Artificial and Unconscious Selection in Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Expectorating the Poisoned Pill of the Lamarckian Reading

Abstract

I examine three kinds of criticism directed at philosophical genealogy. I call these substantive, performative, and semantic. I turn my attention to a particular substantive criticism that one may launch against essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals that turns on how Nietzsche answers “the time-crunch problem”. On the surface, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, in order to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I demonstrate that Nietzsche hits upon the right drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g., walls of early states), but misinterprets their true impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward causing the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to breeding a particular type of individual, namely, one who is docile, by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of early humans. In showing that Nietzsche’s genealogical account of memory and bad conscience is not underpinned on a false scientific theory and is consistent with Neo-Darwinism, I deflect a potentially fatal blow regarding the veracity of Nietzsche’s genealogies.

1. Introduction

Philosophical genealogy refers to the method of historical and philosophical investigation developed by Friedrich Nietzsche upon his reading of Paul Ree’s The Origin of Moral Sensations. As the name itself implies, genealogy is a distinct method of practicing philosophy that entails examining the historical origins of present-day philosophical concepts, ideas, practices, emotions, and discourses. The purpose of this examination is to take ideas long thought to be innate, immutable, and absolute and instead demonstrate that such entities are constructs of sorts; they are elaborate assemblages constituted from earlier and often alien concepts, behaviors, and even feelings.

Genealogy is the subject of devastating criticisms in the secondary literature. All told, there are three kinds of attack. I call the first substantive, the second performative, and the third semantic. I investigate each criticism briefly before turning to a particular problematic reading that may be categorized as a significant substantive issue, in that, if true, would seem to falsify much if not all of Nietzsche’s account regarding the formation of guilt as presented in essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals. The issue pertains to Nietzsche’s supposed Lamarckianism.

The question, “Was Nietzsche a Lamarckian?”, poses severe problems for Genealogy1 if answered affirmatively. For if Nietzsche underpins his genealogy of memory, bad conscience, and guilt on a false scientific theory, then it vitiates the entire Genealogy as a whole. Thus, those Nietzscheans who hold that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian of one stripe or another, most notably Richard Schacht, swallow a poisoned pill of sorts. I demonstrate that artificial and unconscious selection can perform the same work as Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, and yet are entirely consistent with Neo-Darwinism and are, therefore, likely to be true. I draw on recent work in the field of anthropology such as James C. Scott’s brilliant book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, to show that the practices of animal husbandry, as developed in the Neolithic Period of approximately 12,000 years ago, are directly applicable to Nietzsche’s descriptions of “human husbandry” as advanced in sections 1–12 of essay two of The Genealogy. Thus, a potential knock-out blow pertaining to the truthfulness of Nietzsche’s genealogical accounts is side-stepped.

Although the foundation for Nietzsche’s accounts of memory, bad conscience, and guilt now rests on solid ground, the effort to warrant Nietzsche’s theory did not come about without sacrifice. Principally, Nietzsche’s internalization hypothesis—“all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward”—appears to be the offering on the proverbial interpretative altar. I argue that the law still applies to the formation of subjectivity, but that the necessary structures of said subjectivity such as culture-serving memory and docility—both of which were engendered by artificial and unconscious selective pressures—laid the preparatory groundwork for the kind of introjection of affect Nietzsche develops in section GM: II, 16. In brief, the scope of Nietzsche’s internalization hypothesis narrows; it is a warranted theory as it applies to the psychology of humans and not to the “semi-animals” Nietzsche describes our earliest ancestors to be. Thus, while my interpretation of GM: II diverges, at times, from the letter of the text, it remains true to the spirit of The Genealogy and the genealogical method.

2. Genealogy under Attack: Three Critiques

Nietzsche presents three interconnected accounts of morality in his classic work On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Each “story” attempts to explain the origin of some contemporary, feeling-infused behavior. The first gives a rendering of the origin of good and evil intuitions along with the behavior that governs said intuitions. The second involves the origin of guilt and the corresponding ways in which humans assuage guilt. The third and final genealogy explains the origin of the ascetic ideal, a seemingly contradictory way of life, at least from the standpoint of the dominant moral and motivational theory of Nietzsche’s time, psychological hedonism.2 Nietzsche’s genealogies are gripping, and appear to the casual reader to offer penetrating insights into the history and formatting of the human condition.

Nietzsche’s stories, however, are the subject of uncompromising criticisms, sometimes with just cause in the secondary literature. In sum, there are three kinds of criticism: (1) substantive, (2) methodological, and (3) semantic. Turning to the substantive, there are two groups within this camp. The first group includes those scholars who question the historical accuracy and plausibility regarding the details of Nietzsche’s accounts of morality while arguing that the general features are correct.3 This paper is one that may be included within this camp. The second group is far more critical. They claim that Nietzsche’s hypotheses, while imaginative and entertaining, are, more often than not, wild conjectures with little if any historical and archaeological evidence supporting them. Always looking for an opportunity to castigate alternative accounts of human evolution than those purported by Darwin, Dennett as the most compelling member of this camp thinks that “Nietzsche’s Just So Stories are terrific … They are a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy”.4 Still, other scholars who straddle both camps make the further assertion that Nietzsche’s conclusions are predicated on what we now know to be false theories inflected and infected as they were by peculiar 19th-century prejudices.5 The upshot of this critique, as a whole, is that Nietzsche’s genealogical conclusions appear dubious and indeed sophomoric when compared to the sort of work conducted by contemporary ethical naturalists whose own research is informed by the very best archaeological, historical, psychological, neuroscientific, biological, and linguistic evidence.6

The second kind of attack most notably seen in the works of Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and others critiques genealogy from a performative standpoint.7 One rather strong and philosophically interesting reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals suggests that the central thesis of the work is to persuade its readers that all tools for rational thinking are constructions of power. This interpretation of the Genealogy is a thought-provoking yet rather problematic reading because, if rationality, en toto, is merely a product of a peculiar confluence of power, then standards of reason, warrant, and justification are themselves nothing more than emergent epiphenomena emanating from a regime of force. This supposition, if true, would entail that different regimes or employing Foucault’s term dispositifs (power/knowledge apparatus) would have dissimilar and incommensurable definitions of rationality, justification, etc. The upshot is that all statements, genealogical or otherwise, that purport to be true cannot be decoupled from evaluative claims. A genealogy’s commitment, then, to present a more truthful account regarding the origin of some moral phenomenon—assuming this is what a genealogy purports to show—is either meant to be ironic or is a flat-out performative contradiction.8

The third type of criticism, I shall call semantic. Robert Brandom argues in his recent Howison Lectures entitled “Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity” that genealogists are naïve semanticists. Genealogists believe that normative thinking, as it relates to all forms of epistemic inquiry and language use, is reducible to natural causes.9 However, this reduction, Brandom explains, is hopelessly misguided. Concepts, cannot be, in the words of Nietzsche, “bred-up” (heranzuzüchten) over a period of time. Concepts appear, according to Brandom, all at once or not at all. Through Brandom’s lens, genealogies are, therefore, neither epistemically neutral in that “they count no more and no less”, as Habermas put it, than the traditional accounts of the moral phenomena they seek to either replace or impugn, but are, rather, semantically incoherent. Nietzsche’s “story” of the origin of guilt and Foucault’s “tale” regarding the rise of the carceral regime are not even useful fictions.10 They are, instead, meaningless.

