Nietzsche on Evolution and Progress

1.1 Nietzsche on Progressivism

As with all such movements, the belief in the natural and inevitable progress of mankind was not universally accepted. In direct contradiction to the theory that human progress is inevitable, many prominent nineteenth-century physicians held that the very features of modern society that ostensibly evidenced human progress were actually conducive to mental and physical decline. This so-called degenerationist position is exemplified in the eminent German psychiatrist, Wilhelm Griesinger’s 1845 textbook, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics. Griesinger asks “whether the progress of civilization has increased the number” of mentally disordered people,^[22] and, after considering the possibility that this rise is more apparent than real, concludes that advancements in modern society have come at the cost of mental degeneration and a diminished quality of life:

I would rather coincide with the opinion of most medical psychologists, that the increase of insanity in recent times is real, and quite in accordance with the relations of modern society, in which certain causes, according to experience, exerting a great influence, which cannot however be quite expressed in figures, have become stronger and more extended. The progress of industry, art, and science necessitates a general increase of the cerebral functions; the constantly increasing departure from simple modes of life, and extension of the more refined mental and physical enjoyments, bring with them desires and emotions formerly unknown. The general possession of a liberal education awakens in the minds of many a feeling of ambition which few only can gratify, and which brings to the majority but bitter deception. Industrial, political, and social agitations work destructively on individuals, as they do on the masses; all live faster – a feverish pursuit of gain and pleasure, and great discussions upon political and social questions, keep the world in constant commotion. We may say, with Guislain, that the present state of society in Europe and America keeps up a general half-intoxicating state of cerebral irritation which is far removed from a natural and healthy condition, and must predispose to mental disorder: thus many become insane.^[23]

Griesinger’s account subsequently received etiological support^[24] from Bénédict-Augustin Morel’s 1857 Treaty on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species,^[25] which advances a theory of degeneration whereby the negative influences of certain environmental stimuli create heritable mental pathologies that result in an increasingly degenerative lineage. This theory was widely accepted and influenced seminal figures in psychiatry such as Emil Kraepelin to consider degeneration an urgent threat to humanity.

If we survey the long list of harmful cultural influences – and we can hardly deny that civilized culture has a role to play in causing certain forms of degenerative madness – then we must above all determine to what extent those dangers affect not just individuals, but our entire race as well. Given the facts of heredity, we must assume that those life-experiences which influence the body’s life as a whole [Gesamtleben des Körpers] do not leave developing germ cells untouched, but can somehow impinge upon the properties governing the lives of future generations. […] In any case, we are confronted here with questions that are of the utmost importance for our existence as a people. We must determine – absolutely and at any price – in what direction we are headed, whether the forces of degeneration or those of sustainability and progressive development have the upper hand in our people.^[26]

Nietzsche similarly observes the deleterious effect that modern society has on individual development. He describes a “European disease” which has “spread unevenly throughout Europe” (BGE 208). Though Nietzsche explains that “the will is most sick in present-day France” because it has obtained a “culturally dominant position within Europe,” Germany is only somewhat healthier (BGE 208). As would any good physician, Nietzsche provides an account of the illness’s etiology and symptomology. This illness – “paralysis of the will” – “originates whenever races or classes that have been separated for a long time are suddenly and decisively interbred […]. Our contemporary Europe, the site of an absurdly sudden experiment in the radical mixing of classes and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical from its heights to its depths […] and often sick to death of its will” (BGE 208). This skepticism, he explains, “is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition which in layman’s terms is called weak nerves or a sickly constitution.” This description neatly fits the then popular diagnosis neurasthenia, coined by the American^[27] neurologist George Miller Beard and defined as “deficiency or lack of nerve-force.”^[28] In keeping with the medical consensus of the time, Nietzsche believes that this condition is heritable:

The different standards and values, as it were, get passed down through the bloodline to the next generation where everything is in a state of restlessness, disorder, doubt, experimentation. The best forces have inhibitory effects, the virtues themselves do not let each other strengthen and grow, both body and soul lack a center of balance […]. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerate about such hybrids is the will. (BGE 208)

Although Nietzsche is broadly aligned with the medical degenerationists in identifying features of modern society as contributing to increasing rates of mental degeneracy (including criminality and alcoholism)^[29] he distinguishes himself from this position in two ways. First, as physicians, Griesinger, Morel, and Kraepelin, focus on perceived medical disturbances and view society’s pathogenic effect on individuals as a regrettable byproduct of modern advances. In contrast, Nietzsche is additionally interested in deleterious traits that, even by nineteenth century standards, did not fall within the remit of medicine (e. g., predictability). As well, Nietzsche identifies this effect as regrettable only at the level of the individual; at the level of society or culture, the development of such traits are advantageous.

