The Straussian proponents of Platonic political philosophy reject Darwinian natural right for two reasons.
First, they think it promotes a reductionism that denies the cosmic teleology of natural ends. Second, they think it promotes a historicism that denies the cosmic eternity of natural kinds.
When modern natural science sets aside any teleological conception of the universe, they say, it deprives human purposefulness of any cosmic support and thus leads to a reductionistic nihilism. When modern natural science sets aside any conception of the eternity of species or kinds, it deprives human morality and politics of any eternal standard of human nature and thus leads to historicist relativism.
That's why the Straussians are deeply suspicious of modern science and why they look to Plato's argument that the human good must be judged by a cosmic model of eternal, teleological order.
But as I have indicated in my posts over the last two months, I am not convinced that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) supports this position. As I have suggested previously, I see Catherine Zuckert's new book--Plato's Philosophers--as a helpful guide to these questions as they arise in the Platonic dialogues. By taking up each of the dialogues in their dramatic order--rather than in the order in which Plato wrote them--and by comparing what Socrates says in comparison with what is said by four other philosophers in the dialogues--the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger--Zuckert shows that Plato's teaching about cosmic teleology and the eternity of the ideas is much more complex than is often recognized.
Moreover, she shows that these two topics really are the fundamental issues running throughout the dialogues. The question of cosmic teleology is raised at the end of the Laws. "If no connection can be found between the most pressing concerns of human existence and the order of the whole, we humans would appear to be set adrift in a fundamentally indifferent, if not hostile environment" (145-46). The Athenian Stranger offers a teleological cosmology based on the intelligent design of a divine mind. But, Zuckert observes, his arguments are not very plausible; and Socrates is not present in the dialogue to question him. So we are left wondering "whether we can discover an all-encompassing, intelligible order, and second, if such an order can be found, whether it supports or fosters human happiness."
The question of the eternal ideas is raised in the Parmenides. A young Socrates cannot defend his doctrine of the ideas against the criticisms of Parmenides. In particular, Socrates cannot explain exactly how the unchanging, purely intelligible ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings. In fact, as Zuckert sees it, Socrates never solves this problem anywhere in the dialogues.
As I have noted in some of my previous posts on Zuckert's book, she generally emphasizes that Socrates never clearly develops a cosmic teleology. "In contrast to Timaeus, Socrates never gives a specific account of the order of the movements of the heavenly bodies or the geometric construction of the four elements" (421).
Instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, Socrates looks to human wants and desires. "In contrast to Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, Socrates never suggests that human beings can discover what is good for them by contemplating the intelligible order of the movements of the heavens. Not moved by the same wants and desires, the heavens cannot tell us what to do" (419).
If this is the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates would be close to my position--that human morality and politics depends not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires. If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether these ends have any cosmic reference. Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.
This suggests that Plato's Socrates could embrace a conception of the cosmos as morally neutral, while seeing the species-specific desires of human beings as sufficient grounds for moral teleology. This seems to be the stance of the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist. The Eleatic concludes that although the gods might have cared for human beings in the past, the gods no longer rule us directly. And so, as Zuckert states it, human beings now live "in a godforsaken universe in which they have to rule and provide for themselves" (714-17). Joseph Cropsey--in his Plato's World--interprets this denial of cosmic teleology as Plato's understanding.
Although Zuckert generally agrees with Cropsey, she occasionally suggests disagreement. In contrast to the "godforsaken universe" of the Eleatic Stranger, Zuckert asserts, Socrates' universe looks like that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger. "All three of these philosophers suggest that studying the intelligible motions of the heavenly bodies will help human beings learn not merely how the cosmos is ordered but, even more important, how to order their own souls" (718). But this contradicts what Zuckert says elsewhere in her book about how Socrates never clearly embraces the cosmological arguments of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger.
Zuckert's confusion here reflects a confusion in Socrates' position. On the one hand, Socrates never develops any precise cosmology comparable to that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, and he never clearly endorses what they say, although he does say that Timaeus represents "the peak of all philosophy." On the other hand, Socrates does show a yearning for some cosmic explanation of everything as guided by "mind" (nous) so that everything is ordered for the best. It seems, as Zuckert suggests, that Socrates wants this to be the "best of possible worlds" (in Leibniz's famous phrase), because if it is not, then this world is in some essential sense accidental, and that would frustrate Socrates' yearning for a cosmic order that is ordered for the best.
But what then about the other big issue--the question of the eternity of species? If Darwin's evolutionary science is correct, then all the species of life come into being and pass away. Species are not eternal or everlasting. This would seem to contradict the Platonic/Socratic teaching that being--what is really real and fully intelligible--is to be identified as eternal and unchanging, as distinguished from the temporal and ever-changing flux of the sensible world.
This identification of the real as what is eternally fixed is Parmenides' teaching. Socrates adopts this Parmenidean position, although he departs from Parmenides claim that being must be one and undifferentiated, because Socrates insists that being must be differentiated into multiple forms or ideas. As Zuckert says, Socrates is a "pluralistic Parmenidean" (684, 688).
But as long as he adheres to this Parmenidean assumption that being is eternally unchanging, Socrates cannot bridge the gap between the unchanging ideas and changing sense experience. The Eleatic Stranger points out that any absolute separation of unchanging intelligibles and changing sensibles cannot explain human knowledge, because human cognition is in motion. "The intelligibility of being seems to require that it somehow be both in motion and at rest" (700). The Eleatic proposes that we understand the world by sorting things into classes according to the ways they are like or unlike one another.
I am on the side of the Eleatic Stranger. Karl Popper--in his The World of Parminides--captures the main thought here: we need to go beyond the Parmenidean search for invariants and see that reality is a mixture of fixity and flux. We need to see, as Popper suggests, that the history of the cosmos shows an evolutionary emergence of variance and novelty. As the Eleatic Stranger argues, we can sort things out according to their enduring patterns of similarity and difference. But these enduring patterns are not eternal.
This is certainly true for our study of human nature. The human species is not absolutely invariant or eternal. Human beings did not exist before the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens, and we can expect that some day the human species will go extinct. But for as long as our species exists, there will be natural propensities that characterize us.
And yet the present reality of the human species is not invariant, because each human being is unique in being a product of a unique natural history. Biological history depends upon the variation that comes from sexual mating in which the random assortment of genes results in the procreation of unique individuals. So while we can identify the human species as a range of traits, we know that within that range, there is immense variation expressed in individual diversity. Human nature as we know it is neither absolutely fixed nor absolutely chaotic.
Without realizing it, Zuckert implicitly endorses this Darwinian understanding of the human species in her criticisms of Timaeus's cosmological explanation of the human species. As she indicates, Timaeus cannot account for the unpredictable variation in human beings that comes from human mating and reproduction, because he has to assume that the divine craftsman created human nature as absolutely unchanging. Consequently, Timaeus has to assume that all human beings are born absolutely the same in their natural abilities and traits, which denies the reality of natural individual differences (842). Thus, as Zuckert indicates, Timaeus' cosmology--in its search for eternal invariance--must deny the obvious facts of sexual reproduction and individual identity.
My conclusion from all this is that the Platonic dialogues give us reasons to believe that conceptions of cosmic teleology and the eternity of species are implausible because they contradict what we know by experience. More plausible, I suggest, would be the Darwinian conceptions of immanent teleology and the evolution of species.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Darwinism, Reductionism, and the Socratic Turn
One of the most common criticisms of a Darwinian political science is that it must assume a materialist reductionism that denies the freedom of the mind. I often hear this criticism from my colleagues in political philosophy who sometimes cite the famous account in Plato's Phaedo of why Socrates turned away from natural philosophy to moral and political philosophy.
Speaking to some of his friends the day before his execution in Athens, Socrates recounts that as a young man he studied natural philosophy. He was particularly attracted to the teaching of Anaxagoras that everything in the cosmos is ordered by Mind (nous). Socrates thought it was good that Mind should be responsible for ordering all things in just the way that would be best, so that to explain the cause of anything--why it exists or why it comes into being or passes away as it does--one should discover why it is best for it to be as it is, as fulfilling the intention of the cosmic Mind. Socrates thought he had discovered "a teacher after my own mind" (97a-d).
But later Socrates discovered that he was wrong about Anaxagoras. Instead of explaining how each thing in the universe is ordered by Mind for what is best, Anaxagoras explained things through material causes such as air and water. For Socrates this can't be right. He observes:
"To me this seemed most similar to that of somebody who--after saying that Socrates does everything he does by mind and then venturing to assign the causes of each of the things I do--should first say that I'm now sitting here because my body's composed of bones and sinews, and because bones are solid and have joints keeping them separate from one another, while sinews are such as to tense and relax and also wrap the bones all around along with the flesh and skin that holds them together. Then since the bones swing in their sockets, the sinews, by relaxing and tensing, make me able, I suppose, to bend my limbs right now--and it's through this cause that I'm sitting here with my legs bent. And again, as regards my conversing with you, he might assign other causes of this sort, holding voices and air and sounds and a thousand other such things responsible, and not taking care to assign the true causes--that since Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here and more just to stay put and endure whatever penalty they order. Since--by the Dog--these sinews and bones of mine would, I think, long ago have been in Megara or Boetia, swept off by an opinion about what's best, if I didn't think it more just and more beautiful, rather than fleeing and playing the runaway, to endure whatever penalty the city should order" (98c-99a).
The explanations through physical causes correctly describe the necessary material conditions for what Socrates is doing. But they don't explain the true cause of his actions here, which is his opinion about what it's best for him to do.
Socrates goes on to report that his frustration with Anaxagoras led him to undertake a "second sailing" in search for the causes of things. Instead of looking directly into beings, like those who blind themselves by trying to look directly at the sun during an eclipse, he decided to study the accounts or arguments (logoi) that people make about being, like those who look at the sun's reflection in water. This is what some have called the "Socratic turn" away from studying natural science to philosophical conversations about what people think about the world, which includes a turn towards moral and political philosophy.
But many modern biologists would agree with Socrates in criticizing the inadequacy of materialist reductionism. Consider, for example, Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the last century, who writes:
"The conceptual framework of biology is entirely different from that of the physical sciences and cannot be reduced to it. . . . The courtship of a male animal, for instance, can be described in the language and conceptual framework of the physical sciences (locomotion, energy turnover, metabolic processes, and so on), but it can also be described in the framework of behavioral and reproductive biology. And the latter description and explanation cannot be reduced to theories of the physical sciences. Such biological phenomena as species, competition, mimicry, territory, migration, and hibernation are among the thousands of examples of organismic phenomena for which a purely physical description is at best incomplete if not irrelevant" (Toward a New Philosophy of Biology [1988], p. 18).
One of the irreducible features of biological explanations, Mayr argues, is teleology--or at least the kind of teleology that Mayr identifies as "teleonomy." Mayr observes:
"Goal-directed behavior (in the widest sense of this word) is extremely widespread in the organic world; for instance, most activity connected with migration, food-getting, courtship, ontogeny, and all phases of reproduction is characterized by such goal orientation. The occurrence of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the world of living organisms" (p. 45).
"Teleonomy" is Mayr's term for the idea that such goal-directedness is guided by a genetic "program" that has ultimately been shaped by evolutionary history.
For animals with nervous systems and brains, some of this goal-directed behavior can be steered by cognition. Some animals can act voluntarily in so far as they are conscious of their goals. Human beings can act deliberately in so far as they have the cognitive capacity to aim at their goals in the light of past experience and future expectations. As Darwin saw, human beings are moral animals because they can deliberately act under the guidance of their moral sense of what is best for them.
Modern Darwinian biology is not reductionist, because it recognizes the irreducible, emergent complexity of the living world, which shows teleological behavior and mental causality. And yet there is no basis in this biology for cosmic teleology--for the idea that the cosmos as a whole is directed by some intelligent cause to some goal or purpose.
As Socrates indicates in the Phaedo, the idea that Mind rules the cosmos and orders it to good ends is an inference from our introspective human experience of mental deliberation and intentional choice. While Darwinian biologists can accept the idea of intentional order in the behavior of animals with some cognitive capacity for intentional behavior, they cannot accept the projection of this intentionality onto the whole universe.
As I have suggested in some previous posts, it's not clear whether Plato (or Plato's Socrates) endorses cosmic teleology. That Socrates was so attracted to the idea of Mind ruling the cosmos suggests an inclination in that direction. And the Timaeus would seem to lay out the cosmic teleology--the ordering of the cosmos by a divine craftsman looking to the eternal ideas of perfection--that Socrates had hoped would come from Anaxagoras. But the silence of Socrates during Timaeus's speech and the ridiculously implausible assertions in Timaeus' "likely story" leave careful readers wondering whether Plato endorses any conception of the cosmos as ordered by Mind for some cosmic purpose.
Speaking to some of his friends the day before his execution in Athens, Socrates recounts that as a young man he studied natural philosophy. He was particularly attracted to the teaching of Anaxagoras that everything in the cosmos is ordered by Mind (nous). Socrates thought it was good that Mind should be responsible for ordering all things in just the way that would be best, so that to explain the cause of anything--why it exists or why it comes into being or passes away as it does--one should discover why it is best for it to be as it is, as fulfilling the intention of the cosmic Mind. Socrates thought he had discovered "a teacher after my own mind" (97a-d).
But later Socrates discovered that he was wrong about Anaxagoras. Instead of explaining how each thing in the universe is ordered by Mind for what is best, Anaxagoras explained things through material causes such as air and water. For Socrates this can't be right. He observes:
"To me this seemed most similar to that of somebody who--after saying that Socrates does everything he does by mind and then venturing to assign the causes of each of the things I do--should first say that I'm now sitting here because my body's composed of bones and sinews, and because bones are solid and have joints keeping them separate from one another, while sinews are such as to tense and relax and also wrap the bones all around along with the flesh and skin that holds them together. Then since the bones swing in their sockets, the sinews, by relaxing and tensing, make me able, I suppose, to bend my limbs right now--and it's through this cause that I'm sitting here with my legs bent. And again, as regards my conversing with you, he might assign other causes of this sort, holding voices and air and sounds and a thousand other such things responsible, and not taking care to assign the true causes--that since Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here and more just to stay put and endure whatever penalty they order. Since--by the Dog--these sinews and bones of mine would, I think, long ago have been in Megara or Boetia, swept off by an opinion about what's best, if I didn't think it more just and more beautiful, rather than fleeing and playing the runaway, to endure whatever penalty the city should order" (98c-99a).
The explanations through physical causes correctly describe the necessary material conditions for what Socrates is doing. But they don't explain the true cause of his actions here, which is his opinion about what it's best for him to do.
Socrates goes on to report that his frustration with Anaxagoras led him to undertake a "second sailing" in search for the causes of things. Instead of looking directly into beings, like those who blind themselves by trying to look directly at the sun during an eclipse, he decided to study the accounts or arguments (logoi) that people make about being, like those who look at the sun's reflection in water. This is what some have called the "Socratic turn" away from studying natural science to philosophical conversations about what people think about the world, which includes a turn towards moral and political philosophy.
