Abstract
Darwinism was a matter of life and death. No one understood this better than Darwin did. Immediately after explaining that each organism “has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction,” he closed his chapter on “The Struggle for Existence” on a more comforting note: “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” This put a rather positive spin on the struggle for existence, the “law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”1 Even while overtly denying any purpose or goal for evolution, Darwin could not resist the mid-Victorian cult of progress, as these passages illustrate with their vision of increasing health, strength, and even happiness.
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Notes
Darwin, Origin of Species (London: Penguin, 1968), 129
Max von Gruber, “Vererbung, Auslese und Hygiene,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 35 (1909): 1993.
Edward J. Larson and Darrel W. Amundsen, A Different Death (Downers Grove, IL, 1998); Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. 2: The Curse on Self Murder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
The best works discussing this issue are Jürgen Sandmann, Der Bruch mit der humanitären Tradition (Stuttgart, 1990), esp. chs. 4–6; Benzenhöfer, Der gute Tod?, ch. 4; and Kurt Nowak, “Euthanasie” und Sterilisierung im “Dritten Reich” (Göttingen, 1977), 11–26; brief discussions are also found in Hans Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie (Göttingen, 1987), 18–19; and Michael Schwanz, “‘Euthanasie’—Debatten in Deutschland (1895–1945)” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998): 618–19
August Forel, “August Forel” (autobiography), in Führende Psychiater in Selbstdarstellungen (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1930), 60.
Robby Kossmann, “Die Bedeutung des Einzellebens in der Darwinistischen Weltanschauung,” Nord und Süd 12 (1880): 414.
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© 2004 Richard Weikart
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Weikart, R. (2004). The Value of Life and the Value of Death. In: From Darwin to Hitler. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10986-6_5
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