Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

select and enhance. If most of today’s males possess it that is just what we should expect, and certainly no call to start speaking of the Fall of Man, perversion, and moral deterioration. Or perhaps what some call original sin is really the fact that what evolution has produced—and was bound to produce—is out of line with their own conception of an ideal human character.
Incidentally: don’t worry about all those villages, each populated by several hundred half-brothers and sisters. They will only spring up where life provides our young Casanova with a veritable production-line supply of females, willing, fertile, not already pregnant, and not associated with any other males sufficiently aggressive to send him packing. Nature can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happen very often, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating well clear of the facts.
That example is specific and relatively trivial, but you can easily see how Darwinism could subvert an entire philosophy, such as one of those we have just seen. For Descartes human reason was a faculty given to us and guaranteed by God, no less, and that was why he could rely on it to tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter, and a good deal else besides. What if instead he had thought of it as a natural instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that, it gave its possessors a competitive advantage over those without it? Would he then have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matters could with complete confidence be taken to be the truth? If so, how would he have justified it? It is one thing to think that God could not be a deceiver; but quite another to say that since the faculty of reason gives us such advantage in practical matters it cannot possibly lead us hopelessly astray when applied to a question like whether the mind is an independent substance. Am I to believe that because reason is good at helping us survive it must also be good at metaphysics? Why on earth should that be true? If Descartes had lived after Darwin (please forgive the historical absurdity) the foundations of his philosophy would have had to be very different, and if they were so different, could the superstructure have been the same?Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
‘A philosopher is a terrible explosive from which nothing is safe’—that is the only comment we have heard so far (p. 2) from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). He had no intention of offering his readers a comfortable experience, and his contemporaries defended themselves by just not reading him. But soon after his death the tide began to turn, and he became a major influence on twentieth-century thought, especially on the European continent.
The Genealogy of Morals, first published in 1887, consists of a preface and three essays, all conveniently divided into numbered sections. Don’t skip the preface. And don’t miss the first sentence: ‘how much we know nowadays, but how little we know about ourselves’. A huge change in European thought is under way. The tendency had long been to suppose that, however bewildering and opaque the rest of reality may be to us, at least we could tell what was going on in our own minds; but in the nineteenth century that tendency is fast losing momentum. We have just seen a hint of it in Hegel’s understanding of history: the forces of Geist are at work in us, though we know nothing or little of it (p. 85 above). Less than a generation after Nietzsche came Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis, with his doctrine of the unconscious mind in which the most important causes of our mental lives lie hidden from us. Acquiring self-knowledge is no longer a matter of a quick introspective glance. It calls for hard and painful work, and there is no guarantee that you will like what you find.
Don’t miss §3 of the preface either. Do you hear something familiar about it? It reminds me of Part 1 of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method: still a teenager, the future philosopher is struck by scepticism and mistrust towards the intellectual diet that his seniors are feeding him. For Descartes it had been the neo-Aristotelianism of the universities. For Nietzsche it was the moral values of nineteenth-century Christianity. Were they as self-evident as everyone around him seemed to think? Descartes wanted to inquire into the truth of these ‘truths’ that he was being taught. Nietzsche reckoned it was time for some questions about the value of these ‘values’. His method was to ask about their history, their pedigree, what he called their ‘genealogy’. Where had they come from, how had people come to hold them? Why had they come to hold them, or in other words: what were these values doing for the people whose values they became?
A frequent reaction at this point is to say that the value of something, what it is worth, depends on what it is like now. How it came to be that way is quite another matter. So Nietzsche is asking the wrong question. However well he answers it, it won’t tell us anything about the value of our values. To think that it will is to commit (some more philosophers’ jargon for your growing collection) the ‘genealogical fallacy’.
But is that criticism altogether fair? I don’t think so. There are certainly cases in which our view of what something is worth is very much bound up with our beliefs about how it began, and if those beliefs change our evaluation of the thing itself is threatened as well. Indeed we have just seen a very important example, one which was important for Nietzsche too: the effect of Darwinism on our conception of ourselves. For so many of Darwin’s contemporaries the human race originated in a decision by God to create us in His own image. The idea that we had in fact developed