But many modern biologists would agree with Socrates in criticizing the inadequacy of materialist reductionism. Consider, for example, Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the last century, who writes:
"The conceptual framework of biology is entirely different from that of the physical sciences and cannot be reduced to it. . . . The courtship of a male animal, for instance, can be described in the language and conceptual framework of the physical sciences (locomotion, energy turnover, metabolic processes, and so on), but it can also be described in the framework of behavioral and reproductive biology. And the latter description and explanation cannot be reduced to theories of the physical sciences. Such biological phenomena as species, competition, mimicry, territory, migration, and hibernation are among the thousands of examples of organismic phenomena for which a purely physical description is at best incomplete if not irrelevant" (Toward a New Philosophy of Biology [1988], p. 18).
One of the irreducible features of biological explanations, Mayr argues, is teleology--or at least the kind of teleology that Mayr identifies as "teleonomy." Mayr observes:
"Goal-directed behavior (in the widest sense of this word) is extremely widespread in the organic world; for instance, most activity connected with migration, food-getting, courtship, ontogeny, and all phases of reproduction is characterized by such goal orientation. The occurrence of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the world of living organisms" (p. 45).
"Teleonomy" is Mayr's term for the idea that such goal-directedness is guided by a genetic "program" that has ultimately been shaped by evolutionary history.
For animals with nervous systems and brains, some of this goal-directed behavior can be steered by cognition. Some animals can act voluntarily in so far as they are conscious of their goals. Human beings can act deliberately in so far as they have the cognitive capacity to aim at their goals in the light of past experience and future expectations. As Darwin saw, human beings are moral animals because they can deliberately act under the guidance of their moral sense of what is best for them.
Modern Darwinian biology is not reductionist, because it recognizes the irreducible, emergent complexity of the living world, which shows teleological behavior and mental causality. And yet there is no basis in this biology for cosmic teleology--for the idea that the cosmos as a whole is directed by some intelligent cause to some goal or purpose.
As Socrates indicates in the Phaedo, the idea that Mind rules the cosmos and orders it to good ends is an inference from our introspective human experience of mental deliberation and intentional choice. While Darwinian biologists can accept the idea of intentional order in the behavior of animals with some cognitive capacity for intentional behavior, they cannot accept the projection of this intentionality onto the whole universe.
As I have suggested in some previous posts, it's not clear whether Plato (or Plato's Socrates) endorses cosmic teleology. That Socrates was so attracted to the idea of Mind ruling the cosmos suggests an inclination in that direction. And the Timaeus would seem to lay out the cosmic teleology--the ordering of the cosmos by a divine craftsman looking to the eternal ideas of perfection--that Socrates had hoped would come from Anaxagoras. But the silence of Socrates during Timaeus's speech and the ridiculously implausible assertions in Timaeus' "likely story" leave careful readers wondering whether Plato endorses any conception of the cosmos as ordered by Mind for some cosmic purpose.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Nietzsche, Darwin, and Christian Morality
It is remarkable that religious believers who fear Darwinian science as a threat to religious morality can quote Friedrich Nietzsche as supporting their position. I have noticed, for example, that whenever I defend a Darwinian conception of morality, some religious believers will remind me of what Nietzsche said about David Strauss and George Eliot.
Nietzsche's long essay on "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873) was published as the first of four essays collected under the title Untimely Meditations. It is a scornful attack on Strauss's book The Old Faith and the New.
In 1835, Strauss's book The Life of Jesus provoked intense criticism and even violence against him, because he denied the historical reality of Jesus and argued that he was a purely mythical creation of the early Christian community. (This book was translated from the German into English by George Eliot in 1846.) Nietzsche's reading of the book as a theology student in 1864-65 helped to convince him to reject his Christian faith and to refuse to take communion at Easter 1865.
The Old Faith and the New extends Strauss's reasoning by rejecting any conception of a personal God and by arguing that the moral teaching of Christianity can be preserved as part of the "new faith" in Darwinian science.
Nietzsche dismisses Strauss as a foolish philistine who does not understand that in rejecting Christianity, he has rejected the foundation for a Christian morality of universal love that cannot be sustained by Darwinian science. Strauss does not realize, according to Nietzsche, that a truly Darwinian ethic would be based on a Hobbesian "war of all against all" with the rule of the stronger over the weaker. Instead, Strauss declares: "Do not ever forget that you are a man and not a mere creature of nature: do not ever forget that all others are likewise men, that is to say, with all their individual differences the same as you, with the same needs and demands as you--that is the epitome of all morality." But this ignores the fact that, according to Darwin, man is "precisely a creature of nature and nothing else."
Moreover, Nietzsche notes, Strauss fails to see that Darwinian science does not support his metaphysical belief in the moral character of the cosmos, his belief "that everything proceeds according to eternal laws out of the one primeval source of all life, all reason and all goodness--that is the epitome of religion." By contrast, Nietzsche explains: "Modern natural science and study of history have nothing whatever to do with the Straussian faith in the cosmos."
In the Twilight of the Idols (ix.5), Nietzsche makes the same point in ridiculing George Eliot:
"G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.
"We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth--it stands or falls with faith in God.
"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English moraltiy has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem."
But notice the crucial assumption here in Nietzsche's reasoning--his agreement with those Christians who claim that human beings cannot know what is good for them unless they receive Christian morality as a command from God. I reject this assumption, because I believe that human beings can know what is good for them from their natural moral experience. And in rejecting Nietzsche's assumption, I also reject his conclusion--that Christian morality cannot rightly be sustained if one no longer believes in the Christian God.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin says that "to do good unto others--to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you--is the foundation-stone of morality," and he claims that even primitive human beings might act according to this principle as impelled by "the love of praise and the dread of blame," because they care about how they appear to others (1:165). He writes: "The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need not say anything on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to show that the social instincts--the prime principle of man's moral constitution--with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule. 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;' and this lies at the foundation of morality" (1:106).
That Darwin here quotes the statement of the golden rule from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12) might be taken by Nietzsche as evidence for his assertion that Christian morality depends on Christian faith. But notice that Darwin presents this rule as flowing "naturally" from human experience as combining social instincts, social habits, and intellectual activity. In referring to the social instincts as "the prime principle of man's moral constitution," Darwin has a footnote citing Marcus Aurelius, which suggests that the recognition of this moral sociality does not depend on Christian theology. Elsewhere in the Descent, Darwin explains the golden rule as a conclusion from the human experience of reciprocity--the natural tendency of human beings to respond in kind, rewarding those they trust and punishing those they don't. Consequently, when Jesus states the golden rule, he is not commanding something that human beings could not have figured out for themselves. Rather, he is reinforcing a lesson of human practical experience. Given our evolved human nature as social animals, our socially evolved habituation, and our intellectual powers for reflecting on our natural inclinations and social habits, we can understand the wisdom of the golden rule as "the foundation of morality."
Religious belief can reinforce our recognition of moral principles such as the golden rule, and that's why, as Darwin indicates, religion is important for moral history as contributing to our moral habituation. But still that morality can stand on its own natural ground even without any specific religious doctrines.
That's why I disagree with those like John Hare, Carson Holloway, and Peter Lawler, who agree with Nietzsche that there is no natural ground for Christian moral principles like the golden rule. (As I have indicated in some recent posts, it was only in his "middle period" that Nietzsche could see how morality could be rooted in evolved human nature without any need for a transcendent moral cosmology.)
A couple of previous posts on these points can be found here and here.
Nietzsche's long essay on "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873) was published as the first of four essays collected under the title Untimely Meditations. It is a scornful attack on Strauss's book The Old Faith and the New.
In 1835, Strauss's book The Life of Jesus provoked intense criticism and even violence against him, because he denied the historical reality of Jesus and argued that he was a purely mythical creation of the early Christian community. (This book was translated from the German into English by George Eliot in 1846.) Nietzsche's reading of the book as a theology student in 1864-65 helped to convince him to reject his Christian faith and to refuse to take communion at Easter 1865.
The Old Faith and the New extends Strauss's reasoning by rejecting any conception of a personal God and by arguing that the moral teaching of Christianity can be preserved as part of the "new faith" in Darwinian science.
Nietzsche dismisses Strauss as a foolish philistine who does not understand that in rejecting Christianity, he has rejected the foundation for a Christian morality of universal love that cannot be sustained by Darwinian science. Strauss does not realize, according to Nietzsche, that a truly Darwinian ethic would be based on a Hobbesian "war of all against all" with the rule of the stronger over the weaker. Instead, Strauss declares: "Do not ever forget that you are a man and not a mere creature of nature: do not ever forget that all others are likewise men, that is to say, with all their individual differences the same as you, with the same needs and demands as you--that is the epitome of all morality." But this ignores the fact that, according to Darwin, man is "precisely a creature of nature and nothing else."
Moreover, Nietzsche notes, Strauss fails to see that Darwinian science does not support his metaphysical belief in the moral character of the cosmos, his belief "that everything proceeds according to eternal laws out of the one primeval source of all life, all reason and all goodness--that is the epitome of religion." By contrast, Nietzsche explains: "Modern natural science and study of history have nothing whatever to do with the Straussian faith in the cosmos."
In the Twilight of the Idols (ix.5), Nietzsche makes the same point in ridiculing George Eliot:
"G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.
"We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth--it stands or falls with faith in God.
"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English moraltiy has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem."
But notice the crucial assumption here in Nietzsche's reasoning--his agreement with those Christians who claim that human beings cannot know what is good for them unless they receive Christian morality as a command from God. I reject this assumption, because I believe that human beings can know what is good for them from their natural moral experience. And in rejecting Nietzsche's assumption, I also reject his conclusion--that Christian morality cannot rightly be sustained if one no longer believes in the Christian God.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin says that "to do good unto others--to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you--is the foundation-stone of morality," and he claims that even primitive human beings might act according to this principle as impelled by "the love of praise and the dread of blame," because they care about how they appear to others (1:165). He writes: "The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need not say anything on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to show that the social instincts--the prime principle of man's moral constitution--with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule. 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;' and this lies at the foundation of morality" (1:106).
That Darwin here quotes the statement of the golden rule from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12) might be taken by Nietzsche as evidence for his assertion that Christian morality depends on Christian faith. But notice that Darwin presents this rule as flowing "naturally" from human experience as combining social instincts, social habits, and intellectual activity. In referring to the social instincts as "the prime principle of man's moral constitution," Darwin has a footnote citing Marcus Aurelius, which suggests that the recognition of this moral sociality does not depend on Christian theology. Elsewhere in the Descent, Darwin explains the golden rule as a conclusion from the human experience of reciprocity--the natural tendency of human beings to respond in kind, rewarding those they trust and punishing those they don't. Consequently, when Jesus states the golden rule, he is not commanding something that human beings could not have figured out for themselves. Rather, he is reinforcing a lesson of human practical experience. Given our evolved human nature as social animals, our socially evolved habituation, and our intellectual powers for reflecting on our natural inclinations and social habits, we can understand the wisdom of the golden rule as "the foundation of morality."
Religious belief can reinforce our recognition of moral principles such as the golden rule, and that's why, as Darwin indicates, religion is important for moral history as contributing to our moral habituation. But still that morality can stand on its own natural ground even without any specific religious doctrines.
That's why I disagree with those like John Hare, Carson Holloway, and Peter Lawler, who agree with Nietzsche that there is no natural ground for Christian moral principles like the golden rule. (As I have indicated in some recent posts, it was only in his "middle period" that Nietzsche could see how morality could be rooted in evolved human nature without any need for a transcendent moral cosmology.)
A couple of previous posts on these points can be found here and here.
Friday, August 14, 2009
How Nietzsche's Pietism Overturned His Darwinism
As Nietzsche fell into madness at the beginning of January in 1889, he wrote and mailed a series of letters. A letter to Peter Gast was only one sentence: "Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy." It was signed "The Crucified." Other letters were signed "Dionysus."
To many readers, it seems odd that Nietzsche--the self-proclaimed "Antichrist" who announced the death of God--would use such religious imagery and identify himself with Jesus and the god Dionysus. We might dismiss this as only a manifestation of his madness. But the signs of religiosity appear throughout Nietzsche's early and late writings. For example, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche professes his "faith" in the belief "that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole." And he declares: "Such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus" (ix.49).
One doesn't see this religiosity in the writings of Nietzsche's "middle period." In Human, All Too Human and Dawn, he strives for a Darwinian philosophy based on a scientific history of evolution. Rejecting all metaphysical and religious philosophy grounded on the idea of a cosmic teleology of eternal moral order, Nietzsche works from the thought that "everything has evolved: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths" (HATH, 2). Even though there are no eternal truths, a properly historical science can discover the "humble truths" of historical development.
Nietzsche believes that modern science continues the skeptical spirit of the Socratic tradition. He acknowledges, however, that most human beings cannot live the skeptical life of a Socratic "free spirit," because they yearn for transcendent truths and transcendent values that are absolute and eternal. Religions such as Christianity satisfy the transcendental longings of human beings to be redeemed from ordinary earthly existence so that they can feel an ecstatic rapture in the prospect of entering an eternal realm of perfect bliss. In Human, All Too Human, he speaks of this need for redemption as an "artificial" or "acquired" need that was cultivated by the Christian church in the Middle Ages, and he suggests that a future society might eliminate this need while serving "the common true needs of all men" (HATH, 27, 476). But Nietzsche also indicates that this need for redemption has become so strong that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art. Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music (such as Wagner's operas) that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines. Indeed, romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art (130-31, 150-53).
But then, as Nietzsche began writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, he seemed himself to fall under "the magic of religious feeling." In Human, All Too Human, he had warned against the "cult of the genius," based on the "religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of superhuman [ubermenschlichen] origin," and that they have some deep insight into reality (164). But then Zarathustra proclaims the "superhuman" or "overman" as the redeemer. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looks to "the redeeming human of the great love and contempt," to "this human of the future who will redeem us from the previous ideal," and he foresees: "this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this Anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness--he must some day come" (II, 24).
In his middle writings, Nietzsche came under the influence of Darwinian science, which overturned the romantic metaphysics and religiosity of The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. But, then, beginning in 1883, he returned to some of the religious and metaphysical propensities of those early writings. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, he had warned that scientific history--and particularly, Darwinian evolutionary history--was dangerous to life, because this "science of universal becoming" denied the eternal meaning of life as supported by belief in a cosmic teleology. He indicated that there were only two possible antidotes to this intellectual poison. The "unhistorical" antidote would require forgetting history and enclosing one's cultural life within a bounded horizon. The "suprahistorical" antidote would depend on "the powers that lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and recurring, towards art and religion." The problem is that science "sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal; it likewise lives in a profound antagonism towards the eternalizing powers of art and religion." And thus science "robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal" (4, 9-10).
After going through his middle period devoted to historical or evolutionary science, Nietzsche in his later writings returned to his earlier fear of science as subversive of life as he looked to "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" as the only way to restore meaning to life.
In Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche--the first book on Nietzsche's writings--she explained this history of his writing as showing his struggle with a "religious drive" that he could never shake off. On the one hand, he denied the God in whom he had devotedly believed in his Lutheran household. On the other hand, he needed to replace that orthodox religion with a new religion of Dionysus and the Overman. She thought that only in his middle writings--during the time of his deep friendships with Paul Ree and herself--did Nietzsche achieve a position of scientific skepticism free of religious ideas.
