Hollingdale, put it in his now classic, and still much read and praised biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge, 1965, rev. Here’s how one of Nietzsche’s seminal biographers, R.J. Thus human morality was no more grounded in some transcendent purpose than any other natural phenomenon. Instead of tracing morality to heaven, Nietzsche traced it to earth-to the historically contingent (hence Nietzsche’s On the Geneology of Morals ). Darwin had divorced life-and by extension, humankind-from metaphysics and wedded it to history. Darwin, by putting an evolutionary mechanism in place of telos had irretrievably set human beings into the realm of the contingent. And Nietzsche saw that the metaphysical consequences of this discovery could not be more profound. In other words, evolution had occurred, but it was guided by telos (some sort of purpose).įriedrich Nietzsche saw that Charles Darwin had landed upon a mechanism, natural selection, that accounted for evolution absent purpose. Prior to Charles Darwin there were a lot of 19th century people who believed that evolution must have occurred in some form, but they thought about evolution in theistic, deistic, or Platonic terms. Most specifically, contingency (chance), and the implications of contingency upon meaning.
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