What Did Friedrich Nietzsche Take from Charles Darwin?

Answer: A lot. Most specifically, contingency (chance), and the implications of contingency upon meaning.

Prior to Charles Darwin there were a lot of 19th century people who believed that evolution must have occurred in some form, but they thought about evolution in theistic, deistic, or Platonic terms. In other words, evolution had occurred, but it was guided by telos (some sort of purpose).

But here’s the kicker.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw that Charles Darwin had landed upon a mechanism, natural selection, that accounted for evolution absent purpose. And Nietzsche saw that the metaphysical consequences of this discovery could not be more profound. Darwin, by putting an evolutionary mechanism in place of telos  had irretrievably set human beings into the realm of the contingent. Darwin had divorced life—and by extension, humankind—from metaphysics and wedded it to history. Thus human morality was no more grounded in some transcendent purpose than any other natural phenomenon. Instead of tracing morality to heaven, Nietzsche traced it to earth—to the historically contingent (hence Nietzsche’s On the Geneology of Morals ). Here’s how one of Nietzsche’s seminal biographers, R.J. Hollingdale, put it in his now classic, and still much read and praised biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge, 1965, rev. 1999, 72-73):

Darwin had shown that the higher animals and man could have evolved in just the way they did entirely by fortuitous variations in individuals. Natural selection was for Nietzsche essentially evolution freed from every metaphysical implication: before Darwin’s simple but fundamental discovery it had been difficult to deny that the world seemed to be following some course laid down by a directing agency; after it, the necessity for such a directing agency disappeared, and what seemed to be order could be explained as random change. ‘The total nature of the world,’ Nietzsche wrote in Die frohliche Wissenschaft, ‘is . . . to all eternity chaos’ (FW 109), and this thought, basic to his philosophy, arose directly from his interpretation of Darwin.

The implications of this were enormous. Hollingdale again (73):

Nothing that existed in the phenomenal world could have come from ‘outside’: if the universe were intelligible, it must be intelligible from within. Part of that intelligibility had been expounded by Darwin: the ‘divine’ attributes of man had in reality descended to him from the animals. Man was in touch with no ‘beyond’,  and was no different from any other creature. But, as God had been the meaning of the universe, so man had been the meaning of the earth. Now God and man, as hitherto understood, no longer existed. The universe and the earth were without meaning. The sense that meaning had evaporated was what seemed to escape those who welcomed Darwin as a benefactor of mankind. Nietzsche considered that evolution presented a correct picture of the world, but that it was a disastrous picture. His philosophy was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism into account but was not nullified by it.

And where did Nietzsche, in the light of Darwin, go to produce his “new world-picture”? Answer: pre-Socratic Greece. Nietzsche saw in pre-Socratic Greece a period in history comparable to the post-Darwinian late 19th century. Pre-Socratic Greece was a time prior to the Platonic idea of telos (just as the late 19th century was a time after the collapse of Platonic telos ). As Hollingdale puts it (74):

Philosophy from Plato onwards had been founded upon suppositions that were no longer valid, and to find philosophers who had faced their problems without presuppositions one had to go back to Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates.

And what did Nietzsche find there? Survival of the fittest and cruelty (74-75):


In short, concludes Hollingdale, it was Darwin, and his leading of Nietzsche to antique Greece, that led to mature Nietzschean philosophy (78):


And what Nietzsche also put behind him, in his attempt to work out the consequences of Darwin’s discovery, was “slave morality” (Christianity) and democracy. As Thomas Nagel, in his essay on Nietzsche in his recent excellent collection of essays, puts it (37-38):

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare.


So Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest brought Nietzsche to antique Greece (prior to democracy), and thence to his notion of the lone and cruel Ubermensch, the “highest type of man”, the creative supremacist triumphant over the degenerate masses. Though Nietzsche might—and I emphasize might  here—have regarded the Nazis as (in Nagel’s phrasing) “an extreme manifestation of the herd instinct” (39), it’s hardly surprising that the aesthetic loving and scientistic Nazis found in him—and in Charles Darwin—key pieces to the puzzle of their intellectual justification for being.

About Santi Tafarella

I teach writing and literature at Antelope Valley College in California.

21 Responses to What Did Friedrich Nietzsche Take from Charles Darwin?

  1. TomH says:

    If the concept of the artificial vanishes, because man is part of nature and thus inseparable from it, then the social darwinist attempt to manipulate the human genome by natural selection is immune to criticism that it is not true natural selection. Darwin’s theory doesn’t require this, obviously, but Darwin’s theory lends itself to social darwinism and _defends_ social darwinism against attacks that social darwinism is “artificial.”

    • Anonymous says:

      I would say that N would refute that there is a direction to evolution, that we are more evolved and moving toward an ever increansingly perfect human. Thats progressivism, something he didnt like at all. He would see ToE more as a tree of many, equally valid branches rather than a pyramid.

  2. santitafarella says:


    I agree with you that eugenics and atheism have a “go together” feel that eugenics and religion have seemed to not have. Because a lot of contemporary atheists conceal Nietzschean insights about the implications of Darwin’s theory from themselves, they miss the link between eugenics and what it means to live in a contingent world. Selfmaking in a contingent world is Nietzsche. Eugenics is the extension of Nietzschean man. In terms of social questions, I think that eugenics is the great question of this century, yet most people barely have it above their radar.


    • Alejandro says:

      Individuality, Genuine Spirit, Spontaneity, Singular Uniqueness, these clash with eugenics. Eugenics as an assault on the potentialities of sacred individuality erode it, subjugate it, when trying to genetically shape it, rule it, constitute it in a preordained manner, specially when the method is a vugar mass manufacture of “superhumans”. Eugenics is an assault on the individual and need not follow Nietzsche, nor atheism for that manner. Alas the desperate do try…

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  16. Anonymous says:


  17. Anonymous says:

    Please write in standard English, not Americanese. “Evolution absent purpose”???

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