Defenders of Nietzsche (or Foucault for that matter) respond to the above challenges in one of three ways. The first response one might call the “starting point” defense and is typically employed by those who take umbrage with the first grouping of criticisms as stated above. The claim made here is that Nietzsche’s genealogies are merely springboards to a proper naturalized investigation of religious/moral accounts of some psychological phenomenon and, therefore, Nietzsche’s conclusions should not be treated as “the final word” regarding a particular inquiry.11 Genealogies, then, should not be considered true per se, but truthful in that Nietzsche, at times, recognizes that his hypotheses are defeasible and, therefore, empirically falsifiable.12

The second line of response is what I shall refer to as the rhetoric defense; genealogies are not any more nor any less truthful than the more traditional account they critique, but nor do they claim to be. Nietzschean perspectivism, for example, evacuates the very possibility of taking up a non-subjective stance on the question of morality and, therefore, the question, “Are Nietzsche’s genealogies true?”, represents a category mistake. Nietzsche undertakes the investigation in the history of western morality with interest and purpose and indicates this in the very subtitle of On the Genealogy: A Polemic (Eine Streitschrift). Nietzsche’s genealogies are a kind of modern ephexis; they are tactics aimed at disabusing the reader of a belief once held to be true by demonstrating that the traditional stance regarding the origin of some subject matter is rife with problems. They ask that the reader hold both narratives (e.g., the Christian account of guilt and Nietzsche’s) in a state of equipollence or suspension of judgment.13 “Philology, Nietzsche writes, as ephexis in interpretation: whether it concerns books, newspaper article, destinies, or facts about the weather—not to mention the salvation of the soul”.14 Genealogies, then, are not self-supported but are dependent, parasitic as it were on a more traditional account of morality, which serve as their host compromising the epistemic health of the established narrative under investigation.15

The third group of genealogy’s defenders holds that the starting point and rhetoric models take a rather limited view of genealogy’s intended purpose. They rest on the assumption that genealogies either counter some false narrative regarding the development of some self-stultifying emotion, such as guilt, for example, by offering a true or more truthful account of the emotion in question or by denying the very possibility of truth by claiming that all investigations including genealogical are shot through with power. However, these two options are rather myopic so hold the defenders of claim three. There is another possibility; Nietzsche’s genealogies are not meant to be read as ideology critiques at all but are something else entirely. The purpose of ideology critique is to discover and criticize distorted forms of communication. In order for this type of emancipatory discourse to be successful, readers must recognize that they suffer from false consciousness/neurosis and that there is a way out from said suffering. Suffering from false consciousness may be defined as follows: (i) an individual has false beliefs which legitimize oppressive social institutions, and (ii) an individual is also blocked in some way from recognizing the false beliefs they hold (through the media, the educational system, repressive sexual laws, etc).16 Essential to the ideological critique model is the assumption that one may cut through distorted forms of communication whether of the class type as with Marx or the psychic a la Freud, provided that one has the correct conduit to the truth.17 Ideology critique acts as a sieve of sorts promising the reader the pure truth undistorted by class or id investment.

Genealogy, under this third reading, however, militates against the very nature of such promises. In contrast to ideology critique, a successful genealogy reveals to its readers that they suffer not from false consciousness, as that would presuppose that there is a true picture of the world to be had, but restricted consciousness.18 Restricted consciousness may be defined as where an individual is captured by a picture of reality which is neither true nor false in itself but is taken to be the only frame of reference in which questions regarding the truth and falsity of various issues may be legitimately asked.19 The purpose of genealogy, in general, these authors claim to free readers from restricted self-consciousness.20

Regarding the third type of criticism, the semantic, there does not seem to be much work in the secondary literature addressing the issue given the novelty of the critique. However, one might attack Brandom’s characterization of genealogy as overly simplistic, relying, as his critique does, on a rigid division between quid facti and quid juris.21 In brief, Brandom argues that genealogists believe that the propositional content of some belief is reducible to its causal etiology. In sum, the genealogist attempts to show that the cloak of normativity that swaddles the world to borrow a facon de parler from Brandom himself can be removed. “A normative significance”—writes Brandom—“is imposed on a non-normative world, like a cloak thrown over its nakedness, by agents forming preferences, issuing orders, praising and blaming, esteeming and assessing”.22 This practice is misguided, so Brandom holds. One cannot rethread this cloak as a motley patch-like quilt. Concepts, whether ethical or epistemic, appear all at once or do not appear at all—they cannot be “bred-up” (heranzuzüchten) to employ Nietzsche’s phrase, from ancient, less complex practices as genealogy as a philosophical method implies.

I briefly examine the above types of criticism of genealogy to show the tendentious and problematic features of Nietzsche’s historical method. It is evident that solving one kind of criticism, therefore, does not inure genealogy as a method, nor the contents of a genealogical investigation from other classes of unfavorable assessment. Nevertheless, I view the substantive critique to be the most challenging reproach and, accordingly, analyze it here. To take on a substantive criticism of genealogy means to examine the “nitty gritty” details of a particular genealogical investigation. That is to say, since a substantive criticism of genealogical narrative attacks a specific account regarding the origin of some moral event, one must examine the tenets of that account to deflect the charge.

In accordance with the above aim, I examine two recent articles discussing Nietzsche’s Lamarckism: one pro the other con. In support of Lamarck’s influence on Nietzsche is Richard Schacht’s paper “Nietzsche and Lamarckism”. Against a Lamarckian interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in general, as well as the passages Schacht employs to confirm Nietzsche’s Lamarckism, in particular, is Maudmarie Clark’s “Nietzsche Was No Lamarckian”.23

Schacht argues that Nietzsche’s Lamarckian tendencies can be found in many of his published works, including The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil.24 Passages from these works do not concern me here, as I am interested in The Genealogy in particular and not Nietzsche’s oeuvre more generally, even though many of the same inquiries investigated more fully in The Genealogy are treated in these earlier works. My concern, as indicated above, is in attempting to blunt some of the substantive criticisms raised against Nietzsche’s conclusions as found in all three genealogies but, in particular, his findings regarding the outright formation of memory and consciousness or (only its enhancement and development), a point about which Nietzsche is not entirely clear.

Moreover, Clark admirably demonstrates how each passage quoted from Nietzsche’s works published before the Genealogy are readily interpretable in a non-Lamarckian way.25 No, the debate I wish to focus on has to do with the passages Schacht deploys, mainly from the second essay of the Genealogy, in an attempt to demonstrate Lamarck’s influence on Nietzsche. My main focus is on those passages that purport to explain the preparatory stages for the formation of more advanced concepts and feelings such as guilt, promise-making, and the bad conscience. These passages do appear as prima facie evidence that Nietzsche adopts Lamarckian theories. They are the strongest pieces of evidence Schacht submits to prove his case but, remarkably, Clark devotes a mere paragraph to call into question the plethora of sections Schacht marshals forth. From a philological perspective, my accounting of these passages, hopefully, will put the final nail in the coffin regarding Nietzsche’s Lamarckian tendencies.

Although the debate in Nietzsche circles regarding the German philosopher’s alleged Lamarckism may appear to be of only philological interest, it is not. Indeed, if Schacht is right, then, by his own admission, his is a pyrrhic victory of sorts, for Lamarckism is considered to be a false theory regarding the explanation of how and why organisms evolve. Thus, if Nietzsche’s account of guilt in the second essay relies on Lamarck’s views then so too his own conclusions must be vitiated as well, and the substantive critique against, arguably, Nietzsche’s most convincing and profound and fruitful genealogical story goes through.

My primary purpose in this article then is philosophical and epistemic; I address the sections that Schacht employs to demonstrate that a non-Larmackian interpretation of these passages and, therefore, non-falsified empirical explanation for these historical events is possible. I show that much of Nietzsche’s description regarding the domestication and breeding of individuals in the initial stages of civilization may be explained via traditional forms of animal husbandry, (a process with which Nietzsche would have been quite familiar). What Nietzsche did not seem to know was that this practice of domestication combines two evolutionary mechanisms: artificial and unconscious selection. These mechanisms perform the same work as Lamarck’s theory and yet are features of Neo-Darwinism and are, therefore, likely to be true.