Second, unlike the physicians of nineteenth century, Nietzsche believes that humanity’s decline has been a long time coming.^[30] According to Nietzsche, humanity reached its zenith in ancient Greece, perhaps around the fifth century BCE,^[31] after which it entered a state of decline inaugurated by Socrates and accelerated by Plato (TI, Socrates 2). According to Nietzsche, Socrates’s influence was (in part) to emphasize reason over the drives: “We see signs of Socrates’ decadence not only in the admitted chaos and anarchy of his instincts, but in the hypertrophy of logic” (TI, Socrates 4). For Nietzsche who understands the drives to “constitute our being” (D 119), encourages giving form to the drives,^[32] and praises figures who have done so,^[33] the idea that the drives ought to be left in chaos amounts to promoting lower-types^[34] and so it is not surprising that he views Socrates as a “[type] of decline” (TI, Socrates 2):

Reason=virtue=happiness only means: you have to imitate Socrates and establish a permanent state of daylight against all dark desires – the daylight of reason. You have to be clever, clear, and bright at any cost: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards. […] To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness is equal to instinct. (TI, Socrates 10–1)

For Nietzsche, it is not (just) modern advancements in politics and industry,^[35] education,^[36] and the arts^[37] causing humanity to degenerate, it is the general Platonic/Christian^[38] structure of society that negates the instincts and drives, accepts the real vs. apparent dichotomy, and hypervalues the supernatural over the natural, producing a timid and sick citizen.^[39]

We must ask: is Nietzsche’s rejection of the thesis that humanity naturally progresses merely a reflection of his polemical disposition or does belongs to a more substantive claim about humanity? I argue for the latter – specifically that his view of human progress is accounted for by his acceptance of Lamarckian evolution.

2.1 Nietzsche and Darwin

Nietzsche’s acceptance of evolutionary theory is evident in his work and notebooks throughout his life. Nietzsche’s earliest philosophical essay, Fate and History, written in 1862, suggests a familiarity with evolution:^[40]

We hardly know whether mankind itself is only a stage, a phase in the universal, in becoming; whether it is not merely a voluntary appearance of God. Is man not perhaps the development of stone through the medium of plant or animal? Could it be that perfection is already attained here, that herein lies history? Has this eternal becoming no end? What are the mainsprings that drive this great clockwork? They are hidden. But they are the same in the great clock we call history. […] And could we not call immanent humanity each mainspring? […] Or do higher considerations guide the whole? Is man only the means, or is he the end?^[41]

Nietzsche continued to grapple with evolutionary thought in the following years, reading Friedrich Albert Lange’s influential History of Materialism (1866)^[42] the year of its publication.^[43] Lange’s influence on Nietzsche was profound, and in the same year he noted: “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else” and that it was “undoubtedly the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades.”^[44] Two years later, Nietzsche writes that it is “a book which gives infinitely more than the title promises, a real treasure-house to be looked into and read repeatedly” containing not only an account of the “materialist movement of our times, [but] the natural sciences with their Darwinian theories.”^[45]

In 1872, Nietzsche writes of his agreement with Darwinism in his notebooks: “The awful consequence of Darwinism, a theory which, by the way, I hold as true” (Nachlass 1872/73, 19[132], KSA 7.461). Just over a decade later, we see Darwinian ideas emerge in his published work: “If, on the other hand, the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal – doctrines which I consider true but deadly …” (UM II, HL 9). Still later, in Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche rejects the view that the essence of mankind was divine, writing that: “Formerly one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts” (D 49). In The Gay Science (1882–87), Nietzsche comments on “the last great scientific movement, Darwinism” (GS 357). And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), in a passage leading to the introduction of the concept of the Overman, Nietzsche writes of mankind’s development in a manner that unmistakably invokes Darwin: “You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape […]. Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman” (Z, Preface 3–4).^[46] Then, again, in Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche writes: “People are not the products of some special design, will, or purpose, they do not represent an attempt to achieve an ‘ideal of humanity,’ ‘ideal of happiness,’ or ‘ideal of morality,’ – it is absurd to want to devolve human existence onto some purpose or another” (TI, Skirmishes 8).

