Charles Darwin & Robert Fitzroy: The Dilemma of the Noble Adversary
“. . . adversarial selfobjects sustain the self by providing the experience of being a center of initiative through permitting nondestructive oppositional self-assertiveness.”
ERNEST WOLF
Our early-in-life adversaries can make an enormous difference in the development of our character. I hope we have have gotten an “experience-near” taste of this in my description of my adversarial Soul Friendship with Helen Harrington Compton. But recent research shows that adversarial selfobjects—like containers and twins—are needed throughout the life cycle. What’s more, it has become clear that the dynamics of adversarial selfobjects are the least well-studied and well-understood of all selfobject experiences. So we must dig deeply into this domain.
One thing we do know is this: in order to really thrive as adults, and to live into our full possibility, we must have mature adversarial relationships. The potent mix of love and challenge inherent in these adversarial friendships nudges the self ever onward toward a more and more complex fulfillment of human possibilities. The example of my Soul Friendship with Helen Compton is a good way to begin our discussion, but now let’s go further. Let’s move on to a description of a mature adversarial relationship in order to see just what kinds of remarkable fruit these relationships might bear in our adult lives—if (and it’s a big if for most of us) we understand how to use them effectively. As we examine this territory, take note of where you identify with the creative adversarial experience of our protagonists.
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I once engaged in a prolonged study of so-called great lives. This investigation taught me a tremendous amount about how and why certain people seem to mature so fully into their own particular gifts. One of the most fascinating things I learned through this study is this: those individuals who find themselves at the very peak of their human possibilities almost always have, or have had, a mature noble adversary in their adult lives.
A list of optimally performing individuals and their worthy adversaries would run both broad and deep. Indeed, many of these pairs of noble adversaries live in the popular consciousness. You might know, for example, the story of Civil War adversaries Generals Lee and Grant—who never relinquished their admiration for each other. Or of the notorious adversarial relationship between royal cousins: Elizabeth I of England, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Or, perhaps, of composers Mozart and Salieri. Or psychologists Freud and Jung. You may have heard the great tale of the adversarial friendship between medieval warriors Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, or between Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII of Egypt, or Eleanor of Aquitane and Henry II of England—or between Mahatma Gandhi, the great twentieth-century Indian saint, and his worthy opponent the viceroy of India. You might have heard the compelling story of President Abraham Lincoln and his rival and friend, Secretary of State William Seward, a story that still lives in American political consciousness. You no doubt have other pairs to add to this partial list, pairs that come from all fields of life and all eras of history.
What conclusions do we draw from the tales of these great individuals? It seems clear: the noble adversary is an indispensable aid in living fully.
Did you know that in the Eastern contemplative traditions, gurus—or “enlightened” teachers—very often intentionally assume the form of the noble adversary for the student? Aspirants in these ancient traditions understand their teacher’s adversarial stance to be a routine part of their training toward enlightenment—and they expect it.
There is a common adversarial theme in these traditions: the teacher presents the student with increasingly difficult obstacles—physical, psychological, or spiritual obstacles. The student must gather himself together to meet the obstacles put in his way by the teacher. But here’s the catch: usually, in order to surmount these obstacles, the student must expand his mind into an entirely new level of consciousness.
Twentieth-century American anthropologist Carlos Castaneda tells of his long (and, as it turns out, most likely fictional) apprenticeship to a native American shaman, Don Juan, who tells him that “Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who’s not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of continuing on the path of knowledge.”
The noble adversary, in its most mature form then, is nothing less than a goad to expanded consciousness. We will see how this plays out in the story that follows.
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There is perhaps no more dramatic—or revealing—example of a mature adversarial Soul Friendship than the relationship between Charles Darwin, the well-known father of the theory of evolution, and his friend, mentor, and adversary, Robert Fitzroy.
