No, I’m saying the sneakiest (‘existence’?) can be the fittest, in the scientific sense (the most successful at propagating his genes). But then this is obviously beyond you.
There are no parts 5 and 6… And one cannot see from any book ‘what life is all about’…
“Propagation of his genes” = fittest? Is that Darwinism?
So, you blame Nietzsche for promoting his genes in the Antichrist?
Jesus Christ Superstar<<?
LOL
And all morals are only about genes, not about the use and abuse of things for life (in general) of the many but only of the few who have written it?
So, I guess most of the philosophers and conquerers have been the most disabled men in history…
[size=95]the capacity of an organism to survive and transmit its genotype to reproductive offspring as compared to competing organisms
[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fitness.][/size]
Note that it is not prescriptive.
Nope.
Come again?
Sorry, pal, I have asked you things which are thousands of years old and you need no dictionary for that.
Your world-view is basically African or Asian, because they have the highest birth-rates.
I have really nothing else to ask you for the next many thousands of years.
Sounds good.
I suppose you mean “unfit” instead of “disabled”…
Well, not Genghis Khan, in any case!
All I want to say is: When Nietzsche referred to “all that is weak and ought to perish” he was not talking about those who are “unfit” according to Darwin…
Correct, he was rather talking about the ‘health club definition’ of fitness (though extended to include mental fitness, of course).
I like to refer to the encompassing concept as ‘spiritual strength’. In my mind Nietzsche should have said ‘…all that is spiritually weak and ought to perish’ so as to avoid being misunderstood, because I’m sure that’s what he meant.
I take it this knowledge was ‘revealed’ to you?
It’s the conclusion I’ve come to considering all that I know.
About Nietzsche or about ‘spirits’?
Nietzsche of course did not absolutely distinguish between body and spirit.
Where does Nietzsche even say “all that is weak and ought to perish”? I was taught that, even when you can expect your reader to know, it’s still courteous to source.
In TI Skirmishes 14, Nietzsche says:
[size=95]The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again—for they are the great majority, and they are also more intelligent… Darwin forgot the spirit (—that is English!), the weak have more spirit… One must need spirit to acquire spirit,—one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (—“let it go!” they think in Germany today—“the Reich must still remain to us”…). It will be noted that by “spirit” I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).[/size]
So according to Nietzsche, the weak who prevail over the strong again and again are not the weak in spirit—to the contrary! Now do you still think it’s as simple as you said? Do you still think Nietzsche wanted the strong in spirit to prevail over the weak in spirit? But that would be making an ‘ought’ out of an ‘is’:
[size=95]I rebel against the translation of reality into a morality: therefore I abhor Christianity with a deadly hatred, because it created sublime words and gestures to throw over a horrible reality the cloak of justice, virtue, and divinity—
I see all philosophers, I see science kneeling before a reality that is the reverse of the struggle for existence as taught by Darwin’s school—that is to say, I see on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life.—
[WP 685.][/size]
As I’ve been showing in this thread, said reality is not the reverse of what Darwinism teaches. According to Darwin as well as to Nietzsche, those on top and surviving are not necessarily the strongest—the ‘fittest’ in the health club sense.
And yet you also have a point. This is another seeming contradiction in Nietzsche we are to reconcile. Nietzsche deemed “the most spiritual human beings” (AC 57) the highest. Yet he was obviously pertinently against the dominion of the weak.
[size=95]Why the weak conquer. In summa: the sick and weak have more sympathy, are ‘more humane’—: the sick and weak have more spirit, are more changeable, various, entertaining—more malicious: it was the sick who invented malice. […] Esprit: quality of late races: Jews, Frenchmen, Chinese. (The anti-Semites do not forgive the Jews for possessing ‘spirit’—and money. Anti-Semites—another name for the ‘underprivileged.’)
