That could be the best description of the little text which I wrote when we got the assignment with the prompt...
Q: ''Darwin wrote that: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." Compare Darwin's view of the persistent effects of the past with at least one other writer covered so far in the cours'' (I chose Nietzsche).
Let your laughter begin (wonder of anyone will actually give a 2 damn minutes in reading this):
A:
In
meeting Darwin's idea that man inherently carries his evolutionary past
within himself comes the Nietzschean concept of ''animal nature'' which
all men possess. Moreso, both Darwin and Nietzsche consider that we are
the product of the past, yet while the first aims at the biological
evolution of the mankind, the latter examins the moral evolution of
mankind, that being the point where the two thinkers differ in their
approach.
A more consistent difference lays in the fact that Darwin exposes in scientific terms the long evolutionary past of humans and the laws of nature which have enabled this evolution, whereas Nietzsche takes a turn on dissecting the human soul which is the product of a millenia of repressed animal instincts , of ''internalization'' as he calls it. This self denial of our instinctual nature, leads (in Nietzsche's opinion) to ideals, to frames of morality which cage humans, tames and makes them self-sufficient within those frames; he points out that once humans have lost the contact with the nature and stopped being the part of an archaic mode of living, thus internalising all those primal ways of being, they've lived those (lost) adventures within themselves ever since. The fate of the modern man is to have his soul as a battlefield, a place ''of adventure, a place of torture'' as Nietzsche states in his Second Treatise (''On the Genealogy of Morality''); having a conscience equals pain. What brings the two thinkers back on the same track, mildly and unviolent expressed by Darwin, yet strongly and radically pointed by Nietzsche, is the brake from the theological frames of thinking about the evolution of men.
Despite their differences of approach, i.e. scientific with Darwin and philosophical with Nietzsche, the two authors do come about the inate instincts we carry within us, supporting the idea of the persistent effects of the past. If we choose to break from the chains as Nietzsche suggests in the ending of his Second Treatise, it's only a matter of choice.
Are you laughing still? :)
A more consistent difference lays in the fact that Darwin exposes in scientific terms the long evolutionary past of humans and the laws of nature which have enabled this evolution, whereas Nietzsche takes a turn on dissecting the human soul which is the product of a millenia of repressed animal instincts , of ''internalization'' as he calls it. This self denial of our instinctual nature, leads (in Nietzsche's opinion) to ideals, to frames of morality which cage humans, tames and makes them self-sufficient within those frames; he points out that once humans have lost the contact with the nature and stopped being the part of an archaic mode of living, thus internalising all those primal ways of being, they've lived those (lost) adventures within themselves ever since. The fate of the modern man is to have his soul as a battlefield, a place ''of adventure, a place of torture'' as Nietzsche states in his Second Treatise (''On the Genealogy of Morality''); having a conscience equals pain. What brings the two thinkers back on the same track, mildly and unviolent expressed by Darwin, yet strongly and radically pointed by Nietzsche, is the brake from the theological frames of thinking about the evolution of men.
Despite their differences of approach, i.e. scientific with Darwin and philosophical with Nietzsche, the two authors do come about the inate instincts we carry within us, supporting the idea of the persistent effects of the past. If we choose to break from the chains as Nietzsche suggests in the ending of his Second Treatise, it's only a matter of choice.
Are you laughing still? :)
HA!
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