Robert Fitzroy was the captain of HMS Beagle, on which Darwin would spend the most formative five years of his young life, and during which he would develop the seeds of his theory of evolution. Fitzroy and Darwin would become passionate adversaries, but in spite of deep conflict would maintain—over the course of decades—their love for one another, their involvement, their civility, their good will. It’s clear, in retrospect, that the adversarial tension between them actually helped to give birth to and to refine Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It will be fun to tell you this inspiring—though sometimes dark and fraught—story, even in fairly short form. (Most biographies of Darwin and Fitzroy run to eight hundred pages.) And as we move through the story, you will see—and I will point out—the mechanisms of what we will come to call “mature adversity intelligence,” and how these mature character traits issue forth from—what else?—deep relationship.
One truth will become clear: without Robert Fitzroy, there would have been no Charles Darwin as we now know him. (Remember our central premise: the self is a profoundly co-created phenomenon!)
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In August 1831, Robert Fitzroy was a twenty-six-year-old captain in Queen Victoria’s navy. Fitzroy, already recognized as an extremely able, even brilliant, seaman and scientist, was slight, dark, and handsome—and at times brooding and moody. He was a direct descendent of King Charles II of England and he carried himself as such. (He was said to have the impeccable manners of his aristocratic mother and her brother, his famous uncle, Lord Castlereagh, a powerful, and oft-feared Tory, about whom we will hear more later.)
Almost from the beginning of his naval career it was clear that Fitzroy had the makings of an admiral—an honor he would later earn through his impeccable leadership on a number of ships, but especially as a result of his most important first assignment. He had at the very beginning of his career been given command of HMS Beagle, the British empire’s most advanced surveying ship, and had been charged with completing an in-depth survey of the perilous coasts—both east and west—of the continent of South America.
Fitzroy was a superb and fearless seaman, and a naval perfectionist. An early example: Not satisfied with the Navy’s extensive refitting of HMS Beagle for her important-but-perilous mission, Fitzroy had at his own expense provided her with the most recent scientific and navigational tools. He would get the job done at all costs.
Take note of some early foreshadowing here. Perseverance was Fitzroy’s middle name. Like most naval officers of his day and rank, Fitzroy’s most strongly held personal value was devotion to duty at all costs. It was the code of the gentleman. It was the code of the officer. And Darwin, over the course of five years with the captain, would learn the code well. Indeed, it would become his own.
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Through a series of serendipitous events, Captain Fitzroy would soon be paired with an unlikely companion. Twenty-three years old at the time they met—only three years younger than the captain—Charles Darwin was thin and agile, with deep-set eyes and an overhanging brow. He was physically unprepossessing—and many at the time said intellectually unprepossessing as well, though the facts do not bear this out, as we shall see. In any case, there was no question that by comparison with the elegant and commanding Fitzroy, Darwin was something of a slacker.
Charles Darwin was the son of the wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and the grandson of the great English purveyor of fine china Josiah Wedgwood. Young Darwin had dropped out of medical school when he found that he (inconveniently) abhorred the sight of blood—and when he discovered, perhaps more importantly, that he was vastly bored by the lectures. He always preferred hunting, riding, shooting, and partying to the rigors of study and career.
After Charles dropped out of medical school, his father was at his wit’s end with his son. What to do with the boy? The elder Darwin had only barely been able to convince Charles to take the next, and really the only remaining, available step into the life of an English country gentleman—the inexorable step into the clergy. Dr. Darwin supposed that slacker Charles was destined to live the life of a moderately indolent country priest. Charles, after some mild resistance, finally agreed to attend the University of Cambridge to study for Anglican holy orders.
There was little reason to hope that Charles would have a brilliant career of any sort.
Unprepossessing as he might have been, however, this young Darwin had several impressive qualities. Most importantly, he had an implacable curiosity—always questioning, investigating, exploring. In retrospect, we can see that even as a boy, Darwin had the mind of a philosopher. He was a young man of many interests, though he appeared to have little ability to effectively focus these interests. (Today, we might say that he had perhaps suffered from a mild form of attention deficit disorder. He was a poor writer, a mediocre student, and his interests were frustratingly scattered. The guy simply lacked focus.)