After demonstrating the likely process that accounts for Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the pathogenic pathway of bad conscience and guilt, I conclude by examining one final interpretative problem—the internalization hypothesis. The hypothesis is a key component of Nietzsche’s philosophy of psychology and, therefore, is an integral piece of Genealogy. The problem is that my account seems to diminish the role this hypothesis plays if one accepts a Darwinian explanation of domestication. I respond by arguing that one may save Nietzsche’s psychology of internalization by demonstrating that it appears later in the causal etiology of negative feelings (e.g., bad conscience and guilt) than Nietzsche initially supposed. The internalization and subsequent reinterpretation of affect carve out the required structures of subjectivity only when a culture-serving faculty of memory appears in pre-human history.

My reading then falls under a substantivist model. I attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s accounts by reinterpreting the evidence Nietzsche collected and utilized in a way such that most of the details of his theory are likely to be true. Neo-Darwinism, as the marriage of selection pressures (whether natural, artificial, and/or unconscious) and Mendelian genetics is consistent and mutually conciliant with the general picture of human development Nietzsche puts forward in GM: II.

3. Was Nietzsche a Lamarckian?

There is some debate within the secondary literature regarding Nietzsche’s indebtedness or lack thereof to Lamarck.26 There are two problems in interpreting Nietzsche as a Lamarckian. Firstly, there is only one passage in Nietzsche’s published work where Lamarck is explicitly mentioned (section 99 of The Gay Science). There are, in addition, only two references in unpublished notes within the KSA [ 68 NF-1885, 34 [73]27. Secondly and more disconcerting, Nietzsche provides little clarity where Lamarck is mentioned directly. This is a point I do not wish to belabor as Clark, in my opinion, definitively showed the complexity of section 99 where Nietzsche directly references Lamarck by name.28 Like her, I think the section is too convoluted to be used as an interpretive touchstone.29 Thus, the best means of proving Nietzsche’s Lamarckian heritage, therefore, is to adopt an indirect method. Before analyzing those passages Schacht presses into service to prove his case, the first issue to be clear about is of course what Lamarckism is and, if Nietzsche is a Lamarckian, is he faithful tout court to the Frenchman or a heretic of some sort?

Starting with Schacht’s notion of Lamarckism, he writes the following:

“I am referring to the idea that it is possible for characteristics acquired by individual creatures of some type (through intensive application, however prompted) to be biologically transmitted in some degree to their progeny—a process that, if repeated over a number of generations, can result in significant changes in the descendant tokens of the type, and may, therefore, be the explanation of the development of many traits that are now to be observed”.30

Is this Lamarckism or some bastardized version thereof? To answer this question, it is incumbent to examine Lamarck’s work. Perhaps the best summary of the French botanist’s principles of evolution is given by Lamarck himself in the article “On The Influence of Circumstances on The Actions and Habits of Animals, and That of the Actions and Habits of Living Bodies, as Causes Which Modify Their Organization”.31 Lamarck, thankfully, summarizes the main principles of his theory in this clearly written article. I quote all three in full below.

“3d. That every new want necessitating new actions to satisfy it requires, from the animal which experiences it, more frequent employment of some of its parts of which it made less use before. Thereby are developed and enlarged considerably the new parts which the wants have insensibly created in it by the efforts of its ‘interior sentiment’. This is the question, as I will presently prove by known facts. To arrive at a knowledge of the true causes of so many diverse forms and so many different habits, of which known animals offer us examples, it is necessary to consider that the infinitely diversified circumstances, but slowly changing, which the animals of each race are continually encountering, produce for each of them new wants and necessarily changes in their habits”.32

What is interesting in this passage is Lamarck’s notion that new wants spring from within the animal itself. Thus, to use Lamarck’s giraffe example, the want of eating leaves situated on high treetops led to the more frequent employment of the giraffe’s ancestor stretching its neck to reach these leaves. Presumably, the desire of eating such leaves, perhaps because they were tastier than the leaves on lower branches, led to the gradual development and lengthening of the giraffe’s neck.33 The chief principle, however, contained in this passage is one, unfortunately, that Schacht neglects to mention; interior sentiment or want is the true driver of organism evolution. Modifications of an organism are produced because the animal has new desires. However, the passages that Schacht utilizes in the Genealogy show that something else produces wants in the human being, namely, those “blond beasts of prey”, who laid their “terrible claws upon a populace”.34 It was these warrior-artists—as Nietzsche calls them—that laid the tracks for the formation of the modern human.35 Indeed, as Schacht puts,

“It is essential to Nietzsche’s account here that the phenomenon of ‘bad conscience’ must have originated in an abrupt transformation of the conditions of existence of a human population, and that this must have been imposed upon that population by another group, which ‘went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals [bis in solcher rohstoff von Volk und halbthier] was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed [geformt]’”.

(GM ii:17)36

The human being’s wants are, at least initially, exogenous and not endogenous to it; they are fabricated by other creatures with specific goals in mind.

The next principle is what Lamarck refers to as the First Law. He writes,

“In every animal which has not passed the time of its development, the frequent and sustained employment of an organ gradually strengthens it, develops and enlarges it, and gives it power proportional to the duration of its use; whilst the constant disuse of a like organ weakens it, insensibly deteriorates it, progressively reduces its functions, and finally causes it to disappear”.37

The continued use of an organ further develops, enhances, and most importantly enlarges that organ. These three traits Lamarck grouped together, calling them the “complexifying force” of life. Yet this principle is one that is not mentioned by Schacht. Now, of course, Nietzsche attempts to show that our animal instincts are restricted due to the straitjacket of civilization. Yet these drives are not sloughed off only to be peeled away as the First Law would suggest (assuming, of course, that we read the “evolution of drives” as being materially equivalent with organ development which is perhaps another interpretative problem in using Lamarck to underwrite Nietzsche’s account); they instead turn inward. “I regard the bad conscience”—Nietzsche writes in essay two section 16 of the Genealogy, a section I return to later—“as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace”.38 However, on the other hand, if Nietzsche is a Lamarckian, then we should see a corresponding increase in the size of our brain and a corresponding enlargement regarding the power and scope of our mental faculties. Moreover, although Nietzsche does, of course, acknowledge humanity’s increasing technological mastery over the world, there is, however, ample proof to suggest that reason en toto (consciousness, reflection, memory, rationality, etc.) never developed fully.39 “Man like every living being thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part”.40 Some wants increase our desire for self-flagellation, broadly construed, but this want is one produced by those warrior-artists, those blonde beasts of prey responsible for the creation of both civilization and subjects. They do not come from internal sentiment as Lamarck suggests.

What Lamarck calls the Second Law is the principle typically identified as truly Lamarckian.

“All that nature acquires or loses in individuals by the influence of circumstances to which the race has been exposed for a long time, and in consequence by the influence of the predominate employment of such organ, or by the influence of disuse of such part, she preserves by generation, among new individuals which spring from it, providing the acquired changes be common to both sexes, or to those which have produced new individuals”.41

It is this passage that supposedly reveals Nietzsche’s purported Lamarckism, according to Schacht. What needs to be examined is if the preparatory ground for later normative and conative developments such as memory, conscience, bad conscience, promise-making, and guilt can be formulated in terms of cultural inheritance. If they cannot, and Nietzsche holds to the Second Law, he may yet not be a full-fledged Lamarckian. Darwin, it is important to note, “directly accepted Lamarck’s theory of ‘inheritance of acquired characters’ in the ‘Origin of Species’ (in 1859) in the chapter ‘Laws of variation’, under the sub-heading ‘the effect of use and disuse”.42 One may adopt Lamarck’s Second Law while rejecting, what ostensibly appears to be equally important, principles peculiar to the French botanist.