In Bruce Benson's recent book Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (2008), Salome's reading of Nietzsche as tormented by the conflict between his religious longings and his denial of God is deepened and made more precise. Benson shows how Nietzsche moved from the Christian Pietism of his youth to the Dionysian Pietism of his philosophic works. Far from being godless, he moved from one god to another.
As a child, Nietzsche was shaped by Lutheran Pietism, in which Christian faith is understood as a matter of the heart rather than the head, because to have a right relationship with God one must have a childlike trust in God that does not depend upon doctrinal propositions. As an adult, Nietzsche rejected Christian Pietism, because he denied the Christian God. But his Dionysian religion is a kind of Pietism in requiring a childlike trust in life, a joyful acceptance of life that allows him to say "yes and amen" to life.
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche affirms: "Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and made sacred by the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective survival through reproduction, through the mysteries of sexuality. . . . All this is signified by the name Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian rites. In them, the deepest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is experienced religiously--the very way to life, reproduction, as the holy way" (x.4). Nietzsche's Dionysian religion is pietistic in the sense that it requires a change of heart--perhaps through music and dance--that will allow him to say "Yes and Amen" to everything in life, which would be "an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life" (WP 1050).
Benson succeeds in laying out the character of Nietzsche's Dionysian Pietism. But one major weakness in his book is that he fails to contrast this religious longing as it appears in Nietzsche's early and later writings with his evolutionary science as it appears in his middle writings. Salome sees this contrast, as Benson does not. And so Salome shows how Nietzsche might have freed himself from religious mysticism if he had adhered to the scientific stance of Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science.
Did Nietzsche really become a faithful follower of Dionysus? In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Dionysian rapture: "Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up and away into the air above. His gestures speak of his enchantment. . . . he feels himself to be a god, he himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams" (BT 1). Franz Overbeck reports that in the early days of Nietzsche's insanity, he danced and improvised music at his piano, telling his friends that he could only express his feelings in music.
Perhaps Nietzsche did finally achieve ecstatic union with his god Dionysus by giving up his reason and being swallowed up in madness.
To many readers, it seems odd that Nietzsche--the self-proclaimed "Antichrist" who announced the death of God--would use such religious imagery and identify himself with Jesus and the god Dionysus. We might dismiss this as only a manifestation of his madness. But the signs of religiosity appear throughout Nietzsche's early and late writings. For example, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche professes his "faith" in the belief "that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole." And he declares: "Such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus" (ix.49).
One doesn't see this religiosity in the writings of Nietzsche's "middle period." In Human, All Too Human and Dawn, he strives for a Darwinian philosophy based on a scientific history of evolution. Rejecting all metaphysical and religious philosophy grounded on the idea of a cosmic teleology of eternal moral order, Nietzsche works from the thought that "everything has evolved: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths" (HATH, 2). Even though there are no eternal truths, a properly historical science can discover the "humble truths" of historical development.
Nietzsche believes that modern science continues the skeptical spirit of the Socratic tradition. He acknowledges, however, that most human beings cannot live the skeptical life of a Socratic "free spirit," because they yearn for transcendent truths and transcendent values that are absolute and eternal. Religions such as Christianity satisfy the transcendental longings of human beings to be redeemed from ordinary earthly existence so that they can feel an ecstatic rapture in the prospect of entering an eternal realm of perfect bliss. In Human, All Too Human, he speaks of this need for redemption as an "artificial" or "acquired" need that was cultivated by the Christian church in the Middle Ages, and he suggests that a future society might eliminate this need while serving "the common true needs of all men" (HATH, 27, 476). But Nietzsche also indicates that this need for redemption has become so strong that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art. Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music (such as Wagner's operas) that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines. Indeed, romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art (130-31, 150-53).
But then, as Nietzsche began writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, he seemed himself to fall under "the magic of religious feeling." In Human, All Too Human, he had warned against the "cult of the genius," based on the "religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of superhuman [ubermenschlichen] origin," and that they have some deep insight into reality (164). But then Zarathustra proclaims the "superhuman" or "overman" as the redeemer. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looks to "the redeeming human of the great love and contempt," to "this human of the future who will redeem us from the previous ideal," and he foresees: "this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this Anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness--he must some day come" (II, 24).
In his middle writings, Nietzsche came under the influence of Darwinian science, which overturned the romantic metaphysics and religiosity of The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. But, then, beginning in 1883, he returned to some of the religious and metaphysical propensities of those early writings. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, he had warned that scientific history--and particularly, Darwinian evolutionary history--was dangerous to life, because this "science of universal becoming" denied the eternal meaning of life as supported by belief in a cosmic teleology. He indicated that there were only two possible antidotes to this intellectual poison. The "unhistorical" antidote would require forgetting history and enclosing one's cultural life within a bounded horizon. The "suprahistorical" antidote would depend on "the powers that lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and recurring, towards art and religion." The problem is that science "sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal; it likewise lives in a profound antagonism towards the eternalizing powers of art and religion." And thus science "robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal" (4, 9-10).
After going through his middle period devoted to historical or evolutionary science, Nietzsche in his later writings returned to his earlier fear of science as subversive of life as he looked to "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" as the only way to restore meaning to life.
In Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche--the first book on Nietzsche's writings--she explained this history of his writing as showing his struggle with a "religious drive" that he could never shake off. On the one hand, he denied the God in whom he had devotedly believed in his Lutheran household. On the other hand, he needed to replace that orthodox religion with a new religion of Dionysus and the Overman. She thought that only in his middle writings--during the time of his deep friendships with Paul Ree and herself--did Nietzsche achieve a position of scientific skepticism free of religious ideas.
In Bruce Benson's recent book Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (2008), Salome's reading of Nietzsche as tormented by the conflict between his religious longings and his denial of God is deepened and made more precise. Benson shows how Nietzsche moved from the Christian Pietism of his youth to the Dionysian Pietism of his philosophic works. Far from being godless, he moved from one god to another.
As a child, Nietzsche was shaped by Lutheran Pietism, in which Christian faith is understood as a matter of the heart rather than the head, because to have a right relationship with God one must have a childlike trust in God that does not depend upon doctrinal propositions. As an adult, Nietzsche rejected Christian Pietism, because he denied the Christian God. But his Dionysian religion is a kind of Pietism in requiring a childlike trust in life, a joyful acceptance of life that allows him to say "yes and amen" to life.
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche affirms: "Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and made sacred by the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective survival through reproduction, through the mysteries of sexuality. . . . All this is signified by the name Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian rites. In them, the deepest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is experienced religiously--the very way to life, reproduction, as the holy way" (x.4). Nietzsche's Dionysian religion is pietistic in the sense that it requires a change of heart--perhaps through music and dance--that will allow him to say "Yes and Amen" to everything in life, which would be "an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life" (WP 1050).
Benson succeeds in laying out the character of Nietzsche's Dionysian Pietism. But one major weakness in his book is that he fails to contrast this religious longing as it appears in Nietzsche's early and later writings with his evolutionary science as it appears in his middle writings. Salome sees this contrast, as Benson does not. And so Salome shows how Nietzsche might have freed himself from religious mysticism if he had adhered to the scientific stance of Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science.
Did Nietzsche really become a faithful follower of Dionysus? In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Dionysian rapture: "Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up and away into the air above. His gestures speak of his enchantment. . . . he feels himself to be a god, he himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams" (BT 1). Franz Overbeck reports that in the early days of Nietzsche's insanity, he danced and improvised music at his piano, telling his friends that he could only express his feelings in music.
Perhaps Nietzsche did finally achieve ecstatic union with his god Dionysus by giving up his reason and being swallowed up in madness.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Nietzsche and Darwin
For a long time, it has been hard for me to understand Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to Darwin and Darwinism.
On the one hand, Nietzsche seems to embrace Darwinism in declaring that everything has evolved--including human nature--because what appears fixed is the evolutionary product of selection carried out long before the 4,000 years of history that we are familiar with. So, there are "no eternal facts." Moreover, he seems to agree with Darwin in denying any cosmic teleology, in affirming that there is no purpose, no reason, no divinity in the apparent design of the cosmos, because it has all emerged by natural evolution. Human values, therefore, cannot be rooted in any cosmic order of rational or divine intention. Rather, values arise as the evolved conditions for human life.
On the other hand, Nietzsche often criticizes Darwin and Darwinians (especially Herbert Spencer) for failing to see that life is governed not by a "struggle for existence" but a "will to power," and for failing to see that apparently altruistic behavior is ultimately egoistic. Moreover, in arguing for the "will to power" as a cosmic force that rules the whole universe, Nietzsche seems to assume a cosmic, vitalistic teleology that contradicts his acceptance of the Darwinian attack on cosmic teleology. His teleological conception of the "will to power" resembles Leibniz's pan-animism, which manifests the influence of the cosmic teleology in Plato's Timaeus.
My thinking about this has been helped by some recent books--particularly, Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (2002), John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (2004), and Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree.
Moore's book is a "historical" study of how Nietzsche's biological thinking was shaped by the biological ideas that he picked up from his extensive reading of nineteenth-century science. Richardson's book is a "philosophical" study of how Nietzsche's ideas can be made plausible by putting them into a Darwinian framework, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself never lays it out in this way. Small's book is a "biographical" study of how Nietzsche's thinking about Darwinism was influenced by his friendships with Paul Ree and Lou Salome. (Nietzsche, Ree, and Salome called themselves the "holy trinity" when they were trying to set themselves up as a household of free spirits who would share ideas and perhaps more. This strange menage-a-trois was made famous by the picture they staged in May, 1882, with Nietzsche and Ree pulling Salome in a cart with her holding a whip. That explains the true meaning of Nietzsche's remark about "when you go to a woman, take a whip"!)
There is no evidence that Nietzsche read any of Darwin's major writings, although it is probable that he read Darwin's article "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant." But Nietzsche did pick up Darwinian ideas from his reading of Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism, Spencer's Data of Ethics, John Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, and Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics. He learned a lot about Darwinian ethics and psychology from Ree, whose writings lay out a Darwinian view of morality as a product of natural evolution. He also read extensively and carefully various books by scientific critics of Darwinism.
Nietzsche's acceptance of a Darwinian view of the cosmos and human nature as products of evolutionary history is clearest in his writings in the "middle period" of his life--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science. This was the period of his close friendships with Ree and Salome, who reinforced Nietzsche's interest in natural science and especially Darwinian science.
In both their style and their content, these middle writings are more moderate and sensible than Nietzsche's early and late writings. This sensible moderation comes from a Darwinian naturalism that is free from the romantic transcendentalism of his early writings or the ecstatic poetry and cosmic teleology of the "will to power" in his later writings.
Richardson does a wonderful job in restating Nietzsche's ideas in the most systematic and cogent manner by putting them into the framework of a Darwinian science that works through three levels of selection--natural selection, social selection, and self selection. Natural selection explains innate animal values. Social selection explains acquired human values. Self selection explains the possibility for a superhuman transvaluation of values by heroic individuals.
Richardson concedes that Nietzsche himself never lays out his thinking in precisely this way. But Richardson's argument is that this is the best way to make Nietzsche's thinking plausible.
Although I agree with much of what Richardson claims, I disagree on various points. First, he insists that the Nietzschean account of "social selection" and "self selection" goes beyond the Darwinian inclination to reduce everything to natural selection. But I would argue that Darwin and the Darwinian tradition generally recognizes the importance of social selection through cultural learning and self selection through individual judgment. These three levels correspond to what I have analyzed as a hierarchy of natural order, customary order, and deliberate order. In the study of morality, this would correspond to the three levels of moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Similarly, Frans de Waal distinguishes the three levels as moral sentiments, social pressure, and judgment/reasoning. (Occasionally, Richardson himself acknowledges that Darwin allows for social evolution through cultural learning and that this is an important part of modern coevolutionary theorizing.)
Although a Darwinian science recognizes "self selection" in the deliberate judgments exercised by individuals, it also recognizes that this deliberate choosing is constrained both by nature and by culture. This recognition of the severe restraints on the self-choosing freedom of even the most "free spirits" is evident in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. But this moderation falls away in his later writings as he looks up to the superhuman freedom of the "overman." Occasionally, Richardson admits that freedom as self selection is never complete or absolutely unbounded (103, 115-16, 170, 188-89, 215, 218, 261, 267, 270). I would stress this point. And I would also stress that the extremism of Nietzsche's later writings comes from a tendency to heroic transcendentalism that ignores the sober limits on human nature and human society that are prominent in the more Darwinian stance of his middle writings.
Richardson sees that the "dominant" view of "will to power" in Nietzsche's writings assumes, at least implicitly, a cosmic teleology and anthropomorphism in which a cosmic mind rules over all. I agree with Richardson that a "recessive" view of "will to power" as a product of natural selection would be more plausible. We could say then that the natural disposition of living beings to expand, increase, and dominate--to enhance their power--has arisen by evolution because it enhanced their fitness. The desire for power is teleological, because it is directed to ends or goals, but the teleology here is immanent rather than cosmic. This desire is not the product of some cosmic intelligent design such as that set forth in Plato's Timaeus. This desire can be explained as the product of a selective process--natural selection working on inherited variations and social selection working on cultural variations--that does not itself have any "purpose."
Nietzsche's inclination in his early and late writings towards a cosmic teleology of eternal values reflects the religious longings seen by Salome. In his middle writings, he shook off those religious longings under the influence of Darwinian science. But they returned in his later writings. So, for example, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human declares that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts" (sec. 2). But the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil looks to "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (sec. 230).
In his article on Beyond Good and Evil, Leo Strauss stresses the importance of this appeal to eternal human nature. This raises the question of whether Strauss--like Nietzsche--yearned for an eternal cosmic order that would support human values.
In his Untimely Meditations (ii.9), Nietzsche worries: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines which I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future."
Some of the Straussians agree with Nietzsche's fear of the deadliness of Darwinian science. For example, Harvey Mansfield warns: "Darwin was not a nihilist, but he prepared his generation and later generations for nihilism. His theory of evolution not only denied the eternity of the species but also undermined all eternities, all permanence of meaning" (Manliness, 83). Mansfield presents the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt as a rebellion against the Darwinian teaching that there is no purposeful and eternal cosmic order of nature to provide standards for human excellence and importance (86, 89, 93, 105, 111, 121). Nietzsche looks to the manliness of the "overman" (Ubermensch), while TR looks to the manliness of the "leader" (Fuhrer).
But isn't there something dangerous about the extremism of this vision of redemptive leadership? Far more healthy, I suggest, is the moderation of Nietzsche's Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human.
On the one hand, Nietzsche seems to embrace Darwinism in declaring that everything has evolved--including human nature--because what appears fixed is the evolutionary product of selection carried out long before the 4,000 years of history that we are familiar with. So, there are "no eternal facts." Moreover, he seems to agree with Darwin in denying any cosmic teleology, in affirming that there is no purpose, no reason, no divinity in the apparent design of the cosmos, because it has all emerged by natural evolution. Human values, therefore, cannot be rooted in any cosmic order of rational or divine intention. Rather, values arise as the evolved conditions for human life.