Surprisingly to everyone, though—and not least to his father—this changed somewhat when, at Cambridge, Darwin was befriended by the well-known botanist John Stevens Henslow. The two began walking daily in the woods and fields around Cambridge. (Darwin quickly became known around town as “the man who walks with Henslow.”) They went on long nature walks, Henslow pointing out objects of interest, and Darwin taking careful notes, and often collecting specimens for the botanist.
At Cambridge, a spark of some true scholarly interest was lit in Darwin. He had always, even as a child, been a walker, a hiker, an explorer. Now his interests acquired focus. He became fascinated with beetles. (As it turns out, collecting beetles was very fashionable at that time, and Darwin discovered that he enjoyed it, and indeed that he had some talent for it.)
The life of a collector suited Darwin. He preferred an active life, and he savored being out in nature. He loved the prowl of hunting for specimens, the excitement of examining them, mounting them, and classifying them. And his new pursuit fit with his “tribe” of friends; amateur naturalists were commonplace among the gentry at that time. Having found an interest, Darwin became fairly obsessed with it, and he wrote in his journal that he began to enjoy the focus it brought into his life.
How, then, did our aspiring naturalist get paired with Fitzroy and the Beagle?
It’s a great story.
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Captain Fitzroy had decided that it would be in his best interest to bring along a companion for his surveying trip around the globe—to bring with him a gentleman with whom he could converse intelligently, and who could keep him company at meals, and who might occasionally read and study with him at night. Fitzroy knew that in order to keep the lines of authority clear, he could not do this kind of socializing with his junior officers. So it would be, he thought, a wise move to bring along a special companion.
(Here is an additional bit of foreshadowing: It turns out that there was another, and darker, motivation in Fitzroy’s search for a companion—a motivation about which most people did not know at that time. Fitzroy was terrified of the bouts of deep depression from which he had suffered in the past. These periods of debilitating gloom and lethargy could come upon him in seeming random fashion. His uncle, the aforementioned Lord Castlereagh, was given to strikingly similar bouts of severe depression, and had in fact taken his own life—he had slit his own throat—during one such black period. Throughout his adult life, Fitzroy was haunted by what he considered to be the shameful family malady of depression, mental illness, and suicide.
To make matters even more alarming for Fitzroy, his predecessor as captain of HMS Beagle, one Captain Pringle Stokes, had shot and killed himself off the South American coast while engaged in the very same task now set for Fitzroy. Stokes was reportedly the victim of loneliness, isolation, depression and the frustration of the epic mission set before him. Fitzroy secretly worried that he might succumb to the same fate.)
So, the captain was on the hunt for a suitable companion. And through a complicated series of coincidences—it was a small world among the gentry in those days—young Darwin’s name came up. Darwin fit Fitzroy’s bill, though modestly. He was young, impressionable, and affable—a gentleman, to be sure, and a novice scientist who had learned something already about collecting specimens. (Darwin, we are told, could shoot, skin, and stuff, and had, of course, had some training in botany through Henslow.)
This was all to the good, and after another young man—Fitzroy’s first choice—demurred just before the expedition was due to set sail, the captain really had no other options. Young Darwin was it.
Through a series of accidents and synchronicities, then, Charles Darwin was invited to join Captain Robert Fitzroy on the two-year voyage of a lifetime. (It of course turned out to be five long years—not two—before HMS Beagle would again sail into an English port.)
Fitzroy’s was a fateful choice. Darwin was suitable raw material, all agreed. But no one had the slightest idea how he would “catch fire” during the trip. No one, except perhaps Professor Henslow, knew that Charles Darwin was dry kindling ready for a match. A conflagration of world-changing proportions would ensue.
On December 27, 1831, the Beagle and its seventy-three souls set sail. It was a momentous occasion. Young Charles Darwin was aware of the very real peril involved in the adventure—aware, indeed, that he might never see his family again. (Privately, he gave himself only slightly more than a fifty-fifty chance of returning.) The ship would be circumnavigating the globe—and navigating the death trap of Cape Horn and the treacherous Strait of Magellan.