After arriving at the University of Basel in 1869, Nietzsche became friendly with Ludwig Rütimeyer, a Swiss professor of zoology and comparative anatomy who made significant contributions to evolutionary paleontology, publishing an important odontographic analysis in 1863 that is thought to be one of the first attempts after Darwin to use mammalian fossils to reveal evolutionary lineages.^[47] Rütimeyer contributed to the introduction of Darwin’s ideas to Germany^[48] but is perhaps best remembered for an acrimonious public dispute with the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel. During this time, Nietzsche read two further books on Darwin: Oscar Schmidt’s Theory of Descendence and Darwinism (1873) and Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1874).^[49]

Given that Nietzsche appears to have endorsed Darwin’s thought early in his career, his later antagonism to Darwinian ideas^[50] and Darwin’s followers^[51] requires some explanation. In the following section, I examine Nietzsche’s exposure to evolutionary thought and attempt to tease apart Nietzsche’s acceptance of evolution and rejection of Darwinism.

2.2 Evolution, Darwin, and Lamarck

Distinguishing between the theory of evolution and the theory of evolution by natural selection (or Darwinism) was a common, and appropriate, one to make in the nineteenth century. Although Darwin was influential for initiating biology’s conversion toward evolutionary thinking, Darwinian evolution was not believed to represent a fundamentally new way of understanding living beings but rather the most recent scholarly theory of change along the lines of Anaximander,^[52] Lucretius,^[53] Hegel (e. g., GS 357), and crucially, Lamarck, and many in the field were hesitant to accept Darwin’s account of natural selection.^[54] The University of Basel where Nietzsche taught was itself a hub of non-Darwinian evolutionary thought,^[55] with scholars such as Rütimeyer contributing to the emerging field of evolutionary biology while remaining an adherent of Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory of evolution. Even Haeckel, a fierce proponent and popularizer of Darwinism insisted on giving Lamarck his due: “The portion of the Theory of Evolution [Entwickelungstheorie], which maintains the common descent of all species of animals and plants from the simplest common original forms might […] with full justice, be called Lamarckism. On the other hand, the Theory of Selection, or Breeding, might justly be called Darwinism.”^[56]

The central point of disagreement between Darwin’s and Lamarck’s theories of evolution concerns the heritability of acquired traits.^[57] Darwin argued that evolution occurs through a process wherein genotypes are passed from parent to offspring and that those genes that realize phenotypes that increase the organism’s ability to survive and/or reproduce are naturally selected at higher rates than those that have a neutral or negative effect on survival and/or reproduction. In contrast, Lamarck argued that evolution follows two laws: first, the use or disuse of a phenotypic trait enhances or diminishes its effectiveness in performing its function and, second, these intra-lifespan developments are passed on to one’s progeny:

All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.^[58]

It was thus perfectly reasonable to embrace evolutionary theory while rejecting Darwinism by accepting the other major scientific account on offer: Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory. The distinction between Darwinism and Lamarckism would have been well known to Nietzsche who read a number of authors critical of Darwinism and informed by Lamarck.^[59] Lange’s History of Materialism, for instance, expresses a clear agreement with Lamarck: “Why, we are even now rightly restoring Lamarck to honour who derived from immediately efficient causes combined with heredity all modifications of forms, and therefore, e. g., the increase, strengthening, and development of any organ from its increased use.”^[60]

One might wonder then, (1) why did Nietzsche abandon Darwinism and (2) why did he accept Lamarckism? Some have suggested^[61] that Nietzsche shifted from Darwin to Lamarck under Rütimeyer’s influence. Though possible, Nietzsche’s rejection of Darwinism appears not to be focused on a disagreement about the science but on the values he understands each theory to entail. Consider, for example, that although Nietzsche embraces Darwinism in 1872, the following year he criticizes David Strauss’s book On the Old and New Faith (1872), which deals with Darwin in largely favorable light. Nietzsche’s critique is not a result of Strauss’s Darwinism per se, but rather because of the inconsistencies between the values Strauss holds and the ethic Nietzsche believes Darwin’s theory demands: “His Darwinism and his ethics do not fit together, the former ought to result in an ethics of bellum omnium” (Nachlass 1873, 27[2], KSA 7.588). Though we do not get a sense of what Nietzsche’s own position on Darwin’s thought is in this essay, we do find a clue in this phrase: Nietzsche evidently believes that Darwin’s theory entails an ethic of war of all against all (“bellum omnium contra omnes,” UM I, DS 7).