On the other hand, Nietzsche often criticizes Darwin and Darwinians (especially Herbert Spencer) for failing to see that life is governed not by a "struggle for existence" but a "will to power," and for failing to see that apparently altruistic behavior is ultimately egoistic. Moreover, in arguing for the "will to power" as a cosmic force that rules the whole universe, Nietzsche seems to assume a cosmic, vitalistic teleology that contradicts his acceptance of the Darwinian attack on cosmic teleology. His teleological conception of the "will to power" resembles Leibniz's pan-animism, which manifests the influence of the cosmic teleology in Plato's Timaeus.
My thinking about this has been helped by some recent books--particularly, Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (2002), John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (2004), and Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree.
Moore's book is a "historical" study of how Nietzsche's biological thinking was shaped by the biological ideas that he picked up from his extensive reading of nineteenth-century science. Richardson's book is a "philosophical" study of how Nietzsche's ideas can be made plausible by putting them into a Darwinian framework, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself never lays it out in this way. Small's book is a "biographical" study of how Nietzsche's thinking about Darwinism was influenced by his friendships with Paul Ree and Lou Salome. (Nietzsche, Ree, and Salome called themselves the "holy trinity" when they were trying to set themselves up as a household of free spirits who would share ideas and perhaps more. This strange menage-a-trois was made famous by the picture they staged in May, 1882, with Nietzsche and Ree pulling Salome in a cart with her holding a whip. That explains the true meaning of Nietzsche's remark about "when you go to a woman, take a whip"!)
There is no evidence that Nietzsche read any of Darwin's major writings, although it is probable that he read Darwin's article "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant." But Nietzsche did pick up Darwinian ideas from his reading of Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism, Spencer's Data of Ethics, John Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, and Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics. He learned a lot about Darwinian ethics and psychology from Ree, whose writings lay out a Darwinian view of morality as a product of natural evolution. He also read extensively and carefully various books by scientific critics of Darwinism.
Nietzsche's acceptance of a Darwinian view of the cosmos and human nature as products of evolutionary history is clearest in his writings in the "middle period" of his life--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science. This was the period of his close friendships with Ree and Salome, who reinforced Nietzsche's interest in natural science and especially Darwinian science.
In both their style and their content, these middle writings are more moderate and sensible than Nietzsche's early and late writings. This sensible moderation comes from a Darwinian naturalism that is free from the romantic transcendentalism of his early writings or the ecstatic poetry and cosmic teleology of the "will to power" in his later writings.
Richardson does a wonderful job in restating Nietzsche's ideas in the most systematic and cogent manner by putting them into the framework of a Darwinian science that works through three levels of selection--natural selection, social selection, and self selection. Natural selection explains innate animal values. Social selection explains acquired human values. Self selection explains the possibility for a superhuman transvaluation of values by heroic individuals.
Richardson concedes that Nietzsche himself never lays out his thinking in precisely this way. But Richardson's argument is that this is the best way to make Nietzsche's thinking plausible.
Although I agree with much of what Richardson claims, I disagree on various points. First, he insists that the Nietzschean account of "social selection" and "self selection" goes beyond the Darwinian inclination to reduce everything to natural selection. But I would argue that Darwin and the Darwinian tradition generally recognizes the importance of social selection through cultural learning and self selection through individual judgment. These three levels correspond to what I have analyzed as a hierarchy of natural order, customary order, and deliberate order. In the study of morality, this would correspond to the three levels of moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Similarly, Frans de Waal distinguishes the three levels as moral sentiments, social pressure, and judgment/reasoning. (Occasionally, Richardson himself acknowledges that Darwin allows for social evolution through cultural learning and that this is an important part of modern coevolutionary theorizing.)
Although a Darwinian science recognizes "self selection" in the deliberate judgments exercised by individuals, it also recognizes that this deliberate choosing is constrained both by nature and by culture. This recognition of the severe restraints on the self-choosing freedom of even the most "free spirits" is evident in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. But this moderation falls away in his later writings as he looks up to the superhuman freedom of the "overman." Occasionally, Richardson admits that freedom as self selection is never complete or absolutely unbounded (103, 115-16, 170, 188-89, 215, 218, 261, 267, 270). I would stress this point. And I would also stress that the extremism of Nietzsche's later writings comes from a tendency to heroic transcendentalism that ignores the sober limits on human nature and human society that are prominent in the more Darwinian stance of his middle writings.
Richardson sees that the "dominant" view of "will to power" in Nietzsche's writings assumes, at least implicitly, a cosmic teleology and anthropomorphism in which a cosmic mind rules over all. I agree with Richardson that a "recessive" view of "will to power" as a product of natural selection would be more plausible. We could say then that the natural disposition of living beings to expand, increase, and dominate--to enhance their power--has arisen by evolution because it enhanced their fitness. The desire for power is teleological, because it is directed to ends or goals, but the teleology here is immanent rather than cosmic. This desire is not the product of some cosmic intelligent design such as that set forth in Plato's Timaeus. This desire can be explained as the product of a selective process--natural selection working on inherited variations and social selection working on cultural variations--that does not itself have any "purpose."
Nietzsche's inclination in his early and late writings towards a cosmic teleology of eternal values reflects the religious longings seen by Salome. In his middle writings, he shook off those religious longings under the influence of Darwinian science. But they returned in his later writings. So, for example, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human declares that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts" (sec. 2). But the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil looks to "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (sec. 230).
In his article on Beyond Good and Evil, Leo Strauss stresses the importance of this appeal to eternal human nature. This raises the question of whether Strauss--like Nietzsche--yearned for an eternal cosmic order that would support human values.
In his Untimely Meditations (ii.9), Nietzsche worries: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines which I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future."
Some of the Straussians agree with Nietzsche's fear of the deadliness of Darwinian science. For example, Harvey Mansfield warns: "Darwin was not a nihilist, but he prepared his generation and later generations for nihilism. His theory of evolution not only denied the eternity of the species but also undermined all eternities, all permanence of meaning" (Manliness, 83). Mansfield presents the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt as a rebellion against the Darwinian teaching that there is no purposeful and eternal cosmic order of nature to provide standards for human excellence and importance (86, 89, 93, 105, 111, 121). Nietzsche looks to the manliness of the "overman" (Ubermensch), while TR looks to the manliness of the "leader" (Fuhrer).
But isn't there something dangerous about the extremism of this vision of redemptive leadership? Far more healthy, I suggest, is the moderation of Nietzsche's Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Neuroscience of Judgment in War
The New York Times (July 27) has a good article on how research in neuroscience is being used by the U.S. military to study the judgment of soldiers in warfare.
In Iraq and Afganistan, one of the primary weapons of the insurgents is "improvised explosive devices" (I.E.D.'s). It's a matter of life of death for American soldiers to detect roadside bombs that have been carefully hidden by the insurgents. Some soldiers are better at this than others. Relying on hunches or gut feelings, some soldiers have an intuitive sense that there's a bomb nearby.
This is an example of the mystery of practical judgment--of how some people can see what needs to be done in a practical situation where it's not just a matter of abstract rules or logic. This is what Aristotle called "prudence" (phronesis).
Apparently, prudence depends on some complex activity of the human brain as adapted for making practical judgments to avoid dangers and seek out opportunities in one's circumstances. Neuroscience can help to explain how this works.
This kind of research confirms the argument of Leslie Paul Thiele--in his book The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (2006)--that the neuroscience of judgment largely supports Aristotle's account of prudence.
I have written about this in some previous posts that can be found here and here.
In Iraq and Afganistan, one of the primary weapons of the insurgents is "improvised explosive devices" (I.E.D.'s). It's a matter of life of death for American soldiers to detect roadside bombs that have been carefully hidden by the insurgents. Some soldiers are better at this than others. Relying on hunches or gut feelings, some soldiers have an intuitive sense that there's a bomb nearby.
This is an example of the mystery of practical judgment--of how some people can see what needs to be done in a practical situation where it's not just a matter of abstract rules or logic. This is what Aristotle called "prudence" (phronesis).
Apparently, prudence depends on some complex activity of the human brain as adapted for making practical judgments to avoid dangers and seek out opportunities in one's circumstances. Neuroscience can help to explain how this works.
This kind of research confirms the argument of Leslie Paul Thiele--in his book The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (2006)--that the neuroscience of judgment largely supports Aristotle's account of prudence.
I have written about this in some previous posts that can be found here and here.
Friday, July 24, 2009
A Reply to Richard Hassing on Natural Law
In some previous posts, I have commented on the Straussian responses to my conception of Darwinian natural right. On the one hand, the Straussians agree with Strauss about the need for a comprehensive science of nature that would include human nature, which would overcome the typically modern separation between the natural world and the human mind. On the other hand, many of the Straussians (like Leon Kass and Allan Bloom) seem to embrace the radical dualism of nature and humanity that comes out of the modern tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant.
This ambiguity in the Straussian response to my argument for a fully naturalistic account of human life was clear in Richard Hassing's critique of Darwinian natural right published in Interpretation. In my reply to Hassing, I showed how my conception of Darwinian naturalism moved toward the "comprehensive science" sought by Strauss--a science of nature that would include the ethical striving of human nature as part of the natural universe. This would be a science of emergent naturalism that would escape the dilemma of choosing between a reductionist monism and a transcendentalist dualism. Instead of the artificial separation between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, we need a new science of nature that integrates all the intellectual disciplines as we try to understand human nature within the natural order of the whole. Nothing less is required if we want to solve what Strauss identified as the fundamental problem of natural right.
In the book Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law, edited by Ana Marta Gonzalez (Ashgate Publishing, 2008), Hassing has a chapter on "Difficulties for Natural Law Based on Modern Conceptions of Nature." Here again, against my Darwinian natural right, he argues, as he did in his earlier article, that Darwinian science assumes a "species-neutrality" that denies the ground of natural law by denying the importance of the natural differences between species. According to Hassing, the Darwinian theory that all living forms are adapted by evolution for survival and reproduction means that the differences between species are unimportant. In particular, he claims, the Darwinian scientist sees no important differences between the human species and other species of animals.
In my earlier reply to Hassing's article, I pointed out that this interpretation of Darwinian science as "species-neutral" is false. Although all species are subject to evolutionary pressures for survival and reproduction, each species is adapted to its own adaptive niche, and each species has its own species-specific set of traits. Biologists must recognize the uniqueness of each species.
This is as true for Aristotle's biology as it is for Darwin's. Aristotle sees that self-nutrition and reproduction are capacities that generally distinguish the living beings (plants and animals) from the lifeless bodies (De Anima, 412a14-15, 415a24ff., 434a30ff.). And yet he also recognizes and studies the unique traits of each species as adapted to its distinctive way of life (as he does in The Parts of Animals and The History of Animals.)
Darwin's account of human nature in The Descent of Man includes elaborate explanations for the uniqueness of human beings in their capacities for conceptual thought, symbolic language, and moral judgment. What we see here--I argue--is an emergent difference in kind that allows for qualitative novelty but without any break in the underlying continuity of nature.
In his book chapter, Hassing does not respond to my argument. Instead, he merely restates his assertion that Darwinian biologists must believe in "species-neutrality," and therefore they must deny that there are any natural differences between species. His reasoning for this conclusion is strange. For example, he says that since biologists believe there is a universal genetic code, this means that there is no genetic difference between species. But, of course, this doesn't follow at all. Although the genetic code is universal, each species has its own genetic propensities.
Although I find Hassing's reasoning confusing, perhaps I should be reassured that in this book chapter, he does, at least, concede that "Darwin was right about the mutability of living species," and that "living species came into being from common ancestors over a long period of time."
This ambiguity in the Straussian response to my argument for a fully naturalistic account of human life was clear in Richard Hassing's critique of Darwinian natural right published in Interpretation. In my reply to Hassing, I showed how my conception of Darwinian naturalism moved toward the "comprehensive science" sought by Strauss--a science of nature that would include the ethical striving of human nature as part of the natural universe. This would be a science of emergent naturalism that would escape the dilemma of choosing between a reductionist monism and a transcendentalist dualism. Instead of the artificial separation between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, we need a new science of nature that integrates all the intellectual disciplines as we try to understand human nature within the natural order of the whole. Nothing less is required if we want to solve what Strauss identified as the fundamental problem of natural right.
In the book Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law, edited by Ana Marta Gonzalez (Ashgate Publishing, 2008), Hassing has a chapter on "Difficulties for Natural Law Based on Modern Conceptions of Nature." Here again, against my Darwinian natural right, he argues, as he did in his earlier article, that Darwinian science assumes a "species-neutrality" that denies the ground of natural law by denying the importance of the natural differences between species. According to Hassing, the Darwinian theory that all living forms are adapted by evolution for survival and reproduction means that the differences between species are unimportant. In particular, he claims, the Darwinian scientist sees no important differences between the human species and other species of animals.
In my earlier reply to Hassing's article, I pointed out that this interpretation of Darwinian science as "species-neutral" is false. Although all species are subject to evolutionary pressures for survival and reproduction, each species is adapted to its own adaptive niche, and each species has its own species-specific set of traits. Biologists must recognize the uniqueness of each species.
This is as true for Aristotle's biology as it is for Darwin's. Aristotle sees that self-nutrition and reproduction are capacities that generally distinguish the living beings (plants and animals) from the lifeless bodies (De Anima, 412a14-15, 415a24ff., 434a30ff.). And yet he also recognizes and studies the unique traits of each species as adapted to its distinctive way of life (as he does in The Parts of Animals and The History of Animals.)
Darwin's account of human nature in The Descent of Man includes elaborate explanations for the uniqueness of human beings in their capacities for conceptual thought, symbolic language, and moral judgment. What we see here--I argue--is an emergent difference in kind that allows for qualitative novelty but without any break in the underlying continuity of nature.
In his book chapter, Hassing does not respond to my argument. Instead, he merely restates his assertion that Darwinian biologists must believe in "species-neutrality," and therefore they must deny that there are any natural differences between species. His reasoning for this conclusion is strange. For example, he says that since biologists believe there is a universal genetic code, this means that there is no genetic difference between species. But, of course, this doesn't follow at all. Although the genetic code is universal, each species has its own genetic propensities.
Although I find Hassing's reasoning confusing, perhaps I should be reassured that in this book chapter, he does, at least, concede that "Darwin was right about the mutability of living species," and that "living species came into being from common ancestors over a long period of time."
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Plato, Aristotle, and Cosmic Teleology
In Raphael's famous painting "The School of Athens," the center of the picture is dominated by Plato and Aristotle. Plato's right arm is raised with his index finger pointing to the sky. In his left hand, he carries a copy of his Timaeus. Aristotle's right arm is extended forward with the open palm of his hand gesturing down to the ground. In his left hand, he carries a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics. Plato's gesture suggests, "It's up there." Aristotle's gesture suggests, "No, it's down here amongst us."