Thus, the question “Was Nietzschean a Lamarckian” is ill-phrased. Nietzsche rejects at least one aspect of Lamarck’s thesis, namely, complexification. However, more importantly, Nietzsche is at pains to show that our wants do not spring from interior sentiment at all but are artifices of sorts; they consist of primal emotions that are blocked from their natural forms of expression. They are twisted alchemical mixtures of affect and interpretation. A more precise question is “Does Nietzsche adopt Lamarck’s Second Law (hereafter the Inheritability Thesis), i.e., that characteristics acquired by an organism during its life-cycle can be transmitted biologically to its offspring?” In what follows, I show that artificial and unconscious selection can do the same work as Lamarck’s Second Law. Utilizing the notion of animal husbandry, construed rather broadly, has significant advantages over the Inheritably Thesis; the major advantage is that it is likely to be true. However, there are also two interpretative advantages. Firstly, “human husbandry” is a better fit with Nietzsche’s well-known known remarks on breeding (Zuchten) that appear throughout his oeuvre. Secondly, in utilizing artificial and unconscious selection as lenses through which to view key passages of the Genealogy, a novel understanding of the real purpose regarding the erection of walls and torture in early civilizations can be gleaned.

4. The Time-Crunch Problem: Evidence for The Inheritably Thesis in The Genealogy of Morals?

By far the strongest evidence for Nietzsche’s supposed Lamarckism, constrained as it now is to mean a minimalist construal of the Second Law, can be found in the passages quoted perceptively by Schacht from the second essay of the Genealogy. Prima facie, it is incredibly difficult to interpret these passages as suggesting that the development/enhancement of certain features of humanity such as memory, consciousness, and the bad conscience is the product of some non-biological, i.e., cultural mechanism. They appear, rather, as characteristics acquired directly by some organism and then passed down to subsequent generations. These traits, then, are employed as scaffolds, bred-up (heranzuzüchten) to use Nietzsche’s terminology to support more complex concepts/practices. In addition, these three acquired traits are presented as necessary components to produce Nietzsche’s new, more intricate, and thoroughly normative creature “man”, now defined as the only animal who has the right to make promises.

What makes these passages all the more critical (and convincing as evidence in support of Nietzsche’s Lamarckism) is when they are placed within the larger framework of the Genealogy as a whole. The purpose of the Genealogy is to provide a naturalistic account for the development of morality per se and subsequent proliferation of moralities. This account, moreover, is one that does not invoke nor appeal to the supernatural (whether construed as the Christian God or any other deity). What we are dealing with, then, is an “animal” who grows a conscience—a moral “organ”, as it were—that acts, at times, against the animal’s natural, selfish instincts.43 By viewing Lamarckism with this background in mind, specific questions come into sharper relief. The first and foremost of these is “How did this moral organ come into existence?” There are an indefinite number of possible solutions to this question, but I wish to examine three leading contenders. The first answer is in keeping with a strict natural selection reading which, by and large, would assert that the neural and conative structures responsible for altruism, to take but one example of morality, were already in place prior to the evolution of the human species. Such structures were then culturally and religiously reinterpreted in accordance with the peculiarities and requirements of the geographic region in which humans found themselves. One rather robust version of this Neo-Darwinian account of morality is the position taken up by Michael Ruse. Ruse attempts to perform an end-run around Hume’s is/ought distinction by arguing that our genetic make-up, as confirmed by the empirical sciences (an “is” discourse), is not something we can shake-off. He writes, “To be blunt, my Darwinism says that substantive morality is a kind of illusion, put in place by our genes, in order to make us good social cooperators. Thus, we are ethical because we feel that acting ethically is the right thing to do”.44 Feelings of wanting to help others are simply expressions of some as yet to be identified gene or genes. When we act ethically, we do so not because of a Kantian intention, Aristotelian virtue, or Utilitarian equation, but because of some ethical gene “kicks in”. The upshot of Ruse’s biologism is that one cannot help but be altruistic broadly construed if one possesses the “ethical” gene(s).

This model is obviously one that Nietzsche cannot accept and not just because it relies on Mendelian genetics, a conception of biology that comes to prominence long after Nietzsche’s death. No, the principal reason Nietzsche cannot account for altruism, guilt, or any other moral feeling in terms of natural selection is that natural selection requires millions of years of selective pressures being applied to our early non-human ancestors. Nietzsche, however, is under a “time-crunch”; he wants to show that the seemingly distinctive features of human nature such as bad conscience, guilt, and agency are the products of a sudden, violent, and rapid process—civilization.

However, the best evidence at our disposal suggests that civilizations (defined as communities with walls and tax collection) began roughly 5000 years ago. Indeed, even if we expand civilization to mean the human Domus, we only tack on another 4000 or so years. This “time-crunch” as I am calling it means that Nietzsche requires a mechanism (whether he knows it or not) that can account for the radical kind of organismal evolution we humans went through in the proverbial blink of an eye when compared to a process like that of natural selection. Nietzsche’s question that opens up his inquiry to this evolutionary process, “How can one create a memory for the human animal?”, becomes all the more perplexing and challenging when viewed within the larger framework of time noted above. Two other contenders that may account for such a rapid change and, thus, solve the time-crunch problem are Larmarck’s Inheritability Thesis and the twin selective mechanisms of artificial and unconscious selection.

It is the unarticulated temporal background, as noted above, that informs Schacht’s position. It is the time-crunch problem that presents Schacht with one desperate solution, namely, Larmackism. It is the time-crunch problem that leaves Clark, as we shall come to discover, with so little to say.

In what follows, I show why Schacht is convinced that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian. I examine those passages in the Genealogy, which he and (other scholars) believe avow Nietzsche’s Lamarckian leanings. In the section that follows, I demonstrate that the very same passages that Schacht presses into service in support of Larmarckism are consistent with Darwinian theories of selection of the non-natural kind. I further buttress Darwin’s views by explaining the genetic underpinnings of these mechanisms demonstrating, in effect, that Darwin has hit upon the right mechanism, to explain rapid, phenotypic changes in organisms, although he would be clueless that an animal’s genotype engenders phenotypic expressions. Analogously, I believe that Nietzsche too hits upon the right drivers for rapid organismal change, namely walls and “torture”, but misinterprets these forces and ironically commits the same fallacy of presentism he chastises the English Utilitarians for perpetrating. Thus, just as the Utilitarians conflate the drama of an event, in this case punishment, with procedures of that same event, Nietzsche makes the same mistake in thinking that ancient forms of torture were meant to “deter”. The more likely scenario is that torture was a culling device in the early Domus and that such bodily practices became infused with the narrative of deterrence much, much later.

I now quote the passages taken from essay two of The Genealogy that demonstrate Nietzsche’s Larmarckianism, at least according to Schacht. I examine these passages (along with Schacht’s commentary) in order to show that, on the surface, there is much to recommend an interpretation of GM:II along the lines of Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis.

“The task of breeding up [heranzuzüchten] an animal that may [darf] promise […] requires as a condition and preparation the more immediate task of first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable [die nähere Aufgabe in sich, den Menschen zuerst bis zu einem gewissen Grade nothwendig, einförmig, gleich unter Gleichen, regelmässig und folglich berechenbar zu machen]”.45

Schacht interprets Nietzsche as suggesting that the uniformity of human beings was produced via a combination of torture and new physical surroundings (e.g., walls surrounding early communities) which restricted the mobility of our early ancestors. According to Schacht, then,

“A part of it (the explanation of our new found ‘essence’) would appear to be the idea that the application of ‘fearful means’ of ‘torture’ over a very long period of time eventually altered the character of the dispositions we start out with. So. Nietzsche famously writes, ‘With the aid of such images and procedures, one finally remembers five or six ‘I will not’s’ […]—and it was indeed with the aid of this kind of memory that one at last came ‘to reason’! Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’!”

