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