The Study of Concepts of Creative Evolution and Will in Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman: A Schopenhauerian and Lamarckian Study

Soheila Faghfori & Esmaeil Zohdi, Iran, ID CLEaR2016-351;       The aim of this paper is to bring a new critical perspective to Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman by analyzing it in the light of Schopenhauerian Will and Lamarck’s Creative Evolution. Shaw was a dramatic realist whose favorite subject was the living human Will. In Fact, The ultimate goal of Man and Superman is the revelation of the Doctrine of Will. Shavian Life-Force (Will) is neither all powerful nor all-knowing, but is ever striving to be both. It is an impersonal, imperfect force which works through Creative Evolution to produce the Superman (the most perfect state of being). The research method employed is textual analysis of the play in question in order to see to some extent Bernard Shaw is in debt to Schopenhauer and Lamarck in his philosophy of Life-Force. The text consulted will be Schopenhauer’s the World as Will and Representation and Lamarck’s Zoological philosophy. Through a comparative study, this paper intends to point out the similarities and dissimilarities between Shaw’s philosophy with Schopenhauerian Will and Lamarck’s Creative Evolution; and to reach to the conclusion that Bernard Shaw truly deserves to be hailed, as he desired, an “artist philosopher”, that is to say as an artist who put his art into the service of reforming the soul and mind of the modern man in order to propel him to make his spiritual life fuller and richer. 

Keywords: Creative Evolution, Schopenhauerian Will, Life-Force, Man and Superman