It’s important for us to understand that Captain Fitzroy and his crew faced a truly daunting task. They were to complete a close mapping of all the coastlines, inlets, and rivers of the complex coasts of South America. They were also charged with logging the tides and weather conditions of these treacherous coasts. (Fitzroy, in fact, would be the first to plot wind forces around the globe, using an entirely new scale.) The most desolate regions of Patagonia and the Falkland Islands had to be surveyed, as well as the confounding maze of channels at the continent’s southernmost tip in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. And of course, rounding the southern tip of South America was immensely perilous; it was a maelstrom of islands and channels in which many a ship had been lost.
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By all accounts, the voyage began well. From the first, Fitzroy and Darwin got along famously. Charles was utterly taken with the captain. Said one biographer: “He had taken to [Fitzroy] ‘at first sight’ and begun to trust him almost involuntarily. Fitzroy became his ‘beau ideal of a Captain,’ and his kindness left Charles feeling as if he had been predestined to make the voyage.” Fitzroy, as it turned out, also took to Darwin. He liked his manners, his breeding, and his fine—if cluttered and youthful—mind.
The voyage, indeed, began with a kind of bromance between the two men—with Fitzroy clearly in the leadership position. Fitzroy was a masterful commander and a brilliant navigator. Add to that his considerable scientific knowledge, and this made him in many ways a perfect match for Darwin. Early on, Darwin described himself as “happy as a king” with “Fitz” and on the Beagle.
Darwin was not alone in his admiration for the captain. This admiration was indeed shared by most of Fitzroy’s subordinates, who seemed to look to him as a kind of father figure. In the language of our inquiry, the captain provided a safe container for the ship’s entire crew. He was able, reliable, steady, and kind. (Well, usually kind). The men felt safe with Fitz at the helm.
Of course, Fitzroy had that one Achilles’ heel, didn’t he: his depressive nature. The captain was occasionally moody and sullen, and when in such a state he was given to dramatic outbursts of temper. The crew called him “hot coffee” because of his ability to snap at a moment’s notice.
But to Darwin, Fitzroy was the soul of kindness. He was the strong, knowing, capable captain upon whom Charles relied on a daily basis. One example: Darwin suffered from terrible seasickness for nearly the entire trip. Fitzroy never mocked him for this as some experienced sailors might have done. Instead, he sympathetically encouraged him to gain his sea legs—which Darwin never actually did. (Indeed, Darwin came to abhor the sea. Upon return home in 1836, he never left England again, and would never in his life set foot on another ship.)
Fitzroy soon became much more than an admired captain to Darwin: The captain eagerly took on the role of active mentor to the young naturalist—a role for which Fitzroy was well suited indeed. The captain knew geology. He knew the current controversies in botany. He knew how to point young Darwin in the right directions—how to help him to ask the right questions. An important and fateful example: Fitzroy recommended, straight out of the gate, that Darwin study and master Charles Lyell’s new and revolutionary book, Principles of Geology, and gave Darwin a copy of the first volume of the book, which Charles read during the first leg of their journey.
(More foreshadowing: From the beginning, Fitzroy warned Darwin not to take all of Lyell’s theories seriously. “They cannot fully be believed,” he said. Nonetheless, he understood that it was important for Darwin to know about them.)
Fitzroy himself was interested in the flora, fauna, and geology of the sites where they harbored. He had a scientist’s eye for every aspect of the field with which he was engaged, and encouraged Darwin to collect specimens at every opportunity. Darwin, it turns out, of course, needed little encouragement.
In early February 1832, HMS Beagle happily caught a trade wind and in a matter of weeks sailed smoothly into the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. From his very first sight of the coast of Brazil, Darwin’s mind was on fire. As Fitzroy and the crew of the Beagle surveyed the coastline, Darwin plunged into the jungle beyond Rio on an expedition with a ragtag group of English adventurers. What he saw astonished him: conical ants’ nests rising a full twelve feet from the ground, and bursting with activity; vampire bats gorging on horses’ blood; beetles galore. (In one day, he caught sixty-eight species.) He saw enormous, colorful spiders, and a predatory wasp that stung caterpillars and stuffed them into its clay cell as food for the larvae. He saw his first new-world monkey, hanging upside down from its prehensile tail.
