Friedrich Nietzsche's complex relationship to Charles Darwin has been much explored, and readers have placed the two thinkers in conjunction from the very beginning. Nietzsche himself alluded to Darwinian interpretations of his ideas as early as 1888. In Ecce Homo (EH), he felt compelled to disparage the “scholarly cattle,” who suggested that his Übermensch reflected Darwinian sympathies (EH “Why I Write Such Good Books” 1). In recent years, numerous studies have returned to the Nietzsche–Darwin axis, indicating that they recognize Nietzsche's connection to Darwin reflects a significant component of his thought.

While the first objective of this study is to argue for the pre-eminence of Darwin for the development and articulation of Nietzsche's philosophy, its main thrust is to point to the antagonistic character of their relationship and to show how Nietzsche's final critique against Darwin and his followers might represent the key to understanding his broader (anti-)Darwinian position. In that sense, this second, much more significant objective will be to clarify the ambiguity behind Nietzsche's own unambiguously expressed final opposition to Darwin.

Of course, this approach entails taking his final opposition seriously. In some ways, my study will start from the end and proceed to the beginning. It will look for the subtle incongruities and the discrepancies between their thought-systems in order to unearth the fault lines between them.