Darwin, Nietzsche: Utilitarianism and Romanticism

Darwin and Nietzsche : Influence of Utilitarianism and Romanticism in their works

In this essay, I will highlight how both Darwin and Nietzsche rejected the ideas of Utilitarianism in their works and how they evolved Romanticism into a philosophy of existentialism and nature.

Utilitarianism is defined as “Developing a rational scheme for evaluating all practices and beliefs without recourse to any essences or substances, avoiding as scrupulously as possible all those things that cannot be measured” [1]. Charles Darwin, a biologist by profession, draws his thesis of Natural Selection [2] based on his observations of nature. Darwin argues that progress is possible due to slow, tiny developments happening everywhere around us and at all times. In [2], he further argues that natural selection is constantly biasing itself towards that is good, rejecting what is bad and at all times it is striving for its own existence. However, he writes - “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were”. Darwin is making a case that both humanity and nature is guided by the principles of “Struggle for Existence” and “Natural Selection”, and it is quite impossible to measure either of them. In its implicit connotations, Darwin is thus discarding the utilitarianism theory.

Nietzsche also draws his thesis based on observations but instead of focussing on nature, like Darwin, he looks back into man's past and observes the pattern of development that has happened so far. In his essay on guilt and bad conscience [3], Nietzsche rejects that the notion of punishment to a culprit was conceived as an act of repayment. He also rejects that punishment was created to prevent the “criminal” from further such actions or to protect the society. Nietzsche rejects all these rational ideas by distinguishing the origin of punishment and the purpose of punishment. Utilitarianism often treats both of them in togetherness and applies the rational scheme retroactively, thereby misleading the purpose to be its origin.

Nietzsche instead argues for a more existential approach and based on how history has unfolded, he writes - “Watching suffering makes people feel good; creating suffering makes them feel even better—that’s a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle” . Nietzsche is thus in agreement with the ideas of Romanticism which places emotion, feeling and spontaneous reactions at the center of our progress. Romanticism criticizes the over-indulgence of “rationality” in our day to day flow of human life. Nietzsche even goes one step further and claims - “Only something which has no history is capable of being defined.”

Similarly, Darwin also places more emphasis on man's feelings. Darwin claims that the rational thought itself has evolved from man's conscience and habitual convictions. In the Descent of Man [4], he argues - “Nevertheless, the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of lower animals, through natural selection”.

Both, Darwin and Neitzsche, thus, strongly believed that the evolution of humanity and nature has been a process, a series of developments. One can only look at and observe the patterns that could have resulted in the change but it is almost impossible to measure them. Both expanded the view of Romanticism by looking underneath man's moral choices; In Darwin's case it was the principle natural selection while in Nietzsche it was tracing man's transition starting from its origins. Both the thinkers advocated for a more observation based approach – in other words an existential approach.

References:

[1] Prof. Roth, Lecture – ReImagining the World.

[2] Charles Dawin, On the Origin of Species.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters, Genealogy of Morals

[4] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.