File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0009, message 106


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:52:23 -0500
Subject: 3. The civilized myth of a natural struggle for existence


3. The civilized myth of a natural struggle for existence
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 14:00:21 -0500
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Reply-To:  nietzsche-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Date:  Sun, 17 May 1998 14:00:34 -0500
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Reply-To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
-------------------------------------------------

(c) 1998 Correa&Correa

A NIETZSCHEAN CRITIQUE OF EVOLUTIONISM, OLD AND NEW
(Doing harm to evolutionism)

3.  The civilized myth of a natural struggle for existence

	(...)
	The 'struggle for existence' (Spencer's expression: 'struggle for
life"): more than an anthropocentric bias, it is an ethnocentered
Victorian-age notion that to this day has survived as the key notion of
capitalist society.  And it used to be customary to point to savage
societies as "subsistence societies" - a Darwinian prejudice that runs
throughout Engels' "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the
State": yet, after Bataille, T. Leach and Clastres, it makes little
sense to continue to indulge our ethnocentrism in this way - since these
savage societies were abundance societies that ritually consumed their
'excess' production.  

	As Nietzsche put it, the Darwinian notion of a subsistence condition is
'an exception' of nature, "a temporary restriction of the will to live"
(GS, #340.).  We find it in History under the overpopulating conditions
brought about by the State and the creation of a mass-society - quite
distinct from a pack collectivity and a kinship society - and we find it
in a capitalist society, where marketing Survival is the central object
of exchange ("Working to survive, surviving to consume and while
consuming, the infernal cycle is closed", R. Vaneigem, "Traité de savoir
vivre ŕ l'usage des jeunes gens", p. 69).  We also find it in our
laboratories when we crowd mice into a cage and we find it in today's
'wild life' and ecosystems strangled by the urbanization of the
territory and the human overcrowding of the planet.  But it is still an
exception, a human, all too human exception, not the condition of nature
- no matter how many National Geographic magazines and videos conform to
the illusion of survival as the guiding force of the living.

	More than an ethnocentered notion, the pseudo-scientific function of a
'struggle for existence' is the logical complement to a social machine
(the axiomatics of Capital) which operates everywhere by reducing Life
to Survival - and does so, today, equipped with all the molecular
techniques of genetic engineering, digital communication and cybernetic
control over the living.  One may well abandon the prejudice of
progress, but it is only because the prejudice of Survival appears to be
politically neutral with its "independent" criterion of fitness.  Yet it
is, in fact,  neither independent, nor apolitical.  Gould holds that
"scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their
theories the social and political constraints of their times" - and the
theory of the survival of the fittest is no exception - it proposes a
model of nature which is more than a reflection of our social system -
it is its method of operation.  
	(...)
	The lie which science is then supposed to stamp is that this struggle
for existence constitutes the State of Nature - from which civilization
alone emerged as the powerful equalizer of forces.  The way the problem
of Life is posed is falsified at the outset, by a transposition of the
structure of a social machine to define a natural condition - as if the
condition of Survival were a natural condition, when in fact it is a
social or cultural condition!  It is precisely the decay of culture
which permits the reduction of Life, as the natural process of the
living, to Survival, to a struggle for a socially determined
subsistence: "legal conditions can never be other than *exceptional
conditions*, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will to
life" (GM, II, #11.).  

	To postulate that evolution has no purpose and next posit that the
struggle for existence *aims* to increase the representation of one's
genes in future generations clearly shows that even scientific theories
do not die of contradictions.  But it highlights the *inherent finalism*
of Darwinian theory - a finalism which values reproduction and
self-preservation as the teleological targets of all teleonomic
performance, whatever is the local selection of operational fitness.  By
itself, this already constitutes a *reactive* evaluation of Life - an
illegitimate reduction of the power of the living by ignoring the
"fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the *extension of power*
and with this in view often enough calls in question self-preservation
and sacrifices it" (GS, # 349).  
	(...)
	From Malthus to the modern probabilistic notion of evolution as
entropy, there is a continuum of reactive evaluations of Life that has
remained dominant in biology and in medicine.  It  takes evolution by
filiation as the dominant (neo-Darwinist) or exclusive (Darwinian) form
of variation; it relies on a definition of 'biological needs'; and it
lends to Life an image of entropic irreversibility - birth, nutrition,
development, reproduction, decadence and death.  This survivalist
concept of Life - or 'biological Calvinism' - is inherent even to the
gradualism of Darwin's theory: like the life of an individual, the life
of a species would entail a series of small, gradual changes with the
ruptures occurring only at the end, after a process of decadence:
gradual transformation and discontinuous extinctions.  
	(...)
	But actual Life is something at once far more complex and simpler than
its survivalist image even, and above all, in a scientific mould: "the
general aspect of life is *not* hunger and distress, but rather wealth,
luxury, even absurd prodigality - where there is a struggle it is a
struggle for *power*...One should not mistake Malthus for nature." (TI,
Expeditions of an Untimely Man, #14.)

	What then does one mean by the strongest when one asserts it is just
the fittest - as an operational intra-species notion for a given local
environment in Time?  Here is another problem - since, if we assume that
the struggle for existence exists, the meaning of that temporary
restriction is forcefully different from that which evolutionists claim
that it is: what they call the strongest selected by Survival, is the
weakest from the viewpoint of Life - often the least creative: "the
strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organized herd
instincts, by the timidity of the weak, by the vast majority (...) I see
on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value
of life" (WP, #685).  

	Operationally - as in the mindless brain of the engineer - the fit to
survive are the strongest ones (locally the most favoured) for any given
alteration of the environment, any alteration being one that puts on
more *stress pressures*.  The result is the inversion peculiar to
evolutionism and Social-Darwinism: it says that natural selection by the
struggle for existence selects the strongest type, when any struggle for
Survival in the very way it is meant can only select the most base, the
weakest, the most mediocre and also the most cunning.  "Force to
survive" is confused with power to Live, and even with the power of
transformation:  

	"(...) I always see before me the opposite of that which Darwin and his
school see or *want* to see today: selection in favor of the stronger,
better-constituted, and the progress of the species.  Precisely the
opposite is palpable: the elimination of the lucky strokes, the
uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion
of the average, even the *sub-average* types.  If we are not shown why
man should be an exception among creatures, I incline to the prejudice
that the school of Darwin has been deluded everywhere" (WP, 685).  

	The Darwinian Lie, with regard to human evolution, is precisely that
the strong will triumph in History.  But it is the weak, through their
herd-instinct - fomented and managed by priests, scientists and
educators - which have already triumphed:

	"One counts on the struggle for existence, the death of the weaker
creatures and the survival of the most robust and gifted; consequently
one imagines a continual growth in perfection.  We have convinced
ourselves, conversely, that in the struggle for existence chance serves
the weak as well as the strong; that cunning often prevails over
strength; that the fruitfulness of the species stands in a notable
relation to its chances of destruction-" (WP, 684).

	Nietzsche criticizes Darwin for interpreting both evolution *and
chance* in a reactive fashion: Darwin's natural evolution is from the
start the anthropomorphic concept of a primacy of survival and
reproduction (a competition for resources) over the plastic, creative
forces of Life; and Darwin's concept of chance a matter of fortuitous
adaptation to stress: "(...) one overlooks the essential priority of the
spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new
interpretations and directions" (GM, II, 12), new uses of the same
function, new functions of the same organ, new organs, functions and
uses.  It is 'only after this' - after the manifestation of the
'form-giving forces' - that "adaptation follows".


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