(GM II:3)46

A combination of purely non-discursive elements (torture, images of those being tortured, and physical enclosures) was used to traumatize early humans over numerous generations until, miraculously, a generation inherited (via Lamarck’s second law), five or six of the prohibitions created by the first Ur community comprising what Nietzsche calls warrior-artists.47

It should be noted that the overt Larmarckian interpretation of this passage is one that is not just unique to Schacht; it is also upheld by John Richardson. In regard to GMII 3, Richardson argues, “Consider his famous account in GM ii of how a ‘memory’ was ‘burned into’ pre-civilized humans: this memory is fixed not by selection of those who can remember, but by the acquisition of pain associations that are inheritable”.48 Richardson cites other passages from Nietzsche’s work (most notably GS 143 and BGE 213) that support a Larmackian reading.49 All this leaves Richardson to conclude that, Nietzsche “… carries much further a Larmarckism that Darwin also accepts, but uses much less”.50

The effect of these restrictive conditions created something new, “man”, the sick animal. The drives for hunting, adventure, and war in our early ancestors were never extirpated but exapted. They remained ever present, ever growing, but, because these drives were now prevented from expressing themselves naturally, outwardly, they turned inward carving out the features we typically associate with subjectivity, such as a robust capacity to remember, consciousness, agency, and later guilt. Nietzsche’s explanation for what he calls the “internalization of man” serves both as proof for his conjecture and as a general psychological law: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man; thus, it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’”.51

Daniel Conway, in his deeply insightful and illuminating commentary on the Genealogy, emphasizes the importance of the above section as the cornerstone of Nietzsche’s explanation for the formation of guilt and, really, all psychological realities. Conway argues that Nietzsche presents five claims to the reader for further consideration. These five claims are as follows:

(1)

Human psychology is simply a complicated instance of animal psychology;

(2)

The basic processes of animal psychology are best understood as articulations of unconscious drives and instincts;

(3)

It would be possible for a species to survive, and adapt to the enforced introjection of its native instinct;

(4)

A naturalistic account can be provided of how this enforced introjection might have taken place;

(5)

Culture or civilization is not a permanent fixture of the human condition, but a developmental stage that human beings might yet outgrow.52

This reading, as a whole, supports Schacht’s contention. Notice that closer inspection of claims 2, 3, and 4, require a Lamarckian reading; to proffer an explanation where the enforced introjection of an animal’s native instincts (via torture and enclosure) to account for the development of human psychology is to provide a purely naturalistic, non-cultural narrative. These two features reformat the prior animal psychology of humans into its more sophisticated form today, but there remains a vestige of the original primeval ancestry because “… culture and civilization is not a permanent fixture of the human condition” but, by implication, torture and enclosure are permanent.

Brian Leiter’s interpretation of these passages would also serve as evidence for a Larmackian reading. In commenting on “the technique of mneumonics” in GM: II, 3, to create the preparatory groundwork for the capacity of promise-making, namely, memory, Leiter notes,

“What bears emphasizing here is that we are discussing a phenomenon of pre-history: we are discussing what the animal man had to be like before regular civilized intercourse with his fellows (the advantages of society) would even be possible. That means, of course, that the phenomenon we are discussing—the development of conscience and, in particular, bad conscience—predates the events discussed in the First Essay of the Genealogy”.53

(My italics)

From the above passages, it would appear that Conway and Leiter are unprofessed Larmarckians, as the only other mechanism to account for the radical formatting of humans (like the cultural transmission of practices) is simply non-existent at this stage of pre-human history.

Moreover and just to be absolutely clear to his readers what he means by “soul”, in case one might suspect an interpretative overreach of the above passage, Nietzsche seems to double down on his Lamarckian explanation regarding the acquirement of mental characteristics via inherited trauma. He continues, “The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth and height in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited”.54 (My italics). Notice that Nietzsche’s explanation for the creation of agency or “soul” as the capacity to reason, plan, denying impulses and forming intentions, is a process that is best understood causally; the relationship between agency and the completely mechanical, physical reigning in of desires is best expressed as a ratio. There is a direct equivalence between the means and measures of torture along with the restriction of movement and one’s depth and breadth of agential formation. This process of internalization, which continued unabated for, presumably many generations, eventually led to the social illness of humankind, the bad conscience.

Descriptions such as these, along with Nietzsche’s very clearly stated goal of explaining the mnemonics of memory and later consciousness, raises a significant problem for Clark’s overall solution which is to provide a cultural interpretation of the above phenomena in contrast to Schacht’s interpretative schema. However, how, one might ask, can these creatures who are so flighty, so impulsive, so without an understanding of self and, most importantly, with such an impoverished capacity to remember form the rudiments of any social fabric resembling customs and traditions?

Indeed, so biting is this question that Clark does not even attempt to provide an alternative interpretation of these passages. Below is the total response she gives to the plethora of primary source evidence Schacht extracts from The Genealogy in support of his thesis. Her response is a mere four sentences.

“I end with a short comment on GM. Schacht reads all sorts of passages from GM as revealing Nietzsche’s Lamarckianism. But he devotes his account of the book to presenting its familiar story, especially concerning the origins of promising, conscience, and bad conscience. What he doesn’t do is to argue for his account of these, for example, that what Nietzsche calls ‘conscience’ actually develops historically before ‘bad conscience’, or for his assumption that features of GM’s story make sense only given the assumption of Lamarckianism”.55

It is true that Schacht neither provides respective accounts of promising, bad conscience or conscience nor and, just as importantly, the etiological order and subsequent causal coordination of these developments. The reason for this lacuna, in my judgment, is twofold: (1) the historical and psychological coordination between said concepts is contentious in the secondary literature; and (2) an explanation of each idea, along with an historical account regarding its development and an explanation of the historical relationship between all three notions, requires, clearly, a standalone book and not an article.56 What is clear, nevertheless, is that Nietzsche sought to explain the preliminary groundwork for the possibility of such notions and, that, viewing the passages in question through a Schachtian–Lamarckism lens, within the framework of the time-crunch problem (and in the absence of some competing theory), it is difficult to interpret Nietzsche’s account of psychological trait inheritance as one that is merely culturally acquired. Even so, I present Schacht’s evidence in a stronger light, by focusing on the foundational requirements of the three concepts/feelings, namely, memory.

Nietzsche’s account regarding the formation of culture-serving memory as the necessary precursor of promise-making, bad conscience, and the like begins in section three of the second essay. There Nietzsche writes,

“The worse man’s memory (Gedächtniss) has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of his customs; the severity of the penal code portrays perhaps the clearest example of the significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness (Vergesslichkeit) and to impose a few primitive demands of social existence as present realities upon these slaves of momentary (Augenblicks-Sklaven) affect and desire”.57

(Nietzsche’s italics)

In the next paragraphs, Nietzsche goes on to list a number of horrific, and most importantly deathly forms of torture. The common attribute that all the tortures Nietzsche visits here in section three feature the demise of the supplicant creature. The fact that these tortures end in the death of their sufferer is an important point that seems to be glossed over in the secondary literature, but it is one to which I return. When we combine this fragment with the passage just above it, where it is implied that the results of the procedures of primeval torture are somehow infused within modern humans, a picture of Larmackian inheritance comes into sharper focus. In GM: II, 3, Nietzsche declares, “One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective. The past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breathes upon us and rise up in us whenever we become ‘serious’”.58 It is trying to read these passages as anything but an avowal of torture being utilized to improve the memory of humans on a phylogenetic scale. The harrowing and distressful feelings we, as modern humans, are all too familiar with were first engendered because of the painful practices our ancestors experienced. These practices tether ancient feelings associated with torture such as weight, pressure, and physical discomfiture, to new, complex valuations found in advanced societies such as piety, reverence, or indeed any action that requires a measure of seriousness.

