Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

182 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP Eternal Recurrence—Life Without Foundations? 183
the greatest importance. 11 I suspect that Nietzsche was encouraged to take
the idea more seriously than Hume had done by his dim appreciation of the
tremendous power of Darwinian thinking.
Nietzsche's references to Darwin are almost all hostile, but there are quite
a few, and that in itself supports Walter Kaufmann's argument (1950,
preface) that Nietzsche "was not a Darwinist, but only aroused from his
dogmatic slumber by Darwin, much as Kant was a century earlier by Hume."
Nietzsche's references to Darwin also reveal that his acquaintance with
Darwin's ideas was beset with common misrepresentations and
misunderstandings, so perhaps he "knew" Darwin primarily through the
enthusiastic appropriations of the many popularizers in Germany, and indeed
throughout Europe. On the few points of specific criticism he ventures, he
gets Darwin utterly wrong, complaining, for instance, that Darwin has
ignored the possibility of "unconscious selection," when that was one of
Darwin's most important bridging ideas in Origin. He refers to the "complete
betise in the Englishmen, Darwin and Wallace," and complains, "At last,
confusion goes so far that one regards Darwinism as philosophy: and now
die scholars and scientists dominate" (Nietzsche 1901, p. 422). Others,
however, regularly saw him as a Darwinian—"Other scholarly oxen have
suspected me of Darwinism on this account" (Nietzsche 1889, III, i)—a label
which he scoffed at, while proceeding to write, in his Genealogy of Morals
(1887), one of the first and still subdest of the Darwinian investigations of
the evolution of ethics, a topic to which we will return in chapter 16.
Nietzsche viewed his argument for eternal recurrence as a proof of the
absurdity or meaninglessness of life, a proof that no meaning was given to
the universe from on high. And this is undoubtedly the root of the fear that
many experience when encountering Darwin, so let us examine it in
Nietzsche's version, as extreme as any we are apt to find. Why, exacdy,
would eternal recurrence make life meaningless? Isn't it obvious?
11. For a clear reconstruction of Nietzsche's uncharacteristically careful deduction of
what he once described as "the most scientific of hypotheses," see Danto 1965, pp.
201-9- For a discussion and survey of this and other interpretations of Nietzsche's notorious
idea of eternal recurrence, see Nehamas 1980, which argues that by "scientific"
Nietzsche meant specifically "not-teleological." A recurring—but, so far, not eternally
recurring—problem with the appreciation of Nietzsche's version of the eternal recurrence
is that, unlike Wheeler, Nietzsche seems to think that this life will happen again not
because it and all possible variations on it will happen over and over, but because there
is only one possible variation—this one—and it will happen over and over. Nietzsche, in
short, seems to have believed in actualism. I think that this is inessential to an appreciation
of the moral implications Nietzsche thought he could or should draw from the idea,
and perhaps to Nietzsche scholarship as well (but what do I know?).
What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest
loneness, and say: "This life which you live and have lived, must be lived
again by you, and innumerable times more. And mere will be nothing new
in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh—
everything unspeakably small and great in your life—must come again to
you, and in the same sequence and series __ " Would you not throw your
self down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once
experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him:
"Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!" [The Gay
Science (1882), p. 341 (passage translated in Danto 1965, p. 210).]
Is this message liberating, or horrifying? Nietzsche couldn't seem to make
up his own mind, perhaps because he often chose to clothe the implications
of his "most scientific of hypodtheses" in diese rather mystical trappings. We
can get a little fresh air into the discussion by considering a delectable
parody version, by die novelist Tom Robbins, in Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues:
For Christmas that year, Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The
craftsmanship was remarkable.
There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad
of sunlight. There was a plaza and ein Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite
noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot
bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway
sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There
were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath
the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops
and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage
was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans
would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around
the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through
die ruins, muttering, "If they had only listened to me, those children would
be alive today." [Robbins 1976, pp. 191-92.]
The craftsmanship of this passage is itself remarkable. The repetition of
the orphanage drama year after year seems to rob the little world of any real
meaning. But why? Why exactly should it be the repetition of the fire
inspector's lament that makes it sound so hollow? Perhaps if we looked
closely at what that entails we would find the sleight of hand that makes the
passage "work." Do the little Tyroleans rebuild the orphanage themselves, or
is there a RESET button on this miniature village? What difference would that
make? Well, where do the new orphans come from? Do the "dead" ones
come back to life (Dennett 1984, pp. 9-10)? Notice that Robbins says that the
orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas