Is Epigenetics in line with Nietzsche’s thought?
I understand he was working with limited knowledge of his time, but does his primary adherence to Lamarck’s theory of inheritance account for our modern understanding of epigenetics? I think the question is somewhat muddled by not knowing where a cause begins and ends.
In BGE and his Nachlaß, he adopts a position that is pretty static to rest of his philosophy, which is that there is absolutely no point in attempting to train or educate people into being something that they were not already, latently, by descent and genetic substance - by the mid-1880s. This can be established by comparing aphorism 237 of
"Human, All Too Human", with aphorism 264 of "Beyond Good and Evil", his subtitle of Ecce Homo “how one becomes what one is” rebels against the idea that people need to be nurtured with the correct stimuli and given opportunities and they will all struggle through to becoming great men. The phrase's meaning is actually precisely the opposite: "any victories and triumphs you may achieve in your life were already there in you, or were even already there BEFORE you, in the stock from which you came. Here, 'Becoming' is really an illusion. You either ARE something or ARE nothing. And the overwhelming majority of what passes for humanity ARE nothing and therefore WILL BE nothing, no matter what training or nurturing they receive".
Maybe my mistake is from confusing the individual with the overall traits that are a result of his breeding, but doesn’t this idea that everything, including the way a man reacts to stimuli is already determined and unable to be altered contrast the idea that everything is in flux and self-overcoming is a necessity for going upwards? Wouldn’t men who already have this possibility in them be able to overcome, or are we simply so ‘decadent’ that the possibility for overcoming is all that we have? And how does Nietzsche’s thought align (or fall out of) a modern understanding of epigenetics in humans?