Torture, combined with enclosure, produces both the distinctive, powerful, and seminal type of memory human beings now enjoy along with the first remnants of what religious types, such as shamans, would call a “soul”.

“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly (Aussen) turn inward—this is what I call the internalization (Verinnerlichung) of man; thus, it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’ (Seele). The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, (Tiefe) breadth, (Breite), and height (Höhe), in the same measure as outward discharge, was inhibited”.59

When one takes the full measure of the passages above, they appear so obviously Larmarckian that it is challenging to view the thoughts and feelings Nietzsche claims we experience as simply the product of cultural transmission. Why, for example, is it that the unspeakable terror of the past where promises were tied to life and death is infused in our current concepts and actions where the stakes of keeping or breaking promises are not nearly so as high? Secondly, the ancient, bodily practices of torture and physical punishment Nietzsche describes are established to create a hearty capacity of memory in early humans. Furthermore, a fecund and formidable capacity of recall must be the sine qua non for the establishment of a culture, however broadly construed. One cannot recite the songs, stories, beliefs, and practices of culture no matter how simply construed without the aid of memory. Is there, then, an alternative narrative of which to avail ourselves? To answer this question, we must first play closer attention to the standard interpretation of the list of punishments Nietzsche provides in the section.

The standard interpretation suggests that the nine “punishments” Nietzsche lists denote entirely mechanical forms of torture devised and employed to prevent early humans from escaping primeval enwalled communities.60 After cataloguing a number of particularly gruesome punishments, Nietzsche declares, “With the aid of such images and procedures, one finally remembers five or six ‘I will not’s, in regard to which one had given one’s promise so as to participate in the advantages of society—and indeed it was indeed with the aid of this kind of memory that one at last came ‘to reason’!”61 However, there is a key element in the list of tortures that was missed: each torture results in the death of the victim! Consider the list of old German punishments Nietzsche compiles (as analogical forms of torture used in the earliest civilizations) to indicate the fearful means required to instill a few “I will not”s in the very first human settlements.

“Stoning (the sagas already have millstones drop on the head of guilty), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of the German genius in the realm of punishment!), piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling by horses (‘quartering’), boiling of the criminal in oil or wine (still employed in the 14th and 15th centuries), the popular flaying alive (‘cutting straps’), cutting flesh from the chest and also the practice of smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him the blazing sun for the flies”.62

If the above gruesome punishments are meant to correct the behavior of an early malefactor, then the person so tortured must remain alive to receive the benefit of punishment. All of the so-called punishments (some of which were first recorded in the Middle Ages but were utilized much earlier), however, conclude with the killing of their victim. Nietzsche is guilty of the very same fallacy of historical presentism he levels against the English Utilitarians. Just as he condemns them for thinking that the idea of punishment remains the same from historical epoch to historical epoch, namely, as a means of deterrence, so too Nietzsche argues that deterrence was the main purpose of all those bizarre tortures he describes in section three. This is wrong. Examine for a moment Nietzsche’s account through the lens of Pavlovian behaviorism and ask “Can deathly methods of torture create a conditional behavioral response in its victims when those victims are terminated by that very adverse stimulus they should come to fear?” The clear answer to this question is no because the animal dies from the very negative stimulus it is meant to dread. A causal connection between the thought, “I should not break laws because doing so will lead to my death”, cannot be formed. Indeed, at this stage of civilization, the idea is literally unthinkable because Nietzsche wants to make clear that it was these very procedures of torture that produced a persistent, yet unconscious state of unease, the bad conscience which, over the centuries, became the instinctive, yet subterranean touchstone for religious and moral reinterpretation. Torture or, more precisely, the kinds of torture Nietzsche mentions cannot act as “flight deterrents” in early human communities.

One might respond by claiming that those who saw others punished refrained from committing similar acts for fear of meeting the same fate. While such an inference makes sense once the establishment of a robust kind of memory (one I shall call a culture-serving memory to be discussed below) is firmly in place, it cannot explain the sort of creature depicted by Nietzsche in the first several sections of essay two. It is hard to describe the beings so formatted as anything other than flighty creatures with little in the way of rational reflection, planning activity, or control over their emotions or desires. What we are dealing with Nietzsche thinks is a creature not much, if at all, beyond the “animal”. Indeed, in a prior section, Nietzsche remarks just how cruel the first states were in their need to format early humans into something we would recognize today. Nietzsche writes, “The oldest state, thus, appeared as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals was at last only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed”.63 One may infer that, if someone is tortured and subsequently killed for violating some law, then I too will suffer the fate should I commit a similar act. However, how would such creatures with little capacity to remember, a limited (if any) faculty to draw causal conclusions, completely devoid of the capacity for long-term planning and sans the notion of self-identity, make such an inference? The simple answer is that they could not and, therefore, such practices were not entailed for them. Whom were they entailed for?

The deathly tortures Nietzsche describes in vivid detail were meant for those who felt compelled to flee the “pens” of domestication. It was for those creatures who could not stand to allow their instincts for adventure, war, and hunting to become internalized. Those creatures who were more docile, by nature were predisposed to stay within in the early confines of civilization. Torture only served to eliminate those who were too wild to be tamed. Our early domesticators chose to work with those who could be broken in. Most of our ancestors who could not be tamed, so this interpretation holds, were killed before they had a chance to breed.

Interestingly, there is a corollary between the domestication of proto-human beings and the domestication of sheep. As anthropologist James C. Scott notes, himself a sheep farmer,

“I have always been personally offended when sheep are used as a synonym for cowardly behavior and lack of individuality. We have, for the past 8000 years, been selecting among sheep for tractability, slaughtering first the aggressive ones who broke out of the corral. How dare we, then, turn around and slander a species for some combination of normal herd behavior and precisely those characteristics we selected for?”64

I argue that this same process of corralling and culling particularly adventurous early proto-humans (those who climbed the walls of early civilization) is exactly analogous to Nietzsche’s explanation regarding the formation of memory and consciousness, the pre-conditions for more complex, reflexive relationships such as ethics. Torture neither acted as a deterrent nor instilled a general sense of terror as a result of horrific images, at least not initially, when it came to producing fearful, obedient less forgetful creatures in the first societies.

