Nietzsche's New Darwinism

Overview

Nietzsche wrote in a scientific culture transformed by Darwin. He read extensively in German and British Darwinists, and his own works dealt often with such obvious Darwinian themes as struggle and evolution. Yet most of what Nietzsche said about Darwin was hostile: he sharply attacked many of his ideas, and often slurred Darwin himself as mediocre. So most readers of Nietzsche have inferred that he must have cast Darwin quite aside. But in fact, John Richardson argues, Nietzsche was deeply and pervasively influenced by Darwin. He stressed his disagreements, but was silent about several core points he took over from Darwin Moreover, Richardson claims, these Darwinian borrowings were to Nietzsches credit: when we bring them to the surface we discover his positions to be much stronger than we had thought. Even Nietzsches radical innovations are more plausible when we expose their Darwinian ground; we see that they amount to a new Darwinism.

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Author Information

Bio of John Richardson

John Richardson was born in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to Provence, where he helped the collector Douglas Cooper transform the Ch�teau de Castille near Avignon into a private museum of cubist painting. For the next twelve years he lived in France where he became friends with Picasso, Braque, L�ger, and Cocteau. With Picasso's encouragement he embarked on an analytic study of the artist's portraits, part of which is incorporated in the present biography. In the early 1960s Richardson went to live in New York City where he was appointed head of Christie's U.S. operation. Besides having organized various exhibitions, he has written books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The first volume of his Life of Picasso was published to wide acclaim in 1991 and won England's prestigious Whitbread Prize. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where he is working on the third and fourth volumes of this biography.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Oxford University Press, Incorporated

Filesize

1.40 MB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780198038184