Darwin’s collecting now began in earnest. He collected massive numbers of specimens of plants and small animals, following a pattern that he established right at the start. He would trap, shoot, and collect on one day; preserve the specimens the next; and devote the evenings to note taking and correspondence. As Darwin’s collecting became more serious, Captain Fitzroy stepped up his mentorship of Darwin. Fitzroy was highly disciplined in his own note taking and self-organization, and he would impart some of this mastery to Charles.
Fitzroy’s every action set the tone for the ship’s crew, and set the tone for Darwin as well. Darwin observed that the captain’s most important trait was his almost pugnacious tenacity. (Devotion to duty!) Fitzroy was simply driven to do every job well. Famously, Fitzroy oftentimes went back over the same section of coastline again and again to remap it, to get it absolutely right—usually at great inconvenience to himself and the crew. This was initially puzzling and immensely frustrating for Darwin.
But Darwin learned a lesson here. Loving and admiring Fitzroy as he did, he copied him in the ways that he could. And the most profound way in which he could “copy” Fitzroy (psychologists would say “introject” him) was in this trait of perseverance. For the rest of his life, in fact, Darwin would exemplify this trait of perseverance that he saw so admirably modeled by Fitzroy.
“It’s dogged that does it” became Darwin’s most self-defining motto throughout his professional life. It’s dogged that gets it done! Fitzroy taught through example that you must meet adversity with resilience, strength, and grit. Push through whatever obstacles you had to. Stay with a mission at all costs. Never abandon a task, once set.
Fitzroy pressured Darwin to debark whenever possible and to examine the terrain: To investigate. To map. To bring back specimens. To take notes. To make drawings. To keep a careful journal. Fitzroy went over these notes and journals with Darwin. (They would later, together, write a best-selling four-part journal of the whole voyage—a publishing success that would make both of them famous.) Fitzroy helped Darwin devise basic systems of classification to prepare his specimens to be examined back in Cambridge, where they were henceforth sent in huge crates from every port of call.
In Fitzroy, Darwin had met a man—and in many ways a friend, collaborator, even a father figure—like no other. Inspired by Fitzroy, the whole Beagle enterprise became a testing ground for young Darwin. In spite of his queasiness on the water, Darwin grew fond of the discipline of being aboard ship. Charles was well liked by the crew, who often taught him the skills of seamanship and who cheered wildly when he—the perpetually seasick philosopher—finally climbed the masts in a burst of bravado. Darwin was thrilled with the camaraderie and it pushed him to up his own game. Along the way, he was developing mastery, energy, and discipline. Darwin was, in a sense, in the navy along with the rest of the crew. All of this resulted, as we can see in his journals, in a significant boost in self-esteem and a new sense of self-efficacy, and self-organization—a thrilling new sense of reliance on his own capacities.
Fitzroy, for his part, developed a profound trust in Darwin’s instincts. Like the best of parents, Fitzroy encouraged Charles to undertake even difficult journeys on land while the ship was off the coast surveying, taking soundings, and recording. Fitzroy, again like a good parent, trusted Darwin to handle himself with skill. And Darwin rose to the occasion.
In studying Darwin’s journals, we can see that throughout the first months of the voyage, Darwin was immersed in a profound idealization of the captain. He had wanted to pull himself up to meet the captain. To rise to the occasion. To show that he was up to the challenges at hand. Fitzroy clearly engaged Darwin’s deepest aspirations to be all that he could be. Darwin craved the captain’s praise and approbation (just as I had craved Helen Compton’s), and he got it. So Fitzroy became an important object to Darwin. There is no doubt that the relationship was fired by love. In the frame of our current investigation, we could say that “energy and information” passed robustly between the two men during their years at sea.
As one reads their journals, it’s clear that Fitzroy and Darwin’s friendship began with elements of containment (Fitzroy containing Darwin) and even twinship at times, as I have noted. But this was not to be the enduring dynamic of the friendship. The real, enduring selfobject relationship turned out to be decidedly adversarial. (Take note here that adversarial Soul Friendships often begin as something else, and slowly morph into the territory of true adversity.)
