this is involved in all organic "divisionof labor":specific tasks, means to that overall end, are assumedby parts,whose horizons are confinedto the tasks; only a few of these parts are responsible for replication(of the whole organism) itself. Drives "aim"at their special goals (Gs) in a sense that is dependent upon, but differentfrom, the sense in which they aim at reproductivesuccess. We've seen that these Gs are picked out among tended-results those for as which the drives were selected. As plastic towardsthese Gs, the drives must somehow "sight" their relation to them, and "respond" this relation in to their output.But they need not-and rarelyor never do-similarly sight that structural (E). These drives are not, individuallyat least, plastic towards end success; this end lies over their horizons, even though they're reproductive for" it. Those Gs, and thatE, lie as it were at different levels in the "designed organism'steleology. The first readingof "power"-i)-interprets it as a common propertyof many Gs (whereasthe second will place it at the level of E); it readswill to power as one kind of drive among others (whereasthe second will make it universal). It takes Nietzsche's claim about will to power to be: the drives that have best servedreproductive success, and that dominatethe drive-economy of most individuals,are drives whose Gs involve some kind of control, either over otherorganisms,or over other drives in the same organism; they
case"; he cites Dawkins 1976 for the phrase "survival of the stable". Nietzsche's claim about power will be, thatit's not really stability that rendersmost fit, after all. Even inorganic forces have been "designed for" surviving by overcoming other forces. WP552 [1887]: "All events, all motion, all becoming, as a fixing of degrees and relations of force, as a struggle-" 564 JOHN RICHARDSON

have been selected to "incorporate" competitors into their own project, as means. By contrast, the "competition"involved in selection itself is more abstract: fitness is the propensity to outperformcompetitors for given environmental niches. Such competition has the characterof a race. I take Nietzsche to arguethat in this Darwiniancompetition, selection most favors drives towardsa sharperkind of struggle, a fight. He insists on the special others-to divert effectiveness, in that competition, of drives to incorporate others'projectsto serve their own.81This is, of course, an empirical claim. This competitive strategy-plasticity towardspower over some other-is of so effective that it becomes a pervadingdesign-feature organisms. In the clearest, perhaps primary form, subjection is by killing and eating, but organisms evolve many subtler ways to turn others towards their ends. Nietzsche's main interestis of course in the humancase, in what he calls the forms of these drives; in particular,he interpretsour cognition as "spiritual" largely built out of power-drives.He also thinks that such drives are a necessary design-featureof societies: culture depends on hierarchy, i.e on the subordination some of others. He thinks that such aggressive drives are by The many varieties of powerespecially selected in periods of adversity.82 drives are not descendants some single ur-will, but strategies separately, of repeatedlyevolved. Nietzsche claims about this diverse lot, that they are extremely widespread among organisms, and especially influential for their
evolution.83 It's important for Nietzsche that these drives are plastic towards power,

i.e. towardsthe kind of control that is their G. While reproductivesuccess remainsa "structural end"beyondthe drive's horizons, it "aims"at power by
81

