Piętno darwinizmu

The author analyses the problem of circumstances in which Darwin discovered the mechanizm of natural selection and struggle to survive – a discovery that marked human being with “an indelible stigma”. The stigma is a special kind of “a hurt identity”, an identity, which hurts. Darwin’s discovery marked human beings with the “indelible stigma” of low descent, which endowed men with negative identity – of a being without origin. As a result in the 19th century people had to face the question of their own identity. Analysing the memoir The Voyage of The Beagle the author claims, that observations Darwin made during the journey (in particular the geological ones) changed his perception of time. Geological ruins revealed before young Darwin the nature of time, whose essence is dissemination – ie. irretrievable change. His views were confirmed by the earthquake in Chile in 1835 – where a sudden move of the earth’s crust became an image of time which perceived a catastrophe spread over thousands of years. Hence, as the author claims, Darwin’s memoire from the journey, and in particular its part which describes the earthquake in Chile foreshadows the Marxian statement that everything “vanishes”.