Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990.
This is the first use of the famous phrase—“survival of the fittest.” Spencer thought of it as a synonym for Darwin’s “natural selection”, but modern scientists do not use the phrase because it is circular reasoning. It is the fittest who survive it implies when whichever species survives is obviously fittest for that time and place. It is also misinterpreted as a predation scale war which it is not. The lion is much stronger than the antelopes and feeds on them, but the lions are dying out while the antelopes are thriving and developing. The fittest may be so because the species is a faster and more reliable breeder. Most people with a limited knowledge of evolution and scince associate the fittest with the top predator. However, over time, most top predators have NOT survived as well as many other species which in a predation fight are weak, but are more can handle a wider climate range, can change rapidly in response to natural disaters, can breed efficiently, are resistant to diseases, require less food, and literally thousands of other factors.
Darwin initially did not use the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Herbert Spencer did in another context {627587}. With respect to evolution, some people mistakenly assume that this means that the strongest survive and the weak do not. But “fit” and “strong” are not synonymous. For example, the Lion is the strongest and top predator of the African Plain. An antelope, Thompson’s Gazelle, is tiny, not very fast, and has no defenses against the lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, and wild dogs. He is the most eaten animal on the Plain. Yet this gazelle is growing in numbers and is thriving while the lions are becoming an endangered species. The Thompson’s gazelle are more fit for that environment because they breed so fast and at such a young age and have multiple babies. They are more fit than the lions because they breed more prolifically. Other animals are seemingly endangered in one environment (like beaver in the United States) but thrive in another (the Southern tip of Argentina)
This is a very important quotation. This was not the ravings of a right wing extremist. It was a normative view. This book was a best seller in Germany. This quotation illustrates the mentality of the conservative, militarist, culture that dominated Germany at the time. Racism was normative then in Germany. It was not the Nazis who introduced the concept of inferior races to Germany. Through this book and much before it, the idea was well established in aristocratic, militaristic culture. Also, note that the “inferior races” were considered a threat to civilization, not just inferior beings.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