See BGE230, BGE259; WP769 [1883], WP656 [1887] on incorporation. Nietzsche stresses the risks in this, if the system is unable to assimilate what's taken in; his own digestive problems gave him a ready case. BGE262 can be read as a detailed account how a group acquires both unity, and its own will to power by selection; it begins: "A kind arises, a type becomes fixed and strong, throughthe long struggle with essentially constantunfavorableconditions."He goes on to say that the experience of breedersshows that a relaxing of selective pressures produces variationwithin the kind. This is a recognizably frequent view by Nietzsche, that adversity breeds strength;his great cultural worry, is that egalitarian comforts will cease to breed wills to power. See also his references to the "discipline [Zucht] of suffering", e.g. BGE225. GM/II/11 speaks of "another group of affects ... of an even much higher biological value than those reactive ones, [that] consequently deserve even more to be scientifically evaluated and esteemed: namely, the genuinely active affects, such as lust to rule [Herrschsucht], avarice, and the like." Also GM/II/12 on "the fundamental priority ... that the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, ... and formative forces have". GM/III/18 describes will to power as "the strongest, most life-affirming drive". In Homer's Contest. 'Those human capacities that are terrifying and are counted as inhuman, are perhaps even the fertile soil out of which alone all humanitycan grow in impulses, deeds, and works." See note 9 above. When BGE13 counsels us "bewareof superfluous teleological principles!-such as the self-preservation drive", this is because these other drives explain what thatone was supposed to.
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its (selected)plasticity towards that G. Indeed,Nietzsche often insists that drives are "sensitive" towards power in what seems a stronger way: they recognize its achievement in a "feeling of power", which he sometimes identifies with pleasure.84 Here it's hard not to hear him as implausibly consciousness to all organisms-how else could they have such attributing "feeling"?But we readhim more charitablyif we interpretthis feeling in a thin sense, like that we've found for aiming: just as drives "aim"at Gs by at their (selected) plastic responsiveness,so they are "pleased" achieving Gs, their (selected)disposition to sustain those Gs.85 Only some drives just by have evolved to "feel" that achievement in a stronger sense; selection can favor a conscious "taste"for power: predatorshave evolved to delight in catchingtheirprey. Nietzsche interprets Darwinas makingcompetingclaims for "instinctsfor survival"-as claiming that these are the plastic tendenciesmost pervasively selected for. (Uncharitably,he associates Darwin with this claim about Gs-not with the structural point aboutE, where his revolutionaryinsight in fact lies.86) So he thinks that Darwin presumes an isomorphism between selection'sstructural end, anddrives' concretegoals: selection favors not just drives thatenhanceDarwiniansurvival,but drives thatplastically"aim"at it. Against this, Nietzsche presses the competitive strengths of power-drives, the over survival-drives; formerare fitter than the latter-better at survivingas He reproducing. depicts survival-drives passive or reactivetendencies,and thatactively aggressiveones are more important.87 argues What groundis there to think that Darwin or Darwinists would care to enter this debate, and argue for the prevalence of "drives to survive", or "drives to reproduce"? might be natural to expect such isomorphism It between Gs and E-that organismswould be built out of processes aiming at survival itself. And indeedto a great extent they clearly are, and have been viewed so; biologists often stress homeostaticand replicativepowers. When we turn to Darwin, however, we find no such stress on "survivaldrives".88 closest analoguesto drives are "instincts";his chapteron these His
84

86

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88

GS13, A2, and WP649 [1887] stress the feeling of power. WP693 [1888], WP689 [1888], WP688 [1888] analyze pleasure as this feeling; compare WP661 [1887]. othersjust by their plastic tendencies to incorporate them; I Similarly, drives "interpret" think we can read "interpret" this thin sense in (e.g.) WP643 [1886]. in KSA/8/23[9] [1876-7]: "Why accept a preservation-drive at all? Among countless nonpurposive forms there occurred fit [lebensfzhige], durable [fortlebensfahige] ones; million-year-long adaptationsof individualhuman organs were necessary, until finally the current body can regularly arise and those facts regularly appear, which one commonly ascribes to the preservation-drive." Nietzsche thinks Darwinists'presumptionthat selection favors a passive kind of instinct also shows up in their portrayal of organisms as "adapting"to their environments; see GM/II/12;WP681 [1887], WP647 [1887]. Except, that is, for some loose or heuristic remarks, e.g.: "every single organic being aroundus may be said to be strivingto the utmost to increase in numbers"[OS 66]. JOHNRICHARDSON