The Timaeus is perhaps the single most influential book of philosophy in history, because it shaped the prevalent cosmological model of the Western world for 2,000 years. It presented an intelligent-design cosmology in which a divine craftsman creates the world according to eternal forms of perfection, and human life is judged by how well it imitates this cosmic model. Aristotle's Ethics almost never invokes any cosmic standards in laying out his view of ethics as directed to human happiness as the flourishing of human nature. In contrast to Plato's preoccupation with mathematical patterns as exemplifying the eternal and unchanging perfection of the true knowledge of Being, Aristotle studied biology as the realm of mortal life and flux that lends itself only to probable knowledge. His Ethics uses biological reasoning in studying the conditions for human well-being.
Platonism often seems to belong to a tradition of transcendental ethics that depends on a cosmic teleology by which human life imitates the perfect order of the intelligent designer. Aristotelianism belongs, by contrast, to a tradition of empirical ethics rooted in the immanent teleology of the human species. Obviously, my argument for Darwinian natural right is on the side of the Aristotelian tradition.
But the situation might seem more complicated than this. At the beginning of Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss insists that the classic idea of natural right as understood by Aristotle depended on a teleological conception of the universe--and particularly the heavenly bodies--so that the natural ends for human beings could be seen as sanctioned by a cosmic teleology. But, Strauss observes, this cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, which creates an intellectual crisis that threatens to lead us to historicism and nihilism, with no natural standards for human life. And yet, Strauss and his students are not completely clear on this point. Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, and here.
There are some passages in his ethical writings, where Aristotle does seem to be a Platonic transcendentalist. For example, at the end of his Eudemian Ethics, he declares that all human goods are to be judged by how well they promote the "contemplation of God" as the final end. And at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, his arguments for the supremacy of the contemplative life seem very Platonic. But his arguments here are all remarkably strange in that they contradict what he says elsewhere. So, for instance, he declares that philosophers are loved by the gods, but this contradicts what he has said about the self-sufficiency of the gods in not caring for human matters (1154b25-27, 1179a23-33). It almost seems as if Aristotle is here writing an ironical caricature of the Platonic arguments for divine contemplation.
There is only one place in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle refers to the cosmic system. "It is absurd for anyone to believe that politics or prudence is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos. . . . And if it is the case that a human being is the best in comparison to the other animals, that makes no difference, for there are other things that are much more divine in their nature than a human being, such as most visibly the things out of which the cosmos is composed" (1141a21-41b2). But no where else in this book does he refer to these cosmic divinities.
Clearly, he is referring to the heavenly bodies--the Sun, the planets, and the stars. In his On the Heavens, Aristotle lays out his theological astronomy. But even though he takes this astronomy seriously, he repeatedly reminds the reader that astronomical phenomena are too far away to be directly studied, and so most of the fundamental ideas in astronomy are "hypotheses" that must be "trusted" as having been passed down as ancestral myths (270b1-25, 279a5-32, 284a1-25, 291b24-92a20, 298b7-99a2; Metaphysics, 1074a31-b14).
In justifying his biological studies, Aristotle argues that while studying the eternally unchanging phenomena in the heavens might be honorable and divine, such study is hard to carry out because there is so little observational evidence. By contrast, the perishable phenomena of plants and animals are easier to study because "we live among them." There is intense pleasure in studying biological phenomena because "they are nearer to us and more akin to our nature" (Parts of Animals, 644b22-45a5). This goes against the disposition of Plato and the Platonists because believing with Heraclitus that "all sensible things are always in a state of flux and that no science of them exists," they turned to the abstract realm of Ideas and Forms in the search for perfect intelligibility (Metaphysics, 987a30-b15).
That Platonic search for perfect intelligibility seems to be most fully manifested in the Timaeus. But the strangeness of this book--surely the strangest of all of the Platonic dialogues--creates serious problems of interpretation.
In the dramatic setting of the Timaeus, the dialogue occurs the day after the dialogue of the Republic. Socrates begins this new dialogue by summarizing some of the main ideas from the Republic. Just as Socrates had constructed the best city in speech, Timaeus will construct the best cosmos in speech. The best political order, it seems, needs to be set within the best cosmic order. (Here Timaeus's speech seems to serve the same function as the Athenian Stranger's theological cosmology of intelligent design in Book 10 of the Laws.) In Timaeus's cosmos as created by a providential God acting by intelligent purpose, we see that we really do live in "the best of possible worlds," in the famous phrase of Leibniz (the "German Plato").
But then any careful reader has to wonder about the odd features of this dialogue. First of all, it's hardly much of a dialogue, because two-thirds of it is one long speech by Timaeus. And it's not much of a Socratic dialogue because Socrates does not speak once Timaeus takes off in his speech. Timaeus tells Socrates: "it is fitting for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to search further for anything beyond it." Socrates responds: "Excellent, Timaeus! And it must be received entirely as you urge" (29d-e). So although Socrates seems to give advance approval to whatever Timaeus wants to say, Socrates never speaks again. With the suspension of all Socratic inquiry, Timaeus is free to construct his "likely story" as he pleases, without being challenged by any Socratic questioning.
Socrates identifies Timaeus's story not as a "myth" (muthos) or an "account" (logos) of the cosmos, but as a nomos--a song or a law--perhaps suggesting that this is a fictional story to provide cosmic support for the legal order (29d).
Timaeus's mythic stories are so fanciful and unsupported by evidence or logic as to be ridiculous. For example, all the nonhuman animals are created by the divine artisan by reshaping human beings who deserve punishment for their stupidity. "The tribe of birds was the result of remodeling: sprouting feathers instead of hair, it comes from men harmless but light-minded, and studious of the heavenly bodies yet believing, in their naivete, that the firmest demonstrations about such things come through sight" (91d-e). This scorn for empirical astronomy based on visual evidence contradicts what Timaeus had earlier said about human vision as a god-given gift so that we can see the order of nature and become philosophers (47a-c). There is good reason, however, for Timaeus to reject visual evidence, because we know (at least from Pliny's Natural History) that some ancient astronomers observed novas--new stars--being born, which would refute Timaeus's mythic claim that the stars are unchanging.
The dubious character of Timaeus's mythic cosmology and the absence of any Socratic questioning of his claims has led some scholars--including Straussians like Joseph Cropsey and Catherine Zuckert--to conclude that Timaeus doesn't speak for Plato or Plato's Socrates. But if Plato did not intend to endorse Timaeus's cosmological myth, we must wonder why he wrote it in such a way that it would be taken seriously by many, if not most, readers; and even become the most influential of all of Plato's writings for over two millenia.
One might also wonder about whether Timaeus's myth satisfies a Socratic yearning for moral cosmology. In the Phaedo (97c-100b), Socrates describes his youthful excitement in reading Anaxagoras's claim that Mind rules over the whole order of the cosmos and thus designs everything for the best. Socrates was disappointed, however, when he discovered that Anaxagoras was ultimately a materialist in explaining things as governed by purely material causes rather than intelligent causes. This disappointment with natural philosophy set Socrates off on a "second sailing" where he decided to look for the truth of Being in speeches or accounts (logoi) of things, by examining how people talk about their experience and particularly their moral experience. If this was a turn away from natural philosophy towards moral philosophy, with the understanding that moral life is disconnected from cosmic nature, then Timaeus's moral cosmology would be contrary to this Socratic turn. But then one might say that Timaeus had done what Anaxagoras had failed to do successfully--construct a moral cosmology in which the cosmos is intelligently designed as the best of possible worlds--and therefore Timaeus gave Socrates what he had always wanted: an intelligent-design cosmology that would explain why it is best for things to be as they are.
Cropsey and Zuckert reject this reading of the dialogues, because they argue, instead, that Socrates really teaches that the cosmos is morally neutral, because morality depends upon an anthropology of human care for themselves that has no ground in cosmic nature. If so, this would conform to what I have argued for as the immanent teleology of morality as rooted in evolved human nature.
The Timaeus is perhaps the single most influential book of philosophy in history, because it shaped the prevalent cosmological model of the Western world for 2,000 years. It presented an intelligent-design cosmology in which a divine craftsman creates the world according to eternal forms of perfection, and human life is judged by how well it imitates this cosmic model. Aristotle's Ethics almost never invokes any cosmic standards in laying out his view of ethics as directed to human happiness as the flourishing of human nature. In contrast to Plato's preoccupation with mathematical patterns as exemplifying the eternal and unchanging perfection of the true knowledge of Being, Aristotle studied biology as the realm of mortal life and flux that lends itself only to probable knowledge. His Ethics uses biological reasoning in studying the conditions for human well-being.
Platonism often seems to belong to a tradition of transcendental ethics that depends on a cosmic teleology by which human life imitates the perfect order of the intelligent designer. Aristotelianism belongs, by contrast, to a tradition of empirical ethics rooted in the immanent teleology of the human species. Obviously, my argument for Darwinian natural right is on the side of the Aristotelian tradition.
But the situation might seem more complicated than this. At the beginning of Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss insists that the classic idea of natural right as understood by Aristotle depended on a teleological conception of the universe--and particularly the heavenly bodies--so that the natural ends for human beings could be seen as sanctioned by a cosmic teleology. But, Strauss observes, this cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, which creates an intellectual crisis that threatens to lead us to historicism and nihilism, with no natural standards for human life. And yet, Strauss and his students are not completely clear on this point. Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, and here.
There are some passages in his ethical writings, where Aristotle does seem to be a Platonic transcendentalist. For example, at the end of his Eudemian Ethics, he declares that all human goods are to be judged by how well they promote the "contemplation of God" as the final end. And at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, his arguments for the supremacy of the contemplative life seem very Platonic. But his arguments here are all remarkably strange in that they contradict what he says elsewhere. So, for instance, he declares that philosophers are loved by the gods, but this contradicts what he has said about the self-sufficiency of the gods in not caring for human matters (1154b25-27, 1179a23-33). It almost seems as if Aristotle is here writing an ironical caricature of the Platonic arguments for divine contemplation.
There is only one place in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle refers to the cosmic system. "It is absurd for anyone to believe that politics or prudence is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos. . . . And if it is the case that a human being is the best in comparison to the other animals, that makes no difference, for there are other things that are much more divine in their nature than a human being, such as most visibly the things out of which the cosmos is composed" (1141a21-41b2). But no where else in this book does he refer to these cosmic divinities.
Clearly, he is referring to the heavenly bodies--the Sun, the planets, and the stars. In his On the Heavens, Aristotle lays out his theological astronomy. But even though he takes this astronomy seriously, he repeatedly reminds the reader that astronomical phenomena are too far away to be directly studied, and so most of the fundamental ideas in astronomy are "hypotheses" that must be "trusted" as having been passed down as ancestral myths (270b1-25, 279a5-32, 284a1-25, 291b24-92a20, 298b7-99a2; Metaphysics, 1074a31-b14).
In justifying his biological studies, Aristotle argues that while studying the eternally unchanging phenomena in the heavens might be honorable and divine, such study is hard to carry out because there is so little observational evidence. By contrast, the perishable phenomena of plants and animals are easier to study because "we live among them." There is intense pleasure in studying biological phenomena because "they are nearer to us and more akin to our nature" (Parts of Animals, 644b22-45a5). This goes against the disposition of Plato and the Platonists because believing with Heraclitus that "all sensible things are always in a state of flux and that no science of them exists," they turned to the abstract realm of Ideas and Forms in the search for perfect intelligibility (Metaphysics, 987a30-b15).
That Platonic search for perfect intelligibility seems to be most fully manifested in the Timaeus. But the strangeness of this book--surely the strangest of all of the Platonic dialogues--creates serious problems of interpretation.
In the dramatic setting of the Timaeus, the dialogue occurs the day after the dialogue of the Republic. Socrates begins this new dialogue by summarizing some of the main ideas from the Republic. Just as Socrates had constructed the best city in speech, Timaeus will construct the best cosmos in speech. The best political order, it seems, needs to be set within the best cosmic order. (Here Timaeus's speech seems to serve the same function as the Athenian Stranger's theological cosmology of intelligent design in Book 10 of the Laws.) In Timaeus's cosmos as created by a providential God acting by intelligent purpose, we see that we really do live in "the best of possible worlds," in the famous phrase of Leibniz (the "German Plato").
But then any careful reader has to wonder about the odd features of this dialogue. First of all, it's hardly much of a dialogue, because two-thirds of it is one long speech by Timaeus. And it's not much of a Socratic dialogue because Socrates does not speak once Timaeus takes off in his speech. Timaeus tells Socrates: "it is fitting for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to search further for anything beyond it." Socrates responds: "Excellent, Timaeus! And it must be received entirely as you urge" (29d-e). So although Socrates seems to give advance approval to whatever Timaeus wants to say, Socrates never speaks again. With the suspension of all Socratic inquiry, Timaeus is free to construct his "likely story" as he pleases, without being challenged by any Socratic questioning.
Socrates identifies Timaeus's story not as a "myth" (muthos) or an "account" (logos) of the cosmos, but as a nomos--a song or a law--perhaps suggesting that this is a fictional story to provide cosmic support for the legal order (29d).
Timaeus's mythic stories are so fanciful and unsupported by evidence or logic as to be ridiculous. For example, all the nonhuman animals are created by the divine artisan by reshaping human beings who deserve punishment for their stupidity. "The tribe of birds was the result of remodeling: sprouting feathers instead of hair, it comes from men harmless but light-minded, and studious of the heavenly bodies yet believing, in their naivete, that the firmest demonstrations about such things come through sight" (91d-e). This scorn for empirical astronomy based on visual evidence contradicts what Timaeus had earlier said about human vision as a god-given gift so that we can see the order of nature and become philosophers (47a-c). There is good reason, however, for Timaeus to reject visual evidence, because we know (at least from Pliny's Natural History) that some ancient astronomers observed novas--new stars--being born, which would refute Timaeus's mythic claim that the stars are unchanging.
The dubious character of Timaeus's mythic cosmology and the absence of any Socratic questioning of his claims has led some scholars--including Straussians like Joseph Cropsey and Catherine Zuckert--to conclude that Timaeus doesn't speak for Plato or Plato's Socrates. But if Plato did not intend to endorse Timaeus's cosmological myth, we must wonder why he wrote it in such a way that it would be taken seriously by many, if not most, readers; and even become the most influential of all of Plato's writings for over two millenia.
One might also wonder about whether Timaeus's myth satisfies a Socratic yearning for moral cosmology. In the Phaedo (97c-100b), Socrates describes his youthful excitement in reading Anaxagoras's claim that Mind rules over the whole order of the cosmos and thus designs everything for the best. Socrates was disappointed, however, when he discovered that Anaxagoras was ultimately a materialist in explaining things as governed by purely material causes rather than intelligent causes. This disappointment with natural philosophy set Socrates off on a "second sailing" where he decided to look for the truth of Being in speeches or accounts (logoi) of things, by examining how people talk about their experience and particularly their moral experience. If this was a turn away from natural philosophy towards moral philosophy, with the understanding that moral life is disconnected from cosmic nature, then Timaeus's moral cosmology would be contrary to this Socratic turn. But then one might say that Timaeus had done what Anaxagoras had failed to do successfully--construct a moral cosmology in which the cosmos is intelligently designed as the best of possible worlds--and therefore Timaeus gave Socrates what he had always wanted: an intelligent-design cosmology that would explain why it is best for things to be as they are.
