nearly uniform.” Nietzsche, recognising this same truth, would ascribe
practically all the importance to the “highest functionaries in the
organism, in which the life-will appears as an active and formative
principle,” and except in certain cases (where passive organisms alone
are concerned) would not give such a prominent place to the influence
of environment. Adaptation, according to him, is merely a secondary
activity, a mere re-activity, and he is therefore quite opposed to
Spencer’s definition: “Life is the continuous adjustment of internal
relations to external relations.” Again in the motive force behind
animal and plant life, Nietzsche disagrees with Darwin. He
transforms the “Struggle for Existence”—the passive and involuntary
condition—into the “Struggle for Power,” which is active and creative,
and much more in harmony with Darwin’s own view, given above, concerning
the importance of the organism itself. The change is one of such
far-reaching importance that we cannot dispose of it in a breath, as a
mere play upon words. “Much is reckoned higher than life itself by the
living one.” Nietzsche says that to speak of the activity of life as a
“struggle for existence,” is to state the case inadequately. He warns us
not to confound Malthus with nature. There is something more than
this struggle between the organic beings on this earth; want, which is
supposed to bring this struggle about, is not so common as is supposed;
some other force must be operative. The Will to Power is this force,
“the instinct of self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most
frequent results thereof.” A certain lack of acumen in psychological
questions and the condition of affairs in England at the time Darwin
wrote, may both, according to Nietzsche, have induced the renowned
naturalist to describe the forces of nature as he did in his “Origin of
Species”.
In verses 28, 29, and 30 of the second portion of this discourse we meet
with a doctrine which, at first sight, seems to be merely “le manoir
a l’envers,” indeed one English critic has actually said of Nietzsche,
that “Thus Spake Zarathustra” is no more than a compendium of modern
views and maxims turned upside down. Examining these heterodox
pronouncements a little more closely, however, we may possibly perceive
their truth. Regarding good and evil as purely relative values, it
stands to reason that what may be bad or evil in a given man, relative
to a certain environment, may actually be good if not highly virtuous
in him relative to a certain other environment. If this hypothetical man
represent the ascending line of life—that is to say, if he promise all
that which is highest in a Graeco-Roman sense, then it is likely that
he will be condemned as wicked if introduced into the society of men
representing the opposite and descending line of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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