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(in Origin of Species) is revealing. He treats them as a diverse group of behaviors, not specifically aiming "to survive", though all ultimately selected "for survival". Nor of course does he treat them as aiming "to power". But two of the three examples he chooses for extendeddiscussion ("the instinct which leads the cuckoo to lay her eggs in other birds'nests; the slave-making instinct of certain ants; and the comb-making power of the hive-bee" [OS 216]) may invite that conception. And sometimes he puts the of point more directlyand generally:"eachspecies tries to take advantage the of instincts of others, as each takes advantage the weakerbodily structureof others."[OS 211] Some neo-Darwinists put still more weight on the role of "fight" in Dawkins is a prominentcase.89We can also winning the Darwinian"race"; a sense of the prevalenceof this view, from Keller's attack on it: she get argues [1992] that biologists' usual stress on "competition"expresses and of encouragesa misunderstanding naturalselection; with thatterm, biologists too unthinkingly slide along a range of meanings, from a minimum of in "difference viability and reproductivity" which it gets equatedwith (in selection itself), through the richer"joint relianceon a scarceresource" (the currenttechnical sense), to "directstruggle with others". Keller thinks the last is too often used as a metaphorfor the other senses, in a way that tends to obscure them. Nietzsche takes the opposite view: (his) Darwinists tend to underestimate the role of such direct struggle. By their preoccupationwith survival and adaptation, they conceive of the organismas self-focused and defensive, rather of than aggressively outgoing. They don'tproperlysee the common character so many organicprocesses-how they are "sensitive"towardscontrol and use of otherprocesses, how they press plastically to improve control. However, we've just seen that some Darwinists now do. Dennett complains [1995, 465] againstNietzsche's "characteristic huffing and puffing aboutsome power subduingand becoming master",but I thinkwe can now readit as a systematic rendering a strong strain in neo-Darwinismitself. Nietzsche's will to of idea is, on this reading, a naturalistic thesis about a class of power drives-tendencies towards power-as-control.These drives have control as their explaining goal, insofar as they've been selected for it; such drives are because control is strongly selected for. But it is allowed that widespread, otherkinds of drives areoften selected, too. ii. Power as a structural end in selection itself. I think this first readingof "power",as the internal goal of the drives most important in cases. However, it selection, fits most of Nietzsche's uses of it in particular
89

Dawkins 1982, 56 (in a chapterentitled "Arms Races and Manipulation"):"This kind of unsentimental,dog eat dog, language would not have come easily to biologists a few years ago, but nowadays I am glad to say it dominatesthe textbooks...."
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does not do good justice to the universalityhe so often ascribes to will to only a subset of drives, though a power. This readingmakes power-drives large and potent one. If power is to be an end for all wills or drives, as Nietzsche so often maintains,9we must find a way for it to be not just the selected goal of some drives, but intrinsicto the logic of them all. We must find a way in which even drives that are not towards power in that sense (aren'tselected as plastic dispositions to some kind of control), can still be "forpower".I thinktherearetwo candidateways Nietzsche might mean such a point. In the first, power is universal by being part of "what it is to be a drive";in the second, it is universalby belonging to the process (selection) that makes all drives. First, he might suppose that power is the goal of all drives, simply inasmuch as every drive aims to "achieve"its goal. Power might, in its root and abstractsense, be little more than "achievement"-reachingwhateverR the drive is plastically towards.Or it might be just the drive's"power to achieve" its goal, which any drive wills in willing its goal.91In this achieving, the drive makes the rest of the world "obey"it, to the extent of making room in that world for its goal to be real or actual. It imposes its goal on the world. So perhaps WP689 [1888]: "striving is nothing other than striving after power". Nietzsche's point is then cousin to Aristotle's about actuality-any power (dunamis)holding itself in its end (entelecheia). I think this may well be an element in Nietzsche's notion of power. But it's a weak element-for two reasons: in its abstractness,it carriestoo little of the force "over another"that he mainly hears in power; moreover it expresses an a priori and speculative approachto power that he has strong reasons to disavow. But he has another,more promisingoption: he can try to groundeven the universality of power in selection, in a way that preserves both power'saspect of control,and the doctrine'sempiricalstatus. To make power a universal end, Nietzsche must give it the same kind of structuralrole-as partof the "logic" of evolution by naturalselection-that Darwiniansurvival itself has (as the E contrastingwith manifold Gs). Since selection producesall drives, any end that is constituted, etiologically, by selection'sown structure, will be an end for all drives. So power must be not just one contingentstrategyfor survival, but a necessarymeans to it, or even somehow an aspect of it. Organismswould then be "for"power, even when they aren'tplastically towardsit, just as they are for Darwiniansurvival even when this doesn't lie within their goal-horizons (what they're plastically towards).
90