Cropsey and Zuckert reject this reading of the dialogues, because they argue, instead, that Socrates really teaches that the cosmos is morally neutral, because morality depends upon an anthropology of human care for themselves that has no ground in cosmic nature. If so, this would conform to what I have argued for as the immanent teleology of morality as rooted in evolved human nature.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Plato's Teleological Cosmology & Cicero's Socratic Scepticism
I continue thinking about the history of Plato's teleological cosmology, as well as the history of the break from that cosmology in the work of Hume and Darwin.
As far as I know, the three best surveys of how Plato's cosmology--in the Laws (book 10) and the Timaeus--shaped Western cosmology for 2,000 years are Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, and Remi Brague's The Wisdom of the World. In all three books, the claim is that there was no serious criticism of that Platonic cosmology until the modern era.
But this ignores the evidence that Plato's intelligent-design cosmology provoked sceptical questioning from the very beginning with Plato's Socrates, and that this Socratic scepticism was continued by Cicero and others, which was then renewed in the Eighteenth Century by Hume and then elaborated in the evolutionary science of Darwin in the Nineteenth Century.
Brague does at least give his reader a glimpse of this sceptical tradition. Brague notices that the cosmology of the Timaeus--with its teaching that the moral and political life of human beings must imitate the intelligent order of the cosmos--overturns the "Socratic Revolution" described in the Phaedo. In his famous account of his "second sailing," Socrates says that, as a young man, he was devoted to "inquiry into nature"--looking for the natural causes of all things. He was excited by a writing of Anaxagoras that proclaimed "Mind" (nous) to be the cause of all things. But then Socrates became disappointed when he saw that Anaxagoras's explanations through material causes did not really give Socrates what he was looking for--an explanation for why it was best for everything to be ordered as it was. So Socrates decided that instead of looking directly at natural things--as if he were looking directly at the sun--he must look at their reflections in the accounts or speeches (logoi) about them. Thus, he turned to examining how people talk about their experiences, hoping that through such human experience, he could ascend to the enduring patterns or forms that explain that experience. Brague writes: "Thus Socrates renounced that unification of experience in favor of considering solely phenomena relating to the polis, that is, the being-together of men. In this way he disconnected anthropology from cosmology and introduced his plan to found an anthropology based solely on itself" (31).
But if so, then, Brague insists, Plato in the Timaeus had to reverse the Socratic Revolution by formulating a teleological cosmology by which all things were governed by cosmic Mind so that everything was ordered in the best and most excellent way. "Plato built a bridge over the abyss Socrates had opened, by positing the Good as the supreme principle" (32).
Brague suggests that this "abyss" opened by Socrates and closed by Plato was not opened again until the modern era, when the moral interpretation of the cosmos was challenged by modern thinkers. But this overlooks the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism. Brague does recognize Lucretius and the Epicurean tradition as deviating from the cosmological thought set in motion by the Timaeus. But this Epicurean tradition of thought was outside the main line of thought from Plato and Aristotle.
To tell this story, Brague has to ignore Cicero's account of Socratic scepticism. Particularly in his Academics, Cicero shows how scepticism emerged early in the history of the Platonic Academy. Part of that scepticism was the thought that the moral and political life of human beings could not be governed by cosmological knowledge, and so Socrates was right to bring philosophy down from the heavens into the realm of human experience. In this Academics (I.15), Cicero has Varro say: "It is universally agreed that Socrates was the first person who summoned philosophy away from mysteries veiled in concealment by nature herself, upon which all philosophers before him had been engaged and led it to the subject of ordinary life, in order to investigate the virtues and vices, and good and evil generally, and to realize that heavenly matters are either remote from our knowledge or else, however fully known, have nothing to do with the good life." So, contrary to Brague's claim, the idea of the moral neutrality of the cosmos was not an invention of the modern era, because the idea was already there in the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism to which Cicero belonged.
The best critique of intelligent-design cosmology in antiquity is Cicero's dialogue On the Nature of the Gods. This became the model for Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume's character Cleanthes is named after the teacher of the Stoic Balbus, who lays out the intelligent-design argument in Cicero's dialogue. Hume's character Philo (who speaks for Humean scepticism) is named after the teacher of Cotta, who lays out the sceptical arguments in Cicero's dialogue. After allowing Cotta to demolish the intelligent-design cosmology of Balbus, Cicero carefully avoids scandal in the conclusion to his dialogue: "Here the conversation ended, and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta's discourse to be truer, while I thought that of Balbus approximated more nearly to some semblance of the truth." Similarly, Hume concludes his dialogue by having his narrator Pamphilus say: "I cannot but think that Philo's principles are more probable than Demea's, but that those of Cleanthes approaches still nearer to the truth."
We can see here that Cicero and Hume belong to a tradition of sceptical conservatism that doubts Plato's teleological cosmology, even as it grudgingly acknowledges that this Platonic cosmology might be salutary as a popular "civil religion."
Metaphysical conservatives who believe that moral and political order cannot survive without cosmic support are uncomfortable in the face of this conservative tradition of scepticism. One can see this, for example, in an article published in The Intercollegiate Review in 1968 by Frederick Wilhelmsen and Willmoore Kendall--"Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy." They admire Cicero for his understanding of the "public orthodoxy" as "that tissue of judgments, defining the good life and indicating the meaning of human existence, which is held commonly by the members of any society, who see in it the charter of their way of life and the ultimate justification of their society." They see this as corresponding to what Leo Strauss identified as the "way of life" of the politeia or what T. S. Eliot called "culture"--shared judgments about the cosmic meaning of human existence that support social and political order. But they are disturbed by the evidence that Cicero thought that the theological, intelligent-design cosmology of the public orthodoxy was false, even though he might be obligated to avoid publicly denying it.
For Wilhelmsen and Kendall, no public orthodoxy can sustain itself if it is not grounded in some metaphysical conception of the cosmos as intelligently designed as a model for human morality and politics. In the case of Cicero, they see a conflict between theoretical truth (Socratic scepticism) and the customary beliefs required for society. Their solution to this problem is to assert that Christian revelation creates a bridge between transcendent truth and immanent social order. Our Christian faith that God is the source of all order guarantees that there will be no conflict between the truths of the soul and the truths of society. But they leave the reader wondering how this can be "theoretically guaranteed" so as to be immune to the sceptical doubts of Socratic philosophy.
Darwinian science continues the sceptical tradition of Cicero and Hume by showing how the moral order of human life can be based on the natural order of human nature. Even if the natural cosmos as a whole is morally indifferent, the species-specific nature of human beings can support moral distinctions.
If this is persuasive, then we should say that Aristotle was right when he argued in his biological works that in contrast to astronomy, the study of the nature of animals is more open to study, less dependent on traditional myths, and "more akin to our nature" than study of the divine cosmos (Parts of Animals, 642a).
An earlier post on comparing metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism can be found here.
As far as I know, the three best surveys of how Plato's cosmology--in the Laws (book 10) and the Timaeus--shaped Western cosmology for 2,000 years are Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, and Remi Brague's The Wisdom of the World. In all three books, the claim is that there was no serious criticism of that Platonic cosmology until the modern era.
But this ignores the evidence that Plato's intelligent-design cosmology provoked sceptical questioning from the very beginning with Plato's Socrates, and that this Socratic scepticism was continued by Cicero and others, which was then renewed in the Eighteenth Century by Hume and then elaborated in the evolutionary science of Darwin in the Nineteenth Century.
Brague does at least give his reader a glimpse of this sceptical tradition. Brague notices that the cosmology of the Timaeus--with its teaching that the moral and political life of human beings must imitate the intelligent order of the cosmos--overturns the "Socratic Revolution" described in the Phaedo. In his famous account of his "second sailing," Socrates says that, as a young man, he was devoted to "inquiry into nature"--looking for the natural causes of all things. He was excited by a writing of Anaxagoras that proclaimed "Mind" (nous) to be the cause of all things. But then Socrates became disappointed when he saw that Anaxagoras's explanations through material causes did not really give Socrates what he was looking for--an explanation for why it was best for everything to be ordered as it was. So Socrates decided that instead of looking directly at natural things--as if he were looking directly at the sun--he must look at their reflections in the accounts or speeches (logoi) about them. Thus, he turned to examining how people talk about their experiences, hoping that through such human experience, he could ascend to the enduring patterns or forms that explain that experience. Brague writes: "Thus Socrates renounced that unification of experience in favor of considering solely phenomena relating to the polis, that is, the being-together of men. In this way he disconnected anthropology from cosmology and introduced his plan to found an anthropology based solely on itself" (31).
But if so, then, Brague insists, Plato in the Timaeus had to reverse the Socratic Revolution by formulating a teleological cosmology by which all things were governed by cosmic Mind so that everything was ordered in the best and most excellent way. "Plato built a bridge over the abyss Socrates had opened, by positing the Good as the supreme principle" (32).
Brague suggests that this "abyss" opened by Socrates and closed by Plato was not opened again until the modern era, when the moral interpretation of the cosmos was challenged by modern thinkers. But this overlooks the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism. Brague does recognize Lucretius and the Epicurean tradition as deviating from the cosmological thought set in motion by the Timaeus. But this Epicurean tradition of thought was outside the main line of thought from Plato and Aristotle.
To tell this story, Brague has to ignore Cicero's account of Socratic scepticism. Particularly in his Academics, Cicero shows how scepticism emerged early in the history of the Platonic Academy. Part of that scepticism was the thought that the moral and political life of human beings could not be governed by cosmological knowledge, and so Socrates was right to bring philosophy down from the heavens into the realm of human experience. In this Academics (I.15), Cicero has Varro say: "It is universally agreed that Socrates was the first person who summoned philosophy away from mysteries veiled in concealment by nature herself, upon which all philosophers before him had been engaged and led it to the subject of ordinary life, in order to investigate the virtues and vices, and good and evil generally, and to realize that heavenly matters are either remote from our knowledge or else, however fully known, have nothing to do with the good life." So, contrary to Brague's claim, the idea of the moral neutrality of the cosmos was not an invention of the modern era, because the idea was already there in the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism to which Cicero belonged.
The best critique of intelligent-design cosmology in antiquity is Cicero's dialogue On the Nature of the Gods. This became the model for Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume's character Cleanthes is named after the teacher of the Stoic Balbus, who lays out the intelligent-design argument in Cicero's dialogue. Hume's character Philo (who speaks for Humean scepticism) is named after the teacher of Cotta, who lays out the sceptical arguments in Cicero's dialogue. After allowing Cotta to demolish the intelligent-design cosmology of Balbus, Cicero carefully avoids scandal in the conclusion to his dialogue: "Here the conversation ended, and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta's discourse to be truer, while I thought that of Balbus approximated more nearly to some semblance of the truth." Similarly, Hume concludes his dialogue by having his narrator Pamphilus say: "I cannot but think that Philo's principles are more probable than Demea's, but that those of Cleanthes approaches still nearer to the truth."
We can see here that Cicero and Hume belong to a tradition of sceptical conservatism that doubts Plato's teleological cosmology, even as it grudgingly acknowledges that this Platonic cosmology might be salutary as a popular "civil religion."
Metaphysical conservatives who believe that moral and political order cannot survive without cosmic support are uncomfortable in the face of this conservative tradition of scepticism. One can see this, for example, in an article published in The Intercollegiate Review in 1968 by Frederick Wilhelmsen and Willmoore Kendall--"Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy." They admire Cicero for his understanding of the "public orthodoxy" as "that tissue of judgments, defining the good life and indicating the meaning of human existence, which is held commonly by the members of any society, who see in it the charter of their way of life and the ultimate justification of their society." They see this as corresponding to what Leo Strauss identified as the "way of life" of the politeia or what T. S. Eliot called "culture"--shared judgments about the cosmic meaning of human existence that support social and political order. But they are disturbed by the evidence that Cicero thought that the theological, intelligent-design cosmology of the public orthodoxy was false, even though he might be obligated to avoid publicly denying it.
For Wilhelmsen and Kendall, no public orthodoxy can sustain itself if it is not grounded in some metaphysical conception of the cosmos as intelligently designed as a model for human morality and politics. In the case of Cicero, they see a conflict between theoretical truth (Socratic scepticism) and the customary beliefs required for society. Their solution to this problem is to assert that Christian revelation creates a bridge between transcendent truth and immanent social order. Our Christian faith that God is the source of all order guarantees that there will be no conflict between the truths of the soul and the truths of society. But they leave the reader wondering how this can be "theoretically guaranteed" so as to be immune to the sceptical doubts of Socratic philosophy.
Darwinian science continues the sceptical tradition of Cicero and Hume by showing how the moral order of human life can be based on the natural order of human nature. Even if the natural cosmos as a whole is morally indifferent, the species-specific nature of human beings can support moral distinctions.
If this is persuasive, then we should say that Aristotle was right when he argued in his biological works that in contrast to astronomy, the study of the nature of animals is more open to study, less dependent on traditional myths, and "more akin to our nature" than study of the divine cosmos (Parts of Animals, 642a).
An earlier post on comparing metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism can be found here.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Brague, Nietzsche, and the Longing for Moral Cosmology
In my recent posts on Platonic cosmology as interpreted by Zuckert, Brague, and Cropsey, I have taken the side of Cropsey and Zuckert against Brague in concluding that Plato and Plato's Socrates see the cosmos as morally indifferent, and thus they do not endorse Timaeus's moral cosmology. While I disagree with the fundamental argument of Brague's book The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, I like the book because in laying out the history of the reasoning for moral cosmology, Brague shows the weaknesses in the reasoning, although that is not his intention.
The idea of moral cosmology is that the order of the cosmos is such a model of moral perfection that human morality is to be judged by how well it imitates that cosmic model. In particular, the astronomical order displayed in the sky or the celestial realm is the highest expression of the Good. (What Brague is describing here is what Arthur Lovejoy called "the Great Chain of Being" and what C. S. Lewis celebrated as "the discarded image.")
According to Brague, this moral cosmology was first sketched out in Plato's Timaeus, where the cosmos is described as a creation of a divine craftsman who designed everything to approximate the perfect order of eternal ideas, so that Being and the Good coincide, and so that the moral and political perfection of human life comes from imitating that cosmic order of the heavenly spheres. Later, this pagan cosmology was modified by biblical theologians to conform to their theology. This cosmology then became the dominant image of the cosmos throughout the Western world from late antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. But then, Brague argues, this cosmic image was displaced in the modern era by the idea that the cosmos is either amoral or immoral, and therefore not a suitable model for human imitation. For the moderns, therefore, Being and the Good were disconnected. Brague's main message is that this dissolution of moral cosmology and the lack of any cosmic support for morality in the modern era has promoted nihilistic chaos.
At various points in his book, Brague indicates that his analysis coincides with Nietzsche's assessment of the moral crisis that comes with the "death of God," or the death of any belief in a moral interpretation of the cosmos, which is a consequence of modern science, and particularly the "true but deadly" doctrines of Darwinian science (24, 32, 189-90, 198). Brague agrees with Nietzsche that Plato's cosmology is a fictional creation of Platonic philosophers who project their wishes onto the cosmos. But he also agrees with Nietzsche that once this Platonic cosmology is refuted by modern science and replaced by a modern conception of the universe as morally neutral or even hostile to morality, then morality collapses without cosmic support.