This is telling. In so characterizing Darwinism, Nietzsche seems to be imagining the type of violent struggle that occurs among animals competing for limited and vital resources. Understood in this way, “survival of the fittest” would hinge upon one’s ability to physically overpower one’s competitors, making sense of Nietzsche’s claim that Darwinism is a “philosophy for butcher boys” (Nachlass 1875, 12[22], KSA 8.259). As well, this contextualizes Nietzsche’s critique of Paul Rée’s account of the origins of morality in The Origin of Conscience (1885) which Nietzsche believes to involve an implausibly defanged version of Darwinism: “in his hypotheses, the Darwinian beast and the ultra-modern, humble moral weakling who ‘no longer bites’ politely shake hands” (GM, Preface 7).

More substantively, Nietzsche objects that Darwin’s survival of the fittest emphasizes self-preservation over enhancing power, a view which is incompatible with his own values and his thinking about the will to power.

To wish to preserve oneself is a sign of distress, of a limitation of the truly basic life-instinct, which aims at the expansion of power and in so doing often enough risks and sacrifices self-preservation. […] That today’s natural sciences have become so entangled with the Spinozistic dogma (most recently and crudely in Darwinism with its incredibly one-sided doctrine of “the struggle for existence” –) is probably due to the descent of most natural sciences […]. English Darwinism exudes something like the stuffy air of English overpopulation, like the small people’s smell of indigence and overcrowding. As a natural scientist, however, one should get out of one’s human corner; and in nature, it is not distress which rules, but rather abundance, squandering – even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life. (GS 349)

Anti-Darwin. As for the famous “struggle for existence” is concerned, this seems to me to be more of an opinion than a proven fact at the moment. It takes place, but as an exception; the overall condition of life is not a state of need, a state of hunger, but rather abundance, opulence, even absurd squandering. Where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power … You should not confuse Malthus with nature. (TI, Skirmishes 14)

Nietzsche’s objection to Darwinism in these passages is that it misrepresents the end toward which organisms strive as self-preservation, rather than power: “It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more” (Nachlass 1888, 14[121], KSA 13.301). His objection to Darwinism is thus primarily based on the view that will to power precedes, or is more basic than, evolution^[62] and that Darwin’s theory of natural selection contradicts the will to power. In contrast, because Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory does not require states of relative deprivation or a competitive struggle for the phenotype to evolve, it is capable of explaining humanity’s decline (even during times of abundance), and coheres more readily with Nietzsche’s account of the will to power. Lamarck’s theory simply possesses greater explanatory power in addressing the things Nietzsche’s cares about.

Nietzsche’s transition from Darwinism to Lamarckism is most likely explained as a product of this lack of fit between what Nietzsche understands Darwinism to entail and his own views of progress and decline and will to power. Darwinism had a tremendous impact on German culture, influencing everything from the journals Nietzsche read^[63] to the conversations he probably had,^[64] and so Nietzsche’s initial exposure to evolutionary thought was likely through Darwinian thinking and the general atmosphere that things were in a state of progress. However, as Nietzsche continued to read on the subject, he came into contact with non-Darwinian evolutionary thought that more closely accounted for his observation that humanity is in a state of decline and was more consistent with the will to power. Observing that Nietzsche nowhere objects to evolution as such, that (owing to Bronn’s translation) Darwinian evolution was considered to be supportive of the progressivist view that Nietzsche opposes, that Nietzsche (mis)understood Darwinism to include certain value claims that are anathema to his own, and that Darwinism was not considered at that time to be the only viable theory of evolution, permits us to conclude that Nietzsche was not hostile to evolution as such, but merely to Darwin’s theory of natural selection (as he understood it). Given that Nietzsche writes favorably of evolution but critically of Darwinian evolution, that his professional milieu and independent reading included notable Lamarckian-sympathetic scholars, that Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory more readily explains the perceived decline in humanity so concerning to Nietzsche, that he lists the rejection of Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory as one of Schopenhauer’s many errors (GS 99), and his apparent use of Lamarckian evolutionary principles in his explanation of species-level progress (see Section 3), permits us to conclude, as have other scholars,^[65] that Nietzsche endorsed Lamarckism.

