Foucault’s Darwinian Genealogy

Marco Solinas

doi:10.3390/genealogy1020009

Abstract

This paper outlines Darwin’s theory of descent with modification in order to show that it is genealogical in a narrow sense, and that from this point of view, it can be understood as one of the basic models and sources—also indirectly via Nietzsche—of Foucault’s conception of genealogy. Therefore, this essay aims to overcome the impression of a strong opposition to Darwin that arises from Foucault’s critique of the “evolutionistic” research of “origin”—understood as Ursprung and not as Entstehung. By highlighting Darwin’s interpretation of the principles of extinction, divergence of character, and of the many complex contingencies and slight modifications in the becoming of species, this essay shows how his genealogical framework demonstrates an affinity, even if only partially, with Foucault’s genealogy.

Highlights

Political Philosophy, University of Florence and Deutsches Institut Florenz, Via dei Pecori 1, Academic Editor: Philip Kretsedemas
(Darwin 1859–1876, p. 426, emphasis mine). This is one of the final passages from On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin explains how his new theory will transform the entire traditional system of classification of the forms of life into genealogies. This transformation represents one of the strongest impacts of the new theory of “descent with modification”—usually interpreted as “Darwin’s evolutionistic theory”—on the traditional fixist, essentialist, and teleological framework, in which the natural species were understood as unchangeable forms, determined from a predetermined essence, and thought of in a teleological way
Every species descends from a different species, and if we go further into its genealogy, we find different beginnings, and not just different individuals of the same species, as happens in the traditional armorial bearings of a family genealogy: we have to do with old genera, families, and so on; natural genealogies are not limited to the “evolution of a species”

Summary

Darwin’s Genealogical Tree of Life

Darwin’s revolutionary re-organization of the classical image of a stable and unchangeable ladder or scale of beings, began with the elaboration of a picture of a tree of life, or rather of a coral of life with irregular and dead branches. Darwin’s genealogical tree shows that “all living and extinct organisms are united by complex, radiating, and circuitous lines of affinities”, with characters of “high or of the most trifling importance, or, as with rudimentary organs, of no importance”; it is a logical and necessary conclusion when “we admit the common parentage of allied forms, together with their modification through variation and natural selection, with the contingencies of extinction and divergence of character”; in other words, “if we extend the use of this element of descent,—the one certainly known cause of similarity in organic beings,—we shall understand what is meant by the Natural System: it is genealogical in its attempted arrangement, with the grades of acquired difference marked by the terms, varieties, species, genera, families, orders, and classes.” Darwin’s theory is from this point of view, clearly anti-teleological (and anti-essentialist): there is no final cause

Comparing Darwin and Foucault’s Genealogical Methods

Castelli di Yale VIII