Brague's extremism on this point is clear when he insists that a modern scientific conception of the moral neutrality of nature dictates "natural violence" and the criminal immoralism of the Marquis de Sade (204-209)!
Brague does not question this Nietzschean analysis of moral cosmology, and he does not consider Nietzsche's claims in Human, All Too Human that modern evolutionary science can support morality as rooted in animal instincts and evolved human nature. Like many readers of Nietzsche, Brague concentrates on the early and late writings of Nietzsche--with all the fireworks about scientific nihilism--and ignores the more moderate and reasonable writings of Nietzsche's middle period where he suggests that morality does not require transcendent, cosmic support, because it can be founded in the immanent teleology of human nature rather than the cosmic teleology of a divinely perfect cosmos.
Moreover, Brague admits that the moral cosmology that he finds so attractive probably could not provide any moral rules, and thus it probably didn't improve the morality of those who believed in it. After all, what kind of moral instruction is it to be told to "imitate the sky"? Judging what is good and bad is always a matter of prudence or practical judgment, and such judgment can be carried out based upon a biological conception of human life as aiming towards human ends, without any need for a moral cosmology. In fact, Brague admits, that seems to be the case for Aristotle. Although he sometimes invoked conceptions of cosmological teleology, his Nicomachean Ethics does not seem to rely much upon the sort of cosmology that Timaeus set forth. And rather than looking to astronomy for moral and political guidance, Aristotle seemed to look more to biology as a realm of phenomena closer to human moral concerns. (See 30, 122, 126, 152-53, 201, 217.)
If this is so, then Brague is wrong to suggest that the idea of a morally neutral cosmos did not appear in Western thought prior to the modern era, and he is also wrong to argue that morality cannot be sustained without a moral cosmology.
In addition to some of my recent posts, some of my earlier posts that are pertinent to this issue can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
The idea of moral cosmology is that the order of the cosmos is such a model of moral perfection that human morality is to be judged by how well it imitates that cosmic model. In particular, the astronomical order displayed in the sky or the celestial realm is the highest expression of the Good. (What Brague is describing here is what Arthur Lovejoy called "the Great Chain of Being" and what C. S. Lewis celebrated as "the discarded image.")
According to Brague, this moral cosmology was first sketched out in Plato's Timaeus, where the cosmos is described as a creation of a divine craftsman who designed everything to approximate the perfect order of eternal ideas, so that Being and the Good coincide, and so that the moral and political perfection of human life comes from imitating that cosmic order of the heavenly spheres. Later, this pagan cosmology was modified by biblical theologians to conform to their theology. This cosmology then became the dominant image of the cosmos throughout the Western world from late antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. But then, Brague argues, this cosmic image was displaced in the modern era by the idea that the cosmos is either amoral or immoral, and therefore not a suitable model for human imitation. For the moderns, therefore, Being and the Good were disconnected. Brague's main message is that this dissolution of moral cosmology and the lack of any cosmic support for morality in the modern era has promoted nihilistic chaos.
At various points in his book, Brague indicates that his analysis coincides with Nietzsche's assessment of the moral crisis that comes with the "death of God," or the death of any belief in a moral interpretation of the cosmos, which is a consequence of modern science, and particularly the "true but deadly" doctrines of Darwinian science (24, 32, 189-90, 198). Brague agrees with Nietzsche that Plato's cosmology is a fictional creation of Platonic philosophers who project their wishes onto the cosmos. But he also agrees with Nietzsche that once this Platonic cosmology is refuted by modern science and replaced by a modern conception of the universe as morally neutral or even hostile to morality, then morality collapses without cosmic support.
Brague's extremism on this point is clear when he insists that a modern scientific conception of the moral neutrality of nature dictates "natural violence" and the criminal immoralism of the Marquis de Sade (204-209)!
Brague does not question this Nietzschean analysis of moral cosmology, and he does not consider Nietzsche's claims in Human, All Too Human that modern evolutionary science can support morality as rooted in animal instincts and evolved human nature. Like many readers of Nietzsche, Brague concentrates on the early and late writings of Nietzsche--with all the fireworks about scientific nihilism--and ignores the more moderate and reasonable writings of Nietzsche's middle period where he suggests that morality does not require transcendent, cosmic support, because it can be founded in the immanent teleology of human nature rather than the cosmic teleology of a divinely perfect cosmos.
Moreover, Brague admits that the moral cosmology that he finds so attractive probably could not provide any moral rules, and thus it probably didn't improve the morality of those who believed in it. After all, what kind of moral instruction is it to be told to "imitate the sky"? Judging what is good and bad is always a matter of prudence or practical judgment, and such judgment can be carried out based upon a biological conception of human life as aiming towards human ends, without any need for a moral cosmology. In fact, Brague admits, that seems to be the case for Aristotle. Although he sometimes invoked conceptions of cosmological teleology, his Nicomachean Ethics does not seem to rely much upon the sort of cosmology that Timaeus set forth. And rather than looking to astronomy for moral and political guidance, Aristotle seemed to look more to biology as a realm of phenomena closer to human moral concerns. (See 30, 122, 126, 152-53, 201, 217.)
If this is so, then Brague is wrong to suggest that the idea of a morally neutral cosmos did not appear in Western thought prior to the modern era, and he is also wrong to argue that morality cannot be sustained without a moral cosmology.
In addition to some of my recent posts, some of my earlier posts that are pertinent to this issue can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Obama Nominates a Theistic Evolutionist to Head NIH
President Obama has nominated Francis Collins to be the head of the National Institutes of Health. Since NIH is the single biggest funding source for science in the world, this position will give Collins immense influence on scientific research.
There are two big points of interest here. As I have noted in some of my posts, Collins is a theistic evolutionist. Having been an agnostic or atheist in his youth, Collins eventually embraced Christianity through the influence of writers like C. S. Lewis. He decided that this religious belief did not require belief in creationism or intelligent design reasoning--which he rejects--because Darwinian evolutionary science is fully compatible with Christianity. In recent years, he has spoken a lot about this. In fact, some scientists are uneasy about his nomination because they think he shouldn't be mixing science and religion.
At the same time, creationists and intelligent design proponents dislike Collins because he subverts their rhetorical strategy of arguing that scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins speak for all Darwinian scientists.
The second point of interest related to Collins is his involvement in the debate over the power of human genetics. As the leader in the human genome project, Collins won massive federal funding with the prediction that mapping the human genome would fuel medical advances in treating genetically caused diseases and disabilities. That prediction has failed to come true, which has exposed the falsity of any simple-minded genetic determinism. Now, Collins himself emphasizes that human nature cannot be reduced to human genetics, because genetic factors interact in complex ways with many other factors that are not reducible to genetic causes.
Some of my posts related to Collins can be found here, here, and here.
There are two big points of interest here. As I have noted in some of my posts, Collins is a theistic evolutionist. Having been an agnostic or atheist in his youth, Collins eventually embraced Christianity through the influence of writers like C. S. Lewis. He decided that this religious belief did not require belief in creationism or intelligent design reasoning--which he rejects--because Darwinian evolutionary science is fully compatible with Christianity. In recent years, he has spoken a lot about this. In fact, some scientists are uneasy about his nomination because they think he shouldn't be mixing science and religion.
At the same time, creationists and intelligent design proponents dislike Collins because he subverts their rhetorical strategy of arguing that scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins speak for all Darwinian scientists.
The second point of interest related to Collins is his involvement in the debate over the power of human genetics. As the leader in the human genome project, Collins won massive federal funding with the prediction that mapping the human genome would fuel medical advances in treating genetically caused diseases and disabilities. That prediction has failed to come true, which has exposed the falsity of any simple-minded genetic determinism. Now, Collins himself emphasizes that human nature cannot be reduced to human genetics, because genetic factors interact in complex ways with many other factors that are not reducible to genetic causes.
Some of my posts related to Collins can be found here, here, and here.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
A Darwinian Reading of Cropsey's Plato
Against my argument for "Darwinian natural right," many of my critics have insisted that any defensible conception of "natural right" requires a cosmic teleology in which human ends can be understood as fulfilling the natural ends of the cosmic order. Since Darwinian science cannot support such a cosmic teleology, they conclude, it cannot support the idea of natural right.
My response has been to point out that even if human ends cannot be sustained by cosmic nature, those ends can be sustained by human nature. And insofar as Darwinian science explains the evolutionary emergence of a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, such a science supports an immanent teleology that is sufficient grounds for natural right. Some of my many posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Many of my critics on this point are Straussians who think they are following Plato in arguing for a cosmic teleology of moral ends. I believe, however, that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) is actually close to what I have in mind in defending an immanent teleology of human nature as understood by Darwinian science.
In some ways, Joseph Cropsey's book Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos (1995) confirms my thinking about the link between Plato and Darwin on this point. (Many years ago, Cropsey was one of my professors at the University of Chicago.)
The most persistent theme of Cropsey's book is "care." Human beings are said to care about their existence within an uncaring world of nature and without any divinity to care for them (2, 7, 62, 64, 110, 114, 118-21, 125, 127-31, 136-38, 145-47, 151, 155-57, 160, 164-65, 170, 180, 212, 218, 222, 225). At times, this sounds more like Heidegger than Plato. Cropsey never mentions Heidegger in this book. And yet, for Heidegger, the being of human being understood as Dasein is defined as "care" (Sorge), and "care" is grounded in historical temporality. Cropsey seems to be suggesting that Heidegger elaborates what is implied in the Platonic dialogues. This impression of mine was confirmed when I saw that Catherine Zuckert in her review of Cropsey's book also spoke of "the evocation of Heideggerian themes--the temporal limitations of human knowledge, the centrality of the confrontation with death in the definition of human existence, and the importance of care." (Aren't these all Humean and Darwinian themes as well?)
Cropsey indicates that for Plato the primacy of human care shows itself in the need for a human conquest of nature. According to Cropsey, Plato did not believe that nature could provide "the criterion and incentive of human excellence," because Plato actually anticipated the modern teaching that nature is "indifferent or unfriendly to our well-being until we learn to exploit it" (185-86). Cropsey's Plato thus affirms "the moral neutrality of nature" (210).
Although Cropsey does not explicitly associate "care" with any particular Greek word, he implicitly links "care" to two Greek words--epistatike and epimeleia (138, 151, 156, 160). The second word is used by Socrates in the Apology (24c, 31b, 36b-c) when he claims to "care" for the Athenians by trying to persuade them to "care" for virtue rather than for money and power. Both words are used by the Stranger in the Statesman (305e, 308e, 311c) when he speaks of the statesman as the one who "cares for" his city by weaving the diverse characters of his people into a common fabric.
Cropsey says that human caring has neither natural nor divine support. Here is where I disagree with Cropsey. Even if one grants that cosmic nature is uncaring, why not say that caring is natural in the sense that it is rooted in human nature?
After all, Cropsey indicates that caring for their existence is natural to all human beings in some manner, and a special kind of intelligent caring is natural to Socratic philosophers (110, 121, 125, 129-31, 147). Although Cropsey depicts philosophy as a struggle against nature (157, 161, 176, 185), he also makes much of Socrates' philosophic caring as dictated by his nature (157, 161, 185). He describes Socrates as having "an innate inclination toward right and good" that is part of his nature, and this shows us "that nature sends the better angels of caring and nobility as well as the afflictions of cruelty and baseness" (157). According to Cropsey, the Socratic philosopher is "guided by his understanding of the good for the humanity he has insisted was an object of his caring" (212). But where would this philosopher get his understanding of the human good if not from his understanding of human nature (218)? How could we even identify "an innate inclination toward right and good" in Socrates if there were no natural standard of "right and good"?
Cropsey says that human nature does not clearly support human care because of the natural conflict between the indispensable virtues of hardness and softness. "Courage or manliness or aggressiveness (andreia) is in conflict with restraint or accommodation or passivity (sophrosyne), each being a virtue or a part or kind of virtue" (139). True statesmanship is "according to nature" when it contrives a union of these virtues that "conflict by nature," which requires "weaving by which the hard-natured and soft-natured are united as warp and woof to form the protective web of state, procuring the mingling that uncorrected nature would preclude" (139-42). Statesmanship as weaving is the artifice that overcomes "the conflict in equivocal nature between the aggressive and the accommodating virtues" (170).
What does Plato mean in calling this statesmanship "the truly genuine political art in accord with nature" (Statesman, 308d)? Cropsey would say that although the materials are natural, the political order that is woven out of those disorderly materials is an artificial construction of the philosophic statesman. Like other students of Leo Strauss, Cropsey interprets Plato as denying Aristotle's claim that human beings are political animals by nature.
But I would say that what one sees here is the trichotomy of political order as manifesting natural inclinations, cultural traditions, and individual judgment. A fundamental insight of Aristotelian and Darwinian political science is that human political nature must be nurtured through custom and judgment.
If the philosophic weaver cannot look to human nature for guidance, where does he find the pattern for the cloth? How does he know that the best pattern must include an interweaving of courage and moderation? Plato's Stranger explains that the combination of courage and moderation is necessary for the survival of a city in war and peace (Statesman, 307e-308b). Cropsey suggests that "his implication is that the natural reward of survival is conferred on those regimes that sit most bearably on their subjects because the polity respects the law and keeps undivided counsel." Therefore, "survival is the natural reward that signals the presence of true and authentic statesmanship (136).
Doesn't this indicate that the standard for the political weaver is by nature? Given the nature of human beings, they cannot live together in stable political communities without some combination of courage and moderation. Darwin recognized this in his account of how group selection in war contributed to the evolution of cooperation and the moral sense.
Nature can provide no standard for the philosophic statesman if nature is irrational. Cropsey seems to think that the irrationality of nature is indicated by the fact that certain kinds of geometric relationships require irrational numbers for their numerical expression (111, 125). But this makes no sense. These geometric relationships--such as that between the diagonal of a square and its sides or that between the radius and the circumference of a circle--are regular and thus intelligible relationships. Indeed, the wondrous intelligibility of such geometric patterns would seem to manifest the rational order of nature.
If the pattern for the political weaver is purely artificial, as Cropsey suggests, we are left with many questions. Does the weaver simply invent his pattern arbitrarily? Or is his pattern only a modification of a pattern that he has inherited from others? Does the weaver weave himself into and out of his own pattern? Or has the weaver been woven into someone else's pattern?
Cropsey claims that Socrates is the model statesman. If so, was he produced by the pattern woven by Athenian political weavers? According to Cropsey, "Socrates is under the influence of an unfeigned if subdued patriotism that is born of the understanding . . . that the human authority erected in political society is our nearest guarantee of prosperity in an uncaring milieu" (160).
Socrates realizes, however, that "human authority" is not sufficient to sustain the right opinions of the multitude of people. Socrates as the superior human being who cares for humanity cannot speak simply in his own name, because "the natural human suspicion of human superiority gives rise to the urgent need for a presence and a judgment above suspicion." Therefore, Cropsey concludes, Socrates had to create a new religion as a "noble lie." "His own care for the Athenians seems to reveal itself in his effort to conceal from them their human loneliness and to make up for it, as far as possible, with a simple theology of the nameless god. . . . What could better illuminate the paradox of the human condition than this act of human caring for man on the part of one who teaches that the oblivious deity is diligent in righteousness" (165)? In the words of a more recent philosophic weaver of noble lies, "Only a god can save us now."