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The first hint of storm clouds of conflict between the two men came soon enough. Just weeks after their arrival in Brazil, Darwin and Fitzroy disagreed about the topic of slavery. Darwin had now seen the ravages of slavery in Bahia, Brazil—one of their first ports of call—as he had never seen them before, with black men, women, and children, as he wrote, “staggering under their heavy burthens.” For the first time, he witnessed slaves being beaten, sold, and brutally parted from their loved ones.
Back at table on HMS Beagle, Darwin initiated an intense conversation about the situation. He stated his abhorrence for the practice of slavery. Fitzroy pushed back. He remarked, to Darwin’s complete shock, that slavery was not, indeed, “intolerable,” for, he observed, “Brazilians in general treat their black servants well.”
What? Darwin burned with fury. He could not believe his ears.
Said one pair of biographers, “Fitzroy was widely travelled and Darwin was not, but in his Whig heart, Darwin knew wrong from right. Slavery was the one institution that his whole family had inveighed against. It was evil, and Darwin suggested that the only solution was emancipation.”
Darwin, now passionate, held forth to Fitzroy on the case against slavery.
Fitzroy, though, was just as fired up. He commented to Darwin that he had once heard a slave owner ask his servants whether they were unhappy or wished to be free. “No,” they had replied, according to Fitzroy, “they did not wish to be free. So shouldn’t their wishes be respected?”
What in heaven’s name was a slave’s answer to such a question worth, in the very presence of his master? Darwin had exploded.
At that, Fitzroy lost his temper entirely, declaring that he and Darwin could certainly not share the same quarters any longer. His word had been questioned. Darwin could go downstairs and eat with the crew. And then, furious, the captain stalked out of the cabin. “Hot coffee” had exploded, and Darwin had, for the first time, been scalded.
Now something important to our inquiry happens. A few hours after the explosion, a written apology arrived at the crew’s mess, where Darwin was eating. Darwin accepted it, and returned to the captain’s cabin.
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Why do I say that this well-documented apology was important? Well, we can see from this drama that Darwin and Fitzroy were already selfobjects for one another. Remember our lesson about the urgency of repair between selfobjects? In the urgency of the captain’s apology, we can see his remorse. The apology, I believe, was not just manners, but betrayed Fitzroy’s true affection for, and attachment to, Darwin. Remember: it is difficult to tolerate an empathic break with a selfobject. (Take note here: The love between the two men would be the engine that drove a tremendous amount of self-restraint and self-examination on both of their parts in the coming years. There would be more apologies to come.)
This first open conflict, of course, was only the beginning. Over the coming months and years, the true extent of their disagreements would slowly emerge. These disagreements—religious, philosophical, temperamental—were, as it turned out, massive. Indeed, by temperament and upbringing Darwin and Fitzroy differed in almost every way imaginable. Robert Fitzroy was a Tory (a conservative) born and bred, and Charles Darwin a staunch Whig (a liberal). Fitzroy was a devout Anglican who believed strongly in the Bible as the written word of God, and in creationism. (Strictly speaking, in other words, Fitzroy believed the Bible’s account of creation, and the Flood, and believed the description of creation in the Bible’s book of Genesis to be sacrosanct.) Darwin, on the other hand, came from a free-thinking Unitarian background. In his teens and early twenties, he had been profoundly influenced by his intellectually curious cousins and his radical brother, Erasmus, and he was more prone to see the world flexibly. Charles Darwin was simply more open-minded than Fitzroy about all of these issues.
(With the perspective of time, it’s easy to see the profound ethical errors in Fitzroy’s thinking and to abhor him for these. But without excusing him, we can see that the captain was a man caught in the bonds of his own time, class, and context. It’s clear from his own writings that he viewed himself as an exemplary “God-fearing, Christian man.” An example: on an earlier voyage, Fitzroy had—as he thought—“rescued” so-called savages from Tierra del Fuego and brought them back to England to be educated as “good Christians.” And on this current voyage with Darwin, Fitzroy was about to plant these selfsame “savages” back in their native Tierra de Fuego, along with a trained English missionary, to begin to convert and educate “the heathen” of that “savage” part of the world. All of this was done at Fitzroy’s own expense.)