2.3 Lamarckism and Cultural Selection

Equipped with a Lamarckian understanding of evolution, Nietzsche is capable of explaining humanity’s decline as a product of degenerate cultural values promoting the use of certain traits, thereby enhancing their effects in subsequent generations and increasing their prevalence in the population.^[66] Nowhere is Nietzsche more clear about the effect that cultural selection can realize than in his description of lower types. Unlike paragons of excellence such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Wagner, both of whom Nietzsche identifies as being untimely^[67] and so not blindly adhering to the values of their cultural moment, lower types are precisely those whose selves are the product of inherited values and traditions. He writes that “all evaluations are either original or adopted – the latter being by far the most common […]. Original evaluation: that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases or displeases us alone and no one else [is] something excessively rare!” (D 104) Lower types are those who adopt the values of others and then “pretend they are our own – and accustom ourself to this pretence, so that at length it becomes our own nature.” Elaborating upon this process, he explains that

the great majority […] do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them; – as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one forever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the heads of others. (D 105)^[68]

When the formation of the self is left to society^[69] in this way, Nietzsche claims that it selects for traits advantageous to society (e. g., productivity, predictability, bad conscience) at the expense of those advantageous to individual growth:

Whenever we encounter a morality, we find an evaluation and ranking of human drives and actions. These evaluations and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it the most – and second most, and third most – is also the highest standard of value for all individuals. With morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. (GS 116)

The total degeneration of humanity down to what today’s socialist fools and nitwits see as their “man of the future” – as their ideal! – this degeneration and diminution of humanity into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, into man in a “free society”), this brutalizing process of turning humanity into stunted little animals with equal rights and equal claims is no doubt possible! (BGE 203)

Indeed, German universities inculcate these values into students: “What the ‘higher schools’ of Germany actually achieve is a brutal training to make, with the least possible loss of time, a vast number of young men usable, exploitable, for the civil service” (TI, Germans 5).^[70] Nietzsche explains that these socio-cultural values are adopted in part out of laziness (UM III, SE 1), but also because they are viewed as virtues and signs of good character: “the herd man of today’s Europe […] glorifies those characteristics that make him tame, easy-going and useful to the herd” (BGE 199). As such, the traits associated with these values are socially advantageous to possess (BGE 262, 268). Nietzsche illustrates the way societal values masquerade as individual values by examining what is called “strength of character.” He explains that although it is praised as a personal virtue, it serves societal goals rather than individual development:

A child is said to have a good character when it is visibly narrowly determined by what is already existent; by placing itself on the side of the fettered spirits the child first proclaims its awakening sense of community; it is on the basis of this sense of community, however, that it will later be useful to its state or class. (HH I 228)

In this, not only do we see that lower types are characterized in part by the adoption of values that support society’s goals as though they were their own, but that one trait particularly important to this project is predictability – a trait that confers in others the ability anticipate one’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and which enhances productivity and ensures social cohesion:

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbour, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbour, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness […]. When the great thinker despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products. (UM III, SE 1)

A firm reputation used to be a thing of utmost utility; and wherever society is still ruled by herd mentality it is still today most expedient for everyone to act as if his character and occupation are unchangeable, even if basically they are not. “One can depend on him; he stays the same”: wherever society is threatened this is the type of praise that means the most. Society sees in this person’s virtue, in that person’s ambition, in the thoughtfulness and passion of a third dependable ever-handy instruments. (GS 296)

Whereas higher types cultivate selves without yielding to the axiological homogenization society encourages,^[71] lower types abdicate this responsibility and become more alike resulting in “unchangeable, […] handy instruments” and “factory products” (GS 296).

So understood, society exerts a selection pressure on individuals to adopt certain traits. And, because Nietzsche embraces the Lamarckian view that acquired traits may be inherited, this selective process has adapted mankind to a social environment in which those traits help one to survive and reproduce. At the same time, those who express traits contrary to societal values are negatively selected: “Only the mediocre have prospects for continuing on, for propagating – they are the people of the future, the only survivors” (BGE 262); “People who are more alike and ordinary have always been at an advantage; while people who are more exceptional, refined, rare, and difficult to understand will easily remain alone, prone to accidents in their isolation and rarely propagating” (BGE 268). Thus, the herd type predominates not only because those who possess and exercise society-benefiting traits are viewed as virtuous and so “get along” better in society, elevating their reproductive success and passing along these traits, but also because the kind of individual Nietzsche would prefer to cultivate is “precisely what people feared most; so far, he has been practically the paradigm of the terrible; – and out of terror, the opposite type was willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal: man, – the Christian” (A 3).^[72]

3.1 Nietzsche on the Evolutionary Import of Development

Nietzsche’s sanguine posture to the possibility of progress is explained by his understanding that the very same evolutionary mechanism that has resulted in society exerting a selection pressure to cultivate societally advantageous and individually deleterious traits may be used to enhance traits he views as valuable. If so, self-development becomes a crucial process in countering humanity’s downward trajectory. Although one is capable of passing on certain traits by modeling behavior, educating subsequent generations, or producing creative works that demonstrate the value of these traits, once one accepts Lamarckism one also accepts that the non-biological transmission of these traits may also become heritable.