Cropsey speaks of Socrates's "new religion without theophany" as "a religion of reason and justice rather than faith and charity" (177). But it seems to me that "a religion of reason and justice" might well be a natural religion in the sense of a religion adapted to human nature, a religion that might be the product of natural human evolution.
If nature were not the standard for the Socratic weaver, then the pattern of his weaving would be set not by reason and justice but by will and power. This might be Cropsey's view of the matter. But I do not think it is Plato's.
My response has been to point out that even if human ends cannot be sustained by cosmic nature, those ends can be sustained by human nature. And insofar as Darwinian science explains the evolutionary emergence of a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, such a science supports an immanent teleology that is sufficient grounds for natural right. Some of my many posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Many of my critics on this point are Straussians who think they are following Plato in arguing for a cosmic teleology of moral ends. I believe, however, that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) is actually close to what I have in mind in defending an immanent teleology of human nature as understood by Darwinian science.
In some ways, Joseph Cropsey's book Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos (1995) confirms my thinking about the link between Plato and Darwin on this point. (Many years ago, Cropsey was one of my professors at the University of Chicago.)
The most persistent theme of Cropsey's book is "care." Human beings are said to care about their existence within an uncaring world of nature and without any divinity to care for them (2, 7, 62, 64, 110, 114, 118-21, 125, 127-31, 136-38, 145-47, 151, 155-57, 160, 164-65, 170, 180, 212, 218, 222, 225). At times, this sounds more like Heidegger than Plato. Cropsey never mentions Heidegger in this book. And yet, for Heidegger, the being of human being understood as Dasein is defined as "care" (Sorge), and "care" is grounded in historical temporality. Cropsey seems to be suggesting that Heidegger elaborates what is implied in the Platonic dialogues. This impression of mine was confirmed when I saw that Catherine Zuckert in her review of Cropsey's book also spoke of "the evocation of Heideggerian themes--the temporal limitations of human knowledge, the centrality of the confrontation with death in the definition of human existence, and the importance of care." (Aren't these all Humean and Darwinian themes as well?)
Cropsey indicates that for Plato the primacy of human care shows itself in the need for a human conquest of nature. According to Cropsey, Plato did not believe that nature could provide "the criterion and incentive of human excellence," because Plato actually anticipated the modern teaching that nature is "indifferent or unfriendly to our well-being until we learn to exploit it" (185-86). Cropsey's Plato thus affirms "the moral neutrality of nature" (210).
Although Cropsey does not explicitly associate "care" with any particular Greek word, he implicitly links "care" to two Greek words--epistatike and epimeleia (138, 151, 156, 160). The second word is used by Socrates in the Apology (24c, 31b, 36b-c) when he claims to "care" for the Athenians by trying to persuade them to "care" for virtue rather than for money and power. Both words are used by the Stranger in the Statesman (305e, 308e, 311c) when he speaks of the statesman as the one who "cares for" his city by weaving the diverse characters of his people into a common fabric.
Cropsey says that human caring has neither natural nor divine support. Here is where I disagree with Cropsey. Even if one grants that cosmic nature is uncaring, why not say that caring is natural in the sense that it is rooted in human nature?
After all, Cropsey indicates that caring for their existence is natural to all human beings in some manner, and a special kind of intelligent caring is natural to Socratic philosophers (110, 121, 125, 129-31, 147). Although Cropsey depicts philosophy as a struggle against nature (157, 161, 176, 185), he also makes much of Socrates' philosophic caring as dictated by his nature (157, 161, 185). He describes Socrates as having "an innate inclination toward right and good" that is part of his nature, and this shows us "that nature sends the better angels of caring and nobility as well as the afflictions of cruelty and baseness" (157). According to Cropsey, the Socratic philosopher is "guided by his understanding of the good for the humanity he has insisted was an object of his caring" (212). But where would this philosopher get his understanding of the human good if not from his understanding of human nature (218)? How could we even identify "an innate inclination toward right and good" in Socrates if there were no natural standard of "right and good"?
Cropsey says that human nature does not clearly support human care because of the natural conflict between the indispensable virtues of hardness and softness. "Courage or manliness or aggressiveness (andreia) is in conflict with restraint or accommodation or passivity (sophrosyne), each being a virtue or a part or kind of virtue" (139). True statesmanship is "according to nature" when it contrives a union of these virtues that "conflict by nature," which requires "weaving by which the hard-natured and soft-natured are united as warp and woof to form the protective web of state, procuring the mingling that uncorrected nature would preclude" (139-42). Statesmanship as weaving is the artifice that overcomes "the conflict in equivocal nature between the aggressive and the accommodating virtues" (170).
What does Plato mean in calling this statesmanship "the truly genuine political art in accord with nature" (Statesman, 308d)? Cropsey would say that although the materials are natural, the political order that is woven out of those disorderly materials is an artificial construction of the philosophic statesman. Like other students of Leo Strauss, Cropsey interprets Plato as denying Aristotle's claim that human beings are political animals by nature.
But I would say that what one sees here is the trichotomy of political order as manifesting natural inclinations, cultural traditions, and individual judgment. A fundamental insight of Aristotelian and Darwinian political science is that human political nature must be nurtured through custom and judgment.
If the philosophic weaver cannot look to human nature for guidance, where does he find the pattern for the cloth? How does he know that the best pattern must include an interweaving of courage and moderation? Plato's Stranger explains that the combination of courage and moderation is necessary for the survival of a city in war and peace (Statesman, 307e-308b). Cropsey suggests that "his implication is that the natural reward of survival is conferred on those regimes that sit most bearably on their subjects because the polity respects the law and keeps undivided counsel." Therefore, "survival is the natural reward that signals the presence of true and authentic statesmanship (136).
Doesn't this indicate that the standard for the political weaver is by nature? Given the nature of human beings, they cannot live together in stable political communities without some combination of courage and moderation. Darwin recognized this in his account of how group selection in war contributed to the evolution of cooperation and the moral sense.
Nature can provide no standard for the philosophic statesman if nature is irrational. Cropsey seems to think that the irrationality of nature is indicated by the fact that certain kinds of geometric relationships require irrational numbers for their numerical expression (111, 125). But this makes no sense. These geometric relationships--such as that between the diagonal of a square and its sides or that between the radius and the circumference of a circle--are regular and thus intelligible relationships. Indeed, the wondrous intelligibility of such geometric patterns would seem to manifest the rational order of nature.
If the pattern for the political weaver is purely artificial, as Cropsey suggests, we are left with many questions. Does the weaver simply invent his pattern arbitrarily? Or is his pattern only a modification of a pattern that he has inherited from others? Does the weaver weave himself into and out of his own pattern? Or has the weaver been woven into someone else's pattern?
Cropsey claims that Socrates is the model statesman. If so, was he produced by the pattern woven by Athenian political weavers? According to Cropsey, "Socrates is under the influence of an unfeigned if subdued patriotism that is born of the understanding . . . that the human authority erected in political society is our nearest guarantee of prosperity in an uncaring milieu" (160).
Socrates realizes, however, that "human authority" is not sufficient to sustain the right opinions of the multitude of people. Socrates as the superior human being who cares for humanity cannot speak simply in his own name, because "the natural human suspicion of human superiority gives rise to the urgent need for a presence and a judgment above suspicion." Therefore, Cropsey concludes, Socrates had to create a new religion as a "noble lie." "His own care for the Athenians seems to reveal itself in his effort to conceal from them their human loneliness and to make up for it, as far as possible, with a simple theology of the nameless god. . . . What could better illuminate the paradox of the human condition than this act of human caring for man on the part of one who teaches that the oblivious deity is diligent in righteousness" (165)? In the words of a more recent philosophic weaver of noble lies, "Only a god can save us now."
Cropsey speaks of Socrates's "new religion without theophany" as "a religion of reason and justice rather than faith and charity" (177). But it seems to me that "a religion of reason and justice" might well be a natural religion in the sense of a religion adapted to human nature, a religion that might be the product of natural human evolution.
If nature were not the standard for the Socratic weaver, then the pattern of his weaving would be set not by reason and justice but by will and power. This might be Cropsey's view of the matter. But I do not think it is Plato's.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Dancing Cockatoos and Ice Age Flutes
Music is sometimes said to be a uniquely human activity that cannot be explained through Darwinian evolution from ancestral species. But the YouTube video of Snowball the cockatoo dancing to the music of the Back Street Boys suggests that music has deep roots in the animal world. With birds like this, we shouldn't miss Michael Jackson.
Recently, Nature published an online article reporting the discovery of a flute that is estimated to be over 35,000 years old. The flute has five finger holes, and it was made from the wing bone of a vulture. It was found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany, where other such flutes have been found.
The Wall Street Journal has a a good article on this discovery and the scientific debate over the evolutionary origins of music. The video accompanying the article includes a recording of what the flute might have sounded like.
It is surprising, however, that the Nature article makes no reference to Darwin; and the article in the Wall Street Journal claims that Darwin was "baffled" by music, because he could not explain how it could have evolved.
In fact, in The Descent of Man, Darwin has a long section on music. He reported the discovery of "two flutes, made out of the bones and horns of the reindeer, found in caves together with flint tools and the remains of extinct animals." So here, as in so many other cases of supposed new discoveries in evolutionary science, we should see that Darwin was there first!
Some of the scientists studying the evolution of music believe that music evolved among ancient humans before speech, and that speech might actually depend upon abilities shaped originally by music. But, again, Darwin was there first with his claim that "musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language."
And yet one can also see progress beyond Darwin in some critical respects. For example, the use of radiocarbon dating allows for a reasonably precise dating of human archaeology, which was not available to Darwin. Another example of progress would be advances in neuroscience that are now being applied to reasoning about human evolution, so that, in this case, we can infer evolutionary changes in the human brain corresponding to the archaeological evidence for music.
But even as they go beyond Darwin, these new advances in evolutionary science fit within, and deepen, Darwin's evolutionary framework--in this case, Darwin's explanation for how even the highest artistic activities of the human mind might have emerged from human evolutionary history.
Recently, Nature published an online article reporting the discovery of a flute that is estimated to be over 35,000 years old. The flute has five finger holes, and it was made from the wing bone of a vulture. It was found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany, where other such flutes have been found.
The Wall Street Journal has a a good article on this discovery and the scientific debate over the evolutionary origins of music. The video accompanying the article includes a recording of what the flute might have sounded like.
It is surprising, however, that the Nature article makes no reference to Darwin; and the article in the Wall Street Journal claims that Darwin was "baffled" by music, because he could not explain how it could have evolved.
In fact, in The Descent of Man, Darwin has a long section on music. He reported the discovery of "two flutes, made out of the bones and horns of the reindeer, found in caves together with flint tools and the remains of extinct animals." So here, as in so many other cases of supposed new discoveries in evolutionary science, we should see that Darwin was there first!
Some of the scientists studying the evolution of music believe that music evolved among ancient humans before speech, and that speech might actually depend upon abilities shaped originally by music. But, again, Darwin was there first with his claim that "musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language."
And yet one can also see progress beyond Darwin in some critical respects. For example, the use of radiocarbon dating allows for a reasonably precise dating of human archaeology, which was not available to Darwin. Another example of progress would be advances in neuroscience that are now being applied to reasoning about human evolution, so that, in this case, we can infer evolutionary changes in the human brain corresponding to the archaeological evidence for music.
But even as they go beyond Darwin, these new advances in evolutionary science fit within, and deepen, Darwin's evolutionary framework--in this case, Darwin's explanation for how even the highest artistic activities of the human mind might have emerged from human evolutionary history.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Nature and Nature's God: Another Reply to Budziszewski
Observing the Fourth of July might remind us of the famous appeal in the Declaration of Independence to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
That phrase provokes questions. Do the "Laws of Nature" depend on some religious belief in "Nature's God"? Does "Nature's God" suggest some kind of natural theology--some conception of the divine that is manifest in nature without need for revelation? Could "Nature's God" suggest a deistic notion of God as the uncaused cause of Nature? Or do we need a more biblical conception of God as a divine person who intervenes in nature miraculously? Does the very idea of "Laws of Nature" imply a lawgiver, who must be God? If natural law requires religious belief, does that mean that a regime based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence must enforce religious belief--at least the minimal religious beliefs suggested by the Declaration with its invocation of God as Creator, Legislator, and Judge? If so, why is the United States Constitution silent about these religious beliefs, even as it declares that there shall be "no religious test" for public office, and no congressional "establishment of religion"?
Some of these questions have come up in the exchanges I have had with J. Budziszewski, a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. Budziszewski is an evangelical Christian who writes works of Christian apologetics, which include a defense of natural law reasoning as the basis of ethics. He has criticized my claim that natural law can be rightly understood as a purely natural morality rooted in evolved human nature that can be known to human beings regardless of whether they have any religious beliefs. Against my position, he insists that natural law requires some belief in God as the supernatural ground of natural law.
Budziszewski has developed his critique of my reasoning in an essay that he has published three times. Most recently, the essay appears in his new book--The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (ISI Books, 2009). Three years ago, I wrote a post responding to the earlier version of this essay.
I still believe that Budziszewski's argument is implicitly based on a divine command view of ethics--the idea that we have no natural ground for judging right and wrong independently of God's command. Budziszewski tries to deny this. He writes: "The idea of a divine authority behind the natural law is often misunderstood. Some people imagine that if God had ordained that we rape instead of marry, murder instead of cherish, hate Him instead of love Him, then such things would be right. The absurdity of this idea is considered an objection to God's authority. What the objection overlooks is that a being capable of commanding such things would not be God. God is neither constrained by nor indifferent to the good; He is the good, the uncreated good in which the goodness of created being is grounded" (210-11).
But doesn't this identification of God with the good imply that Budziszewski knows what the good is independently of God's revealed will? For example, since Budziszewski knows murder is wrong, wouldn't he say that the biblical story of God commanding Abraham to murder his son Isaac must be somehow mistaken? Wouldn't he also recognize that Thomas Aquinas was wrong when he concluded that it was right for the Church to sanction the execution of heretics?
Similarly, while the Bible sanctions slavery, Budziszewski knows that this is wrong, and therefore he looks for some way to correct the Bible to conform to his natural moral knowledge that slavery is wrong. In his new book, he writes: "Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave. At least they did eventually. Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did--not spontaneously" (36). The explicit teaching of the Bible is that the "brotherhood of master and slave" is consistent with preserving slavery as a moral good. But Budziszewski rightly judges that Christians had to correct the Bible by seeing that human brotherhood demands the abolition of slavery as a great moral wrong.
That phrase provokes questions. Do the "Laws of Nature" depend on some religious belief in "Nature's God"? Does "Nature's God" suggest some kind of natural theology--some conception of the divine that is manifest in nature without need for revelation? Could "Nature's God" suggest a deistic notion of God