Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 08:10:56 -0600
Subject: Re: Nietzsche on Mill and Darwin -Reply


Excuse my inadaquacy of the list-serve, but
I am not sure if I replied to Mr. Callihan,
or to the whole group. Anyhow, I am the
lowly undergraduate who initiated a
conversation way back in November. The
discussion quickly moved beyond my grasp,
but as it moved back to Darwin, some
questions were raised. 

It is clear to me that Nietzsche's project
focuses many of its energies against
Metaphysics, as I see it, the teleological
ground for all things, the pre-socratic
from which, to which; the unrestricted
desire to know. 

Now at the begining of BGE Nietzsche's
"metaphysical absolute" appears to be the
instinct of survival, "it is time to grasp
that, for the purpose of preserving beings
such as ourselves, such judgments must be
believed to be true; although they might of
course still be false judgments!(BGE, early
on in the first section, can't quite
remember). What I want to pull out of this
quote is not the notion of falsification
but the basic drive, of which we are not
conscious, and which reveals itself as the
purpose of preserving our species. We could
have deduced as much from Darwin.

It seems to me, from the little that I read
of Kaufmann, that the will to power had not
yet come to fruition while Nietzsche was
writing BGE. If this is true, how is
Nietzshce's ripe will to power different
from Darwin's survival instinct? How is the
will to power not a metaphysical notion;
yes it might be unordered and chaotic, in
our linguistic, logical sense of order and
chaos,  but ordered, yes! even
teleological, on a grander scheme? And if
the will to power was not ripe in the mind
of Nietzsche when he wrote BGE, then it
must have been even less ripe when he wrote
Zarathustra; what effects, despite what
Nietzsche might want to deny, does a mature
will to power have on the Superman? Or, did
he just deduce the will to power from the
Superman? a Darwinian technique, as I see
it.

Thank you, James Bachmeier.


	--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---