In perhaps his clearest explanation of how evolution and self-development may combine to produce greater types, Nietzsche explains the effect that self-development had in Ancient Greece. He writes that “Cicero registered his surprise at seeing how the men and boys of contemporary Athens were far and away more beautiful than the women: but look at how much work and exertion in the service of beauty Athenian males had demanded of themselves for centuries!” (TI, Skirmishes 47). Elaborating upon the mechanisms that effected this change, Nietzsche writes:

Make no mistake about the method at work here: a simple discipline of feeling and thought amounts to practically nothing […] you first need to persuade the body. Strict adherence to significant and refined gestures and an obligation to live only with people who do not “let themselves go” is more than enough to become significant and refined: two or three generations later and everything is already internalized. It is crucial for the fate of individuals as well as peoples that culture begin in the right place – not in the “soul” (which was the disastrous superstition of priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, gestures, diet, physiology, everything else follows from this … This is why the Greeks are the first cultural event in history – they knew, they did, what needed to be done (TI, Skirmishes 47).

Nietzsche here describes how evolution may be steered through a regiment of self-development (“Strict adherence to significant and refined gestures and an obligation to live only with people who do not ‘let themselves go’”) as the traits so enhanced become heritable in subsequent generations (“two or three generations later and everything is already internalized”).

Though his focus in the above passage is on the body, Nietzsche is equally clear that one’s mental faculties and values are capable of being developed in much the same way the body is:

Even the beauty of a race or family, the grace and goodness in all its gestures, have been worked on: beauty, like genius, is the final result of the accumulated labour of generations (TI, Skirmishes 47).

The preparatory labor of many generations is needed for a philosopher to come about; each of his virtues needs to have been individually acquired, cared for, passed down, and incorporated (BGE 213).

What a man’s forefathers liked doing the most, and the most often, cannot be wiped from his soul: whether they were diligent savers and accessories of some writing desk or cash box, modest and middle-class in their wants and modest in their virtues as well; or whether they lived their lives giving orders from morning to night, fond of rough pleasures and perhaps even rougher duties and responsibilities; or whether they finally sacrificed old privileges of birth and belonging in order to live entirely for their faith – their “god” –, being people of a tender and unyielding conscience, embarrassed by any compromise. It is utterly impossible that a person might fail to have the qualities and propensities of his elders and ancestors in his body. (BGE 264)

All the virtues and efficiency of body and soul are acquired laboriously and little by little, through much industry, self-constraint, limitation, through much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labors, the same renunciations; but there are men who are the heirs and masters of this slowly-acquired manifold treasure of virtue and efficiency – because, through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired arid stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. (Nachlass 1884, 26[409], KSA 11.260)

Note the way these passages express an acceptance of Lamarckian evolution. He claims that certain phenotypes have to be “worked on” (TI, Skirmishes 47), “cared for” (BGE 213), and “are acquired […] through much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labors” (Nachlass 1884, 26[409], KSA 11.260).

Understanding Nietzsche’s position that the traits acquired and developed during one’s life have the potential to make a species-level (or at least a local German- or European-level) contribution accounts for his optimism about the possibility of progress and explains why he believes cultivating a self distinct from social values is so important. Encouraging his readers to acknowledge their individuality, and resist the pressure to blindly adopt the values of society and so become “like a factory product” (UM III, SE 1),^[74] is thus not merely an expression of a distaste for conventional morality, but a statement on the need to halt humanity’s decline. Similarly, once his Lamarckism is fully appreciated, his encouragement to cultivate the drives in order to become greater, more unified, selves becomes an entreaty to counter this downward trajectory by selecting for traits that promote “greatness” such that these get passed down to future generations. Nietzsche’s Lamarckian understanding of evolution is thus essential to understanding why self-development is such an important component of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The urgency with which he writes about self-development gains new meaning when development includes the responsibility to correct the downward trajectory of the species, or at least Europe. This may also frame Nietzsche’s emphasis on those individuals he deems “great” for it is these people that have outsized effects on the growth or decline of the species.^[75]