If this reading is correct, then Nietzsche is just as guilty of the historical presentism fallacy he diagnoses in section 12 of the essay II as the English Utilitarians against whom he rails. Paraphrasing his critique of the English Utilitarians who confuse the sequence of bodily procedures with the drama of punishment, Nietzsche too has naïvely sought out the purpose of torture as either a form of fear inducement and/or deterrence and then “guilelessly placed this purpose at the beginning of the causa fiendi of torture”.65 Nietzsche is guilty, yet again, we might say, following Richardson, of “… blurr[ing] or ignor[ing] the difference between genetic and cultural inheritance”.66

Torture, at least initially, was a just a gratuitous means of exercising the real purpose of said procedures, namely, death. Torture did not enhance our ancestors’ ability to remember, at least not initially. It did serve to create particular memories (especially cause-and-effect relationships, I would argue) once a more responsive, robust capacity to remember was present. A faculty of memory that we would recognize, a “culture-serving memory” I shall call it—which would entail the capacity to absorb and then subsequently follow, laws, practices, and traditions and adhere to cause-and-effect relationships conducive for survival—was formed, then, on a genetic basis and not because of biologically inherited trauma. Assuming Nietzsche is right, namely, that our ancestors were incredibly impulsive creatures with little ability to retain disciplinary lessons, possessing a fuller capability of retention than one’s conspecific (to borrow a term from the animal testing literature) must have been a genetic mutation that had tremendous selective advantages in the early Domus. Humans who could remember five or six “thou shalt not”s would have a higher survival rate than those who could not, since what is tacked onto these pronouncements would have been painful tortures leading to death. These creatures would then pass on the genes that served to underwrite a robust memory as a phenotypic capacity. Furthermore, this interpretation does not vitiate the main thrust of Nietzsche’s thesis, namely, the importance of torture in forming the bad conscience. The bad conscience is an internalization of desires and feelings that typically had an outward expression. However, cultural-serving memory served as the pre-condition for the effectiveness of torture; torture was not a causal instrument in the formation of culture-serving memory per se but became essential in the formation of memories and epistemic relations we, as contemporary humans, would recognize, once the capacity developed more fully. The internalization of the human being began much later than Nietzsche anticipated. The capacity to remember (in a robust sense of this term) has to be first firmly ingrained in early humans, and only gradually and much later in history did deathly tortures become vastly overdetermined serving first to cull, then to please, then, much later, to deter and only more recently to correct

I now turn to another well-known passage from essay one section 11 (and a passage quoted by Schacht) to prove his case for Nietzche’s Lamarckianism.

The meaning of all culture [der Sinn aller Cultur]—at least in the first place and with respect to its original function, is ‘breeding the predatory animal ‘Mensch’ into a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal [aus dem raubthiere ‘Mensch’ ein zahmes und civilisirtes thier, ein Hausthier herauszuzüchten]—is a correct treatment of the development of human psychology but in a way that Nietzsche did not anticipate”.67

The drives for adventure, war hunting, and the like manifested themselves in distinct individuals. These specific drives were blocked from expression not because they were internalized but because they were bled out as a result of culling of these very individuals. Cruelty to oneself was and is a genetic predisposition that grew to feverish pitches as more and more adventurous types were eliminated from the genetic pool and more individuals with the desired genetic traits took their place. Tameness was not initially something produced through internalization but simply genetically selected for.

Indeed, there is evidence within the Genealogy that supports a straightforward Darwinian reading. In section 16 of essay two, Nietzsche compares the creation of the bad conscience to that of the transition from sea-going creatures to land animals.

“The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, war, to prowling, to adventure; suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and ‘suspended’. From now on, they had to walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves’, whereas hitherto they had been borne of water: a dreadful heaviness lay upon them”.68

This passage could not be more any more Darwinian; Nietzsche acknowledges the environment to be the cause of evolutionary adaptation and not the interior wants of the animal as Lamarck would have it. The animal is either forced to adapt to new environmental pressures or die. The twist the Genealogy introduces, at least according to my reading, is that our adaptation was not natural but artificial and unconscious, a point that Nietzsche again upholds. “He who is by nature master”, Nietzsche evinces, “comes like fate … they appear like lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too ‘different’ even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists”.69 In the next section, I explore how warranted Nietzsche’s claims truly are. I demonstrate that he is more justified than he knows. I show that domestication was a rather sudden affair and that early humans were domesticated along two lines of selective practice already intimated in the above section by Nietzsche himself: artificial and unconscious.

5. The Justification of Nietzsche’s Account

Turning now to the plausibility of this new but corrected Nietzschean hypothesis, if the oldest states (with tax collection and walls) on record arose in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley around 3100 Before Common Era (BCE), then how is it that we grew to have memories, distinct, recognizable emotions, and the capacity for reflection and rational planning in a relatively short period of time?70 How might we explain the inheritance of culture-serving memory and consciousness in a non-Lamarckian manner? I submit that there is no great mystery concerning this question. The contemporary term, selective breeding/artificial selection, more than suffices to do the work of Lamarck’s theory of inheritance.

Animal husbandry is a form of selective breeding that has its roots in the Neolithic period of approximately 12,000 years ago.71 Our early ancestors selected animals for mating according to traits that humans found to be beneficial (e.g., fecundity, large offspring, greater frequency of gestation, healthier off-spring, etc.). What is more, such selection can take place without any knowledge of the relationship between genes being transferred and their phenotypic expression. Natives of the American Plains, for example, were nomadic peoples and utilized dogs to drag supplies across great distances. As such, physical traits of dogs such as their size and strength were highly valued. Buffalo Bird Woman, a 19th century native of the North Plains, describes a traditional practice of how these traits may be manifested in litters. “As we wanted only big dogs, and those of the first litter never grew large, we always killed them, sparing not even one. From the second litter, we kept three or four of the puppies with large heads, wide faces, and big legs, for we knew that they would be big dogs; the rest we killed”.72 Artificial selection can produce significant phenotypic differences when one compares the original organism and its descendants in only a few generations removed. There would have been a strong motivation to multiply and enhance the positive physical traits of some of the first domesticated animals of the late Neolithic period (e.g., dogs, goats, and sheep).73 Our early domesticators, if Nietzsche’s account is even remotely true, would have paid particular attention to the traits they wished to enhance along with the conditions under which such traits were produced. Maximizing these conditions would have been of fundamental importance for our domesticators.

What specific traits were our captors “those blonde beasts of prey” seeking as we too were brought under the microscope of domestication? The answer is once again not mysterious: tameness, because tameness is the chief trait sought by all domesticators, even though such a trait, as applied to the husbandry of animals, is only selected for unconsciously. Let me explain.

Darwin argued that, in the course of artificial selection, two paths are carved: the valuable traits (as defined by the domesticator) which are consciously selected for and the unconsciously selective traits that follow these former ones.74 Chief among these latter attributes was tameness because the domesticated animal, now taken from its wild environment, found its previously cherished characteristics (such as aggressiveness and alertness), which helped it survive before its enclosure in the early human Domus, to be non-favorable. New characteristics like docility, early socialization, and submissiveness in animals are now evolutionarily preferred in early civilization as these traits help animals to survive and reproduce. These characteristics, which appear in conjunction with the consciously selected for traits favored by breeders noted above, have a higher degree of fitness and, thus, the genotypes capable of producing these phenotypic tendencies are passed on.

The famous silver fox experiment conducted by Dmitry Belyaev demonstrates Darwin’s thesis of unconscious selection beautifully.75 In 1959, Belyaev set up a long-term experiment of domestication of wild foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in which individuals were exclusively selected for tameness. Today, almost 50 generations later, nearly 100% of the experimental population actively seeks contact with humans.76 They exhibit typical dog-like behavior (e.g., seeking eye-contact with humans, paying attention to facial expressions, and tail-wagging) which is directly related to neuroendocrine and ontogenetic modifications.77 Similar behavior is found in domiciled sheep, dogs, and pigs. As James Scott notes,

“Indeed, the part of the brain most affected in domesticates is the limbic system which is responsible for activating hormones and nervous system reactions to threats of external stimuli. The shrinkage of the limbic system across all domesticated animal species from pigs to goats, to weavels to dogs, as well as commonsenls like rats, pigeons, and sparrows, is associated with raising the threshold that would trigger aggression, flight, and fear”.78

Animals artificially selected for their reproductive characteristics also exhibited unconscious selection for traits such as reduced brain size and, therefore, impoverished alertness when compared to their wild cousins, because they were no longer affected by the selective pressures obtained in natural environments.79

How might we apply these facts to Nietzsche’s story in the Genealogy? Two points are essential in this regard. One is that there would have been those pre-humans who would have climbed the walls of ancient civilizations, only to be struck down, tortured, and killed. As discussed, torture was not meant as a deterrent. It was not a punishment, but likely, as Nietzsche argues in essay two when discussing the Twelve Tables of Rome and the cutting of shares, a source of malevolent pleasure (“de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire”) that had the added benefit of killing the malefactors in some horrible manner.80 The genes which caused this group of incorrigibles to be more adventurous, risk-taking, and aggressive were not selected for. The second point relates to those pre-humans who, instead, were genetically predisposed to obey and, therefore, would have populated more rapidly. These genes would have been passed down to subsequent generations and those creatures with the most obsequious behavior would have been bred. This process, of course, does not entail that the drives that were turned inward were rooted out entirely (nor that the process of killing the most aggressive human beings was always successful), but that other drives promoting social cohesion, obeyance, genuflection, etc. became more dominant in the population. As a particular society continued to grow, fewer of Nietzsche’s much heralded “strong types” would have survived the pressures of civilization, at least as conceived in the West, and would have found or experienced novel ways to die before procreating.