[WP 864.][/size]
Note how Nietzsche first uses the word “spirit” without quotation marks, then goes on to qualify it as “esprit” and “‘spirit’” (within quotation marks). Though Nietzsche obviously possessed esprit, and was, in relation to Bismarck’s Reich, kind of a ‘French poet’ as I’ve pointed out before, Nietzsche was ultimately not positive, or at least not only positive, about esprit:
[size=95]Against the romanticism of great ‘passion.’— To grasp that a quantum of coldness, lucidity, hardness is part of all ‘classical’ taste: logic above all, happiness in spirituality, ‘three unities,’ concentration, hatred for feeling, heart [Gemüt], esprit, hatred for the manifold, uncertain, rambling, for intimations, as well as for the brief, pointed, pretty, good-natured.
[WP 849.][/size]
Nietzsche was of course a proponent of ‘classical’ taste. He put the word “classical” between quotation marks because he thought the word had already been hijacked by, e.g., Romantics. As he says elsewhere (not sure where at this point—EH Books?), he instead chose the word “Dionysian” to express his ‘classical’, anti-Romantic position.
In the last quote, you see that Nietzsche locates happiness in spirituality and hatred for esprit on the same side—the side he’s on.
Nietzsche said the grand style, the summit of ‘classical’ style, followed from great passion (WP 1024). And note how he writes “passion” within quotation marks in the last quote.
In the last paragraph of the last-quoted section, Nietzsche writes:
[size=95][Romantics have] The will to unity (because unity tyrannizes—namely over the listener, spectator); but inability to tyrannize over oneself concerning the main thing—namely in regard to the work itself (omitting, shortening, clarifying, simplifying).[/size]
Esprit is spirit without passion. It is superficial, feminine:
[size=95]Surface is woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.
Man’s soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns[.]
[TSZ, “Of Old and Young Women”.][/size]
On first sight, Romantic art seems more passionate than Dionysian art, because the Romantic lacks the passion to tyrannize over his work—to yoke the bull, so to say. The bull that is the Dionysian artist yokes the bull that is his work of art. The Romantic artist lacks the might of the bull, and therefore cannot yoke his work of art. For this reason, his work is wilder.
When in AC Nietzsche says great spirits are skeptics, he explains:
[size=95]Great passion, the ground and the power of his being, even more enlightened and despotic than he himself is, takes his entire intellect into its service[.]
[AC 54; cf. WP 963.][/size]
Nietzsche rebelled against the prevailing of those of small passion, the weak—that is, the weak of will (the will is a pathos)—, over those of great passion, the strong—that is, the physically strong. Geistig greatness follows from physical might:
[size=95][T]he wholesome, healthy selfishness […] springeth from the powerful soul [Seele]:
—From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror:
—The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment calleth itself “virtue.”
[TSZ, “Of the Three Evils”, 2.][/size]
Only in this light can one understand what Nietzsche said in BGE:
[size=95]At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not in the first place consist in their physical, but in their psychical [seelisch] power—they were the more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as “the more complete beasts”—).
[BGE 257.][/size]
Not in the first place: for they exuded such power that they did not usually need to actually prove their strength: the strength of the people they subjected was sapped by the latter’s Ahnung of the former’s power:
[size=95]Man’s soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns: woman surmiseth [ahnt] its force, but comprehendeth it not.
[TSZ, “Of Old and Young Women”.][/size]
The strong do not in the first place possess brute force, but well-organised force—well-constituted bodies.
[size=95]The most spiritual men feel the stimulus and charm of sensuous things in a way that other men—those with ‘fleshly hearts’—cannot possibly imagine and ought not to imagine: they are sensualists in the best faith, because they accord the senses a more fundamental value than to that fine sieve, that thinning and reducing machine, or whatever we may call what in the language of the people is named “spirit.” The strength and power of the senses—this is the essential thing in a well-constituted and complete man: the splendid ‘animal’ must be given first—what could any ‘humanization’ matter otherwise!
[WP 1045, entire.][/size]
The statement I was referring to (and which was paraphrased) is found at the very end of Ecce Homo:
[size=95]" Finally—this is what is most terrible of all—the concept of the good man signifies that one sides with all that is weak, sick, failure, suffering of itself—all that ought to perish: the principle of selection is crossed—an ideal is fabricated from the contradiction against the proud and well-turned-out human being who says Yes, who is sure of the future, who guarantees the future—and he is now called evil.— And all this was believed, as morality!— Ecrasez l’infame!——"[/size]
In hindsight (having re-read the passage) I would have to say that my suggested “edit” is retarded and that my first post was quite dodgy. That’s what you get for remembering quotes poorly. 