WP688 [1888]: 'That all driving force is will to power, that there is no physical, dynamic or psychic force except this". CompareClark 1990, interpretingwill to power as a (Frankfurtian)second-order drive for "effectiveness" at first-orderdrives.
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I think we can indeedfind such an idea in Nietzsche, announcedin his familiar notion of "self-overcoming"[Selbstiiberwindung].He reinterprets evolution by naturalselection: a lineage lasts, over "deep"or evolutionary but time, not just by surviving or reproducing, by successively overcoming stages of itself-by, indeed, evolving. Those terms "survival"and '"eproduction" suggest an identity or fixity through time in the members of the linexs, age, a repeatedproductionof structurally-identical which is not true to the process. Not only does the lineage change, even in its members'(xs')92central featuresand functions, but it must do so, to continue. For it competes with other lineages not just in the moment, but over stretchesof evolutionary time, in which each is challengedto improve faster than the others.93A lineage can continue, only by repeatedlyrevising itself. WP552 [1887]: "'Preservationof the species' is only a consequenceof growth of the species, i.e. the overcomingof the species on the road to a strongertype".94 In a., power was control over other organisms.Here it is self-overcoming, a kind of control over self. In each case, Nietzsche thinks of this "control"as a teleological "incorporation"-of something into one's ends/projects, to serve as subordinate means or stages. So power over other organisms lies in them to one's advantage.And power over oneself, self-overcoming, is turning one's old self, as correctedpast, into a fuller new self. (In what incorporating sense "fuller"? Perhapsjust in doing what it did, and more.) One bootstraps above oneself to a new position, doing a kind of violence to one's existing self. Since thereis selection over lineages for adaptiveness-for the capacity to make improving self-revisions-we find in every lineage "devices"for so revising itself: parts or featuresthat are "designedfor" this, by a long-term "lineage-selection". this past selection, self-overcomingis constitutedas By an etiological end for lineages generally,and indirectlyfor all their members. This gives Nietzsche a way to naturalizehis claim that all living things will power:each is designed to help its lineage overcome itself. Could anything like this be biologically viable today?The best candidate to be a design-devicefor species-change,is presumably the mutatability of
92

What counts these as members, is their descendance-relations, not-as the stress on survival suggests-their sharing a defining structure or features. Not only are members of a (lineage) L not determined by similarity-relations,but the L's persistence requires that they diverge. Compare Dawkins 1982, 61 on an "arms race" between lineages, each progressively improvingits adaptationsin response to the other. GM/III/27:"All great things bring about their own destruction[gehen durch sich selbst zu Grunde]throughan act of self-sublimation[Selbstaufhebung]:thus the law of life wills it, the law of the necessary 'self-overcoming' in the essence of life". In TSZII/12, life ascribes this necessity to itself. TSZ/II/7: "[Life] wills to build itself into the heights.... /And because it needs height, it needs steps and a contradictionof steps and climbers! Life wills to climb and to overcome itself climbing."Also GS33 on this evolutionary selfovercoming. NIETZSCHE CONTRA DARWIN 569

