Siempre se van los mejores: The good die first
Me gusta decir a los vascos que cuanto más antiguo sea su idioma, más cerca estará del chimpancé.
(I like to tell the Basques that the older their language, the closer it is to the chimpanzee.)
Aside from my fondness for Gustavo Bueno (and chimpanzees), I have to disagree with his witty statement.
The professor himself clarified that the reason antiquity alone does not confer value on a language is that languages are historical products, not gifts bestowed by God. His allusion to the chimpanzee invokes Darwin’s theory of evolution.
This is a good point at which to note that my esteem for Nietzsche was largely based on positions routinely ignored — literally ignored, in many cases — by many self-described Nietzscheans. One of those positions was Nietzsche’s rejection, not so much of Darwin’s theory as of the interpretation of what the fittest (or the strongest) is taken to mean.
In Darwin, fitness is a neutral concept referring merely to those whose traits are best suited to their environment.
For Nietzsche, the norm in nature — above all, in human society — is the survival of the worst.
His doctrine of the Übermensch is explicitly a corrective, an idealistic* imposition on the degradation towards which material life spontaneously tends.
(*) (See, for example, Nietzsche’s words on Cervantes, quoted and commented in the article On existence as a predicate of perfection.)
Despite his famous war on Platonism, Nietzsche had studied under Karl Steinhart, the foremost Plato scholar of his day, at Schulpforta. The influence of Plato is evident throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, and nowhere more clearly than in his Great Politics.
Nietzsche — also famously hostile to Protestantism — would have subscribed to the Spanish, Catholic dictum: Siempre se van los mejores. In the words of William Wordsworth:
‘The good die first.’
He sought to devise a framework in which the best would prevail, based on the evidence that the best does not usually win.
Lastly, and returning now to the initial quote, I’d like to place on record my own stance on the matter: I do consider the possibility of language to be a gift from God, and I deny that every human being is descended from apes.