I argue that selective pressures on sheep and other domesticants were the same for us. Those who were not predisposed to accept their new masters actively sought ways to escape from civilization and, when caught, were killed but not expeditiously. Instead, they were subjected to gruesome and horrendous torture. The inhabitants who remained were more docile than their aggressive counterparts and, like the silver foxes in the experiment noted above, were interbred, creating, over just a few generations, a substantively more submissive populace. These individuals would then be more receptive to the much later discourse and practices of the priestly type who, acting as shepherds for their new-found cow-eyed herd, would have directed the emotional predispositions (and perhaps on a deeper level the very drives) of their flock artificially selected for, in new ways. The cultural transmission of ideas would then have stepped in to advance further these life-denying behaviors (just as Nietzsche explains and predicted) once the genetic predispositions for submissiveness, culture-serving memory, and consciousness were formed. Docility, as a product of a genetic drive, was exapted by the priestly type who put the inherently plastic dispositions of this drive toward new ends.81

One final problem remains. According to Nietzsche, a good deal of work regarding the domestication of the human being is done by his internationalization hypothesis. Perhaps the most forceful and clearest statement of this hypothesis is found in GM: II, 22. Nietzsche writes, “That will to self-tormenting (Selstpeinigung), that repressed cruelty (Grausankeit) of the animal-man (Thiermenschen) made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the ‘state’ so as to be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural vent for his desire to hurt had been blocked …”82 The idea is that negatively charged affects such as guilt, anxiety, and self-loathing were once externally expressed affects that underwent a transformation because their natural outlets were now blocked. The affect is initially impeded then reinterpreted and correspondingly subverted. It loses its positive value (namely, one of affirmation and will to power) and becomes negative (life denying, i.e., the diminishment of power). The feeling is then re-released, internally, carving out a subjectivity from the inside. Does my interpretation, namely, that docility, for the most part, was unconsciously selected for, enervate the force of this tremendously incisive and fertile psychological insight?

I do not think so. Firstly, the internalization of affects occurs later, historically, than Nietzsche initially hypothesized. Our ancestors did internalize their outward feelings only when they realized that acting on them would end in their suffering and/or death. However, this realization would have developed slowly and much later than Nietzsche anticipated. It would have matured, coevally, with culture-serving memory. Nietzsche’s rich psychological discussion regarding the transformation of bad conscience into guilt remains warranted—it is just that his timelines for this development are inaccurate. The account I provide then remains within a substantivist camp reading where the features and argumentation of Nietzsche’s account are correct, generally speaking, but the details are wrong.

In conclusion, I show that the often-raised question in the scholarly literature, ”Was Nietzschean a Lamarckian?”, is ill-phrased. Nietzsche clearly rejects at least two of Lamarck’s theories: complexification and the position that holds that the “interior sentiments” of an organism give rise to new physical attributes. The only thesis that Nietzsche seemingly adopts is Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, i.e., characteristics acquired by an organism during its life-cycle can be transmitted biologically to its offspring.

I establish that, if Nietzsche does adopt what is essentially a false scientific theory, then it vitiates his account of the development of guilt in the second essay of the Genealogy. Thus, scholars who hold that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian of one stripe or another, most notably Richard Schacht, swallow a poisoned pill of sorts. In contrast, I demonstrate that artificial and unconscious selection can perform the same work as the Inheritability Thesis. The advantage of adopting a Darwinian mechanism to account for organismal change is that it is likely to be true. Although Nietzsche’s own account of the formation of the bad conscience appears to contradict a Darwinian interpretation of the same phenomenon, I demonstrate that there are passages within the Genealogy that support my reading. In addition, I argue that Nietzsche misinterpreted the very evidence he marshals forth to support his claim and that this misinterpretation is distinctly anti-genealogical. Nietzsche offered hypotheses “out of the blue” of the English variety instead of keeping to the grayness of genealogical inquiry, i.e., staying close to that which can actually be documented.83 I draw on James C. Scott’s brilliant book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, to show that the practices of animal husbandry, as developed in the Neolithic Period of approximately 12,000 years ago, are directly applicable to descriptions of “human husbandry” as put forward by Nietzsche in sections 1–12 of essay two of The Genealogy.

In my endeavor to provide a more justified underpinning of Nietzsche’s explanation regarding the formation of culture-serving memory, consciousness, and unconsciousness, I blunt a severe objection of a substantive variety as noted in the introduction to Nietzsche’s particular genealogical account. My argument, as mentioned near the beginning of this paper, neither immunizes genealogy as a method nor particular genealogies from other critiques along substantive lines, nor does it inoculate a genealogy from critiques of a performative and/or semantic nature. Correspondingly, non-substantive readings (e.g., rhetorical or perspectival defenses, please see Section 1) of Nietzsche’s reconstruction of the formation of memory, bad conscience, and guilt are possible.

I also recognize that my principal thesis, namely, that enclosures and tortures were utilized, principally, to cull and not to deter our early ancestors and, that such techniques lead to an explanation that is conciliant with Neo-Darwinism, is clearly not Nietzsche’s view. Nevertheless, I hold that my assessment is closer to the spirit of genealogy which is to renounce philosophical accounts that seek to establish the true metaphysical origins (Ursprung) of some phenomenon and instead to exhort moral investigators to search for the stock and descent (Herkunft) of some practice, feeling, or thought. The genealogist does not gaze haphazardly into the blue, but remains focused on the gray of history, which, as Michel Foucault notes, can actually be documented. Moreover, just as Foucault demonstrates in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” that Nietzsche at times conflates Ursprung with Herkunft in the body of The Genealogy, even though he seems to make a clear distinction between these two in the preface, Nietzsche is guilty of another conflation that goes against the very heart of his method; he confused culling with punishment. He broke one of the cardinal rules of genealogical inquiry as stipulated in GM: II, 13: “one must distinguish two aspects”, (when it comes to punishment), “that which is relatively enduring … a certain strict sequence of procedures, and the other that in it which is fluid, the meaning, the purpose …”84 We make a serious mistake Nietzsche proclaims when the meaning of punishment “… is projected and interpreted into the procedure (which has long existed but been employed in another sense) …”85

When Nietzsche is “truly a genealogist” as Foucault puts it, he “… demonstrates that the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity to their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity”.86 It is this disparity that jars us to act differently. It is this jarring that causes us to diagnosis and then amputate our infected belief systems. That is a rather tall order. However, in order to do all that genealogy can do for us, the substantivist reading proclaims that Nietzsche’s stories cannot be fables, nor can they be Kiplingesque “just so” stories. They must, above all, be true.