the genetic code. Could this itself be an adaptation? Could the cellular copyfor that code have been selected in competition with more ing-mechanisms the accuratemechanisms that precluded degreeof variabilityneeded?Here it suffices that we see what kind of selection could give Nietzsche's claim a ground.But he himself of course knows nothing of this. Nietzsche envisions a much greaterproliferationof design for self-overcoming. Here his Lamarckism plays a major role. Whereas Darwinism attributes improving revisions (which selection then favors) to random mutationin the productionof germ-cells-i.e. to the step between successive xs in a lineage-Nietzsche thinks advancesmade within an x's own life can be heritable.Hence organisms can be designed to change themselves, as a means to changing their lineage. So Zarathustra, challenging his audienceto work at overcoming the human: "All beings so far have createdsomething beyond themselves: do you will to be the ebb of this great flood and rather even go back to the animal,thanovercome the human?"(TSZ/I/P/3) So far we've viewed lineages as descendant-linesof organisms. But Nietzsche makes his point about lineages of other kinds too. The xs that copy/revise themselves from generationto generation, can also be parts of organisms,e.g. drives, or groups of organisms, e.g. communities. Nietzsche attributescompetitionat these other"levels" (than the organism) much more readilythanDarwin.And he thinkstheir lineages are also selectedto be selfrevising-and thatthis is also achieved by the heritableprogress of the units themselves. Drives and groups are likewise "designed" revise themselves, to the betterto revise their lineages. Nietzsche's most crucial application of this point-design for self-overcoming-is to explain the prevalenceof sickness and weakness. It poses a primafacie puzzle to him, why the sick and weak should be (as he thinks) so common-especially perhapsin certainperiods, such as now. Why doesn't selection eliminatethem?95 Nietzsche proposes that it's the sick or weak that serve the lineage's self-overcoming most of all-and that they are selected precisely for this role. HH/I224: "The strongest natureshold the type firm, the weaker help it to develop further [fortbilden]."96 The picture seems to be: the sick or weak, uncomfortablewith the prevailing practice roughly of their kind, work changes in it-introduce variation, over which selection
95

WP864 [1888]: "It is senseless to assume that this whole victory of values [of the weak] is antibiological:one must try to explain it from an interest of life /the preservation of the type 'human' even by this method of dominance [Uberherrschaft] of the weak and WP401 [1888]. disadvantaged-". Also GM/111/13; KSA/8/12[22] [1875], a draftfor this section, is entitled "On Darwinism."Elsewhere he suggests different roles the weak and sick may be "for"; see e.g. WP685 [1888]. In NcD/Il I develop yet anotherreason: it's because humans are subject to a "social selection" that favors and spreads a "herd instinct", that humans are pervasively "sick". See note 65 above.

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operates. This variation in response to discomfort helps the lineage to change. Nietzsche develops this account of sickness/weakness in elaborate and fascinating ways. But I think this gives us enough, to draw some conclusions about this whole strategy for securing the universality of power as an end. The strategy promised a naturalistic, empirical way for Nietzsche to attributewill to power to all organisms. But if it can successfully deliver anything at this biological level by its argumentfrom lineage-selection, it's kind of "will to power"-just "mutatability". at best an extremelyattenuated the richer ways Nietzsche thinks organisms are structured All 'for self-overcoming", collapse when we remove his Lamarckiansupport. Without it, organisms can't be designedto overcome themselves, as a way to improve the species. The only place design-for-evolutionoccurs, is in the copyingprocess. Nietzsche's richer claims about self-overcoming collapse-as biology, that is. They can still seek viability by converting themselves into points about "cultural evolution",claiming to find a hiddenselective logic in that. I think these claims do indeedbelong properlyto his "anthropology", his not "biology", and that he himself sometimes sees this. For he also treats selfovercoming as a distinctively humanway of willing power. This is expressed in what he offers as his ironical counterto Aristotle'sdefinition of the human as the "rationalanimal"-instead it's the "sick animal".97Our differentia, sickness, lies precisely in this way the aggressive impulse is turnedinward, into self-overcoming.98It's our capacity for this, that has carriedus so beyond the other animals. Because of our cultural aspect, selection works differentlyupon us. So it is the argumentin i) that is more importantfor Nietzsche's "power biology"-i.e. his uses of will to power to explain organisms in general. Power, as control over others, is a dominant strategy, commonly (but not universally)selected. In my book I interpreted"will to power" as an ?6. Conclusion. of hypothesis aboutthe basic character all reality-an hypothesis not claimed but to provenby a priori argument, offered as a candidate fit and explain our overall experience. I continue to believe that this is how Nietzsche most commonly means it, and that it's in this role that the notion ties together the greatestshareof his thoughts. However, this "powerontology" is incredible for most of us. The claim that everything is "towardspower" seems to commit Nietzsche to a psychic vitalism, readingmind and intention into all
97

98

GM/IIl/13. Also A14. GM/11/16,18.Again, I explore these topics in NcD/II.