In any case, by ‘spiritually strong’ I do not mean being in possession of lots of spirit (like a saint); I mean being averse to decadence, being in possession of tragic passion. This concept of ‘spiritual strength’ finds its opposite (ie spiritual weakness) in the ‘good’ man, in he who ‘sides with all that is weak, sick, failure, suffering of itself’.
That evolutionary theory today does not support progressivist notions is clear, but it is less certain that Darwin was not susceptible to them. Consider that Darwin, in the second to last paragraph of the Origin stated that “as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” For further examples, we could readily turn to The Descent of Man for support, but suffice it to say that Nietzsche’s representation of Darwin is not entirely without merit, as is the case with most of his caricatures. And any other Darwinist that Nietzsche may have had in mind here (Spencer or Haeckel, for instance) is even less likely to escape his critique.
But even supposing Darwin’s own formulations were entirely consistent with present day theory, that Nietzsche corroborates the facts of evolution does not constitute his siding with it, and the cartoon you offer is misleading with respect to this. Leaving aside the problematic use of the words “strong” and “weak,” it may establish some resemblance between the facts of evolution and the facts as Nietzsche perceives them, but it is far from establishing an agreement. The only thing this cartoon establishes is the possibility that a “weak” organism can prove more fit than a “strong” one (the songster, I believe, is still in all instances more likely to get laid), while Nietzsche maintains that the prevalence of the weak over the strong is the rule. It is precisely the exceptional cases, those strong constitutions that succeed despite their “uselessness,” that evolution cannot account for or even acknowledge without threatening its authority. He offers this specific challenge at the end of the section immediately preceding the one you cite: “The brief spell of beauty, of genius, of Caesar, is sui generis: such things are not inherited.”
But really, all of this is only ostensible comparison, since all I think this cartoon is trying to do is dissolve any popular preconceptions that evolution merely states something like “only the strong survive” or some other slogan for knuckledraggers. Within scientific discourse, there are no “weak” but fit or “strong” but unfit organisms, only those that are “fit” or “unfit.” “Strong” and “weak” as the cartoon uses them are value-laden terms that from the standpoint of science denote nonsense. Plus it invites the misleading comparison with Nietzsche’s language that leads to the equivocation of Nietzsche’s concept of strength with your own “health club definition.” If this is all Nietzsche meant by strength or power, then old man Goethe must have been mighty spry for his age. I mean, how many philosophers and artists (which for Nietzsche are two exemplary types through which the will to power achieves expression) do you know who fit this latter category?
I believe you. I’ve not read anything by Darwin myself.
That’s not what I meant by ‘siding with it’. English is not my native language, so I may have used the verb wrong, but what I meant is that he (like Darwin, in my understanding) saw that evolution is not progressive.
Is your belief based on evidence?
Exactly.
Still, there are different senses of “fit”. The ‘health club sense’ does not denote nonsense for science. And yet there are, or could be, individuals who are fit in the health club sense but not in the scientific sense. For instance, female birds of a certain species who were raised in too small cages grew up stunted, and preferred males who also grew up stunted over males who grew up in large enough cages. (I read this in a recent newspaper report on a scientific study.)
That does not matter. The thing is that the philosophers and artists Nietzsche admired most (Greeks!) were most fit in the health club sense. And even he himself laid claim to what he called “the great health”. Great philosophers and artists cannot be physical abortions.
Only so long as decadent ideals are bedecked with purple honours.
Well, first off, the question is whether there’s really a difference in that respect between homo sapiens and other species. Second, the question is whether the fact that “decadent ideals are bedecked with purple honours” contradicts evolution. I suspect the problem may be in that the capacity for sympathy etc. was selected as a fitness indicator. In itself this is not a problem, but the consequence that “by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it [pity/compassion/sympathy (Mitleiden)] gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect” (AC 7) may very well be one.