During their second year at sea, the truth slowly—and painfully—dawned on Darwin. His captain, whom he loved and admired, was profoundly limited. As Darwin’s idealization of Fitzroy began to crumble, their relationship shifted. The two men were already attached as selfobjects, as we have seen, and indeed, they loved one another and were devoted to one another. But now, in Ernest Wolf’s terms, the two men slowly became adversarial selfobjects.
This adversity turned out to be especially creative and effective for Darwin. He became increasingly assertive with Fitzroy, standing by his own views and instincts, while staying in loving relationship with the captain. This stance is the very essence of the mature adversary. As noted, Wolf says, “adversarial selfobjects sustain the self by providing the experience of being a center of initiative through permitting nondestructive oppositional self-assertiveness.” Take note: Center of initiative. Nondestructive assertiveness.
We can see between Darwin and Fitzroy the precise dilemma of the noble adversary—and the reason a mature adversarial selfobject (in the right hands) becomes such a powerful engine of creativity, and even of transformation of consciousness. Why? Because love between adversaries makes a black-and-white picture very difficult to sustain for either one. The love and good will for the adversary makes battle lines difficult to draw. There is clearly conflict. But because of the admixture of love, conflicts of this nature between adversarial selfobjects tend to seek resolution. Each individual seeks to act upon the other, rather than to destroy him. And in acting in this way—with integrity to his own views—he experiences him or herself as a nondestructive center of initiative, just as Wolf suggests.
So what happens? In order to be truly effective and remain in relationship, each side looks for “a third way” out of the conflict—a way that might make room (somehow!) for both their views and interests. A way that will humanize and soften the conflict, and preserve good will, which is the essence of love. Each side is forced to dig deep within, and to somehow embrace the other in spite of differences. Neither Fitzroy nor Darwin could dispense with one another; Darwin’s very life, in fact, was in Fitzroy’s hands every day that they were at sea. So, they sought the third way whenever they could, as they had done in their first argument about slavery—wherein each man eventually “agreed to disagree” and continued to try to act upon the other.
We can see in retrospect that Fitzroy represented every belief and entrenched interest that Darwin would battle for the rest of his life: creationism, biblical literalism, Tory arrogance, bigotry, establishmentarianism. Darwin would find all of these writ large in the captain. But now he was wrapped up in deep relationship with a real human being who represented these traits and beliefs. These beliefs were not concepts “out there.” They were embodied. As we shall see, this mature adversarial relationship would have a profound effect on the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Fitzroy, for his part, also aimed at the third way. Interestingly, he initially adopted a gentle, big-brotherly approach to Charles. He came to call Darwin “the Philosopher” as a way of bringing humor to their differences. Said one account, in spite of their disagreements, Fitzroy still held Charles in the highest regard. Fitzroy continued to see Darwin as “‘a very superior young man,’ with the right mix of ‘necessary qualities which makes him feel at home, and happy, and makes everyone his friend.’”
Think about it: the men were together in the captain’s cabin at lunch and dinner almost every day for five years, talking regularly about the very issues that might otherwise have divided them. For Darwin, the entire voyage—and his thinking about evolution—unfolded in the context of this relationship with Fitzroy. As a result of this—and unlike some of the later proponents of evolution, especially Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker, about whom, more later—Darwin found himself unable to draw hard battle lines between himself and the creationists.
Now the question arises: Would both Darwin and Fitzroy be able to sustain their good will in the face of adversity? Would they each be able to hang in there in the position of noble adversary? Would they each be able to tolerate the “tension arc” between them? Could these men find ways to make the tension arc creative? Could they restrain themselves from moving into the more destructive features of ordinary adversarial relationships: The hardening of battle lines? The retrenching into fixed positions? The slow arising of ill will? Or would they remain flexible, fluid, open, and full of good will? These are the central questions in the evolution of truly effective and transformational adversarial relationships.
Let’s see what happens.