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things, despite his explicit disavowals. For how else can he find a directedness, a teleology there? Recoiling from this apparent absurdity,it can be tempting, as a way to rescue will to power for viability, to scale back the claim into a "power psychology": a proposal about an underlying"motive" in human intending and purposing.Perhapswe can save enough of Nietzsche's point by restricting it to cases in which a psychic account of the teleology is available. But besides being dubiously plausible in its own right, this psychological will to power casts off too much of what Nietzsche wants to say with his notion. (It loses, in particular,his naturalist insistence on the deep continuity of the humanwith the rest of life.) I think we do betteron both counts by pursuing insteada "powerbiology". I've tried to show how this biological reading of will to power gives Nietzsche's idea its strongest form. By treating that will as a product or element of natural selection, we find a non-psychic sense for directedness towardspower-and a sense that can explain why Nietzsche is surest about calling all life will to power. This quasi-Darwinian readingsaves Nietzsche from a psychism he has his own good reasons to avoid; it converts a weakness at the center of his thought, into a strength there. To be sure, this account of will to power is not, to my knowledge, ever directly articulated by Nietzsche. But it is an easy and naturalapplicationof his pervasive use of selection to explain drives and instincts. While less to the front of his mind than that ontological claim, it's still there in the background.And it's this power biology that sets the most of his thoughtson a firmer ground.99 Cited Works References to Nietzsche. I cite Nietzsche's published works by their (English) abbreviations,followed by a Roman numeralfor a part or chapter with separately-numbered sections (if any), followed by an Arabic numeral for the section. (For Untimely Meditations, which has very long sections, I add the page numberin the CambridgeU.P. edition.) I cite Nietzsche's Nachlass by the section in The Will to Power, if the note is includedthere, and otherwiseby the volume in the KritischeStudienausgabe(ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari, de Gruyter 1980), followed by the notebook number and-in brackets-the note number; e.g. KSA/9/6[145]. It's important to bear in mind thatthese are mere notes; to flag this, I set them apart,in lists, from citations of published works. I also try to preservetheir note-character my in translations.And I include the date of these notes, both as furtherflagging, and to let them be placed againstthe published works; the date also allows a
I'm very grateful, for discussions or comments on drafts of this paper, to Ken Gemes, R. Kevin Hill, GrahamParkes,Peter Poellner, Fred Ulfers, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.
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KSA citation to be located in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (same editors). In notes in date order,not the artificialWP ordering. lists, I give Allen, C., Bekoff, M., and Lauder,G. (eds.) 1998. Nature's Purposes;Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge:MIT Press. Anderson,R.L. 1994. "Nietzsche'sWill to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 25(5):729750. Ansell Pearson, K. 1997. Viroid Life: Reflections on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition.Londonand New York:Routledge. F.J. 1970. "Teleological Explanationsin EvolutionaryBiology", PhiAyala, losophy of Science 37:1-15. Bigelow, J. and Pargetter, R. 1987. "Functions", Journal of Philosophy 84(4):181-196. Braithwaite,R.B. 1953. Scientific Explanation.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press. Brandon,R.N. 1981/1996. "Biological Teleology: Questions and Explanations", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 12(2):91-105. Repr. in Concepts and Methods in Evolutionary Biology, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress. Canfield, J. 1964. "TeleologicalExplanationin Biology", British Journalfor the Philosophy of Science 14:285-295. Clark, M. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Cummins, R. 1975. "FunctionalAnalysis", Journalof Philosophy 72:741764. Danto, A.C. 1965. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Macmillan. Darwin, C. 1859/1961. On the Origin of Species. Orig. pub. London: John Murray. Facsimile of the First Edition pub. Cambridge and London: HarvardUniversityPress. [I cite this as OS.] Darwin, C. 1871/1981. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Orig. pub. London: John Murray. Facsimile of the First Edition pub. Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press. Dawkins, R. 1976/1989. The Selfish Gene. Oxford:Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. 1982. The ExtendedPhenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress. Dennett, D.C. 1995. Darwin'sDangerousIdea Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. Godfrey-Smith,P. 1994. "A Moder History Theory of Functions", Noas 28(3):344-362. A Gould, S.J. and Vrba, E. 1981. "Exaptation: Missing Term in the Science of Form",Paleobiology 8:4-15.

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Hull, D.L. 1978. "A Matterof Individuality", Philosophy of Science 45:335360. Kaufmann,W. 1950/1974. Nietzsche:Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th Ed. Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press. Orig. pub. 1950. Keller, E.F. 1992. "Competition:CurrentUsages". In Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, ed. E.F. Keller and E.A. Lloyd. Cambridge:Harvard University Press. Kitcher, P. 1993. "Function and Design", Midwest Studies in Philosophy XVIm. Lange, F.A. 1865/1950. The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its PresentImportance. E.C. Thomas; 3rd edition. New York: HumaniTr. ties Press. Orig. pub. 1865. Leiter,B. 1997. 'The Paradoxof Fatalismand Self-Creationin Nietzsche", in C. Janaway (ed.): Willing and Nothingness: Essays on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress, 1997. Leiter,B. 1998. "Nietzsche'sRespect for NaturalScience", in Times Literary Supplement4983(20ct98):30-31. Lenoir, T. 1989. The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in NineGermanBiology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. teenth-Century 1982 by D. Reidel Pub. Co. Orig. pub. Millikan, R. 1989. "In Defense of ProperFunctions",Philosophy of Science 56:288-302. of Mills, S.K. and Beatty, J.H. 1979. "The Propensity Interpretation FitScience 46:263-286. ness", Philosophy of Morrison, R.G. 1997. Nietzsche and Buddhism:A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities. Miller-Lauter,W. 1971/1999. Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions His Philosophy. Tr. D.J. Parent. Urbana and of Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Nagel, E. 1977. 'Teleology Revisited", Journal of Philosophy 74(5):261301. der NietzschesBibliothek.VierzehnteJahresgabe Gesellschaftder Freundedes R. WagnerSohn. 1942. Nietzsche-Archivs.Weimar: Poeliner, P. 1995. Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. 1996. Nietzsche's System. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson,J. "NietzschecontraDarwin II". Unpublished. [I referto this as NcD/II.] Schacht, R. 1983. Nietzsche. London:Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sober, E. 1980. "Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism", Philosophy of Science 47:350-383.

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Stack, G.J. 1983. Lange and Nietzsche. New York and Berlin: Walter cd Gruyter. Williams, G.C. 1966/1996. Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. Woodfield, A. 1976. Teleology. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress. Wright, L. 1973. "Functions",Philosophical Review 82:139-168. Key Terms I've tried to translateconsistently those of Nietzsche's terms that bear most on my topics. The following are some of the equivalents.I mark departures above by giving the Germanin brackets. Leben = life Dasein or Existenz = existence = Erhaltung preservation Fortleben= survival Zeugung= procreation = Vererbung heredity = Nachkommenschaft posterity = nourishment Ernmhrung Gattung= species Art = kind Entwicklung= evolution Selektion or Selection = selection Anpassung= adaptation Kampf= struggle Lebensfahigkeit= fitness Trieb= drive Instinkt= instinct streben= (to) strive Ziel = goal Zweck = purpose Zweckmassigkeit= purposiveness Motiv = motive Absicht = intention beabsichtig= intentional Absichtlichkeit= intentionality Funktion= function Vortheil= advantage niitzlich= useful Ntitzlichkeit= utility = Mittel = meansbegiinstigend favorable = Verwendung employment = Fortschritt progress = ziUchten (to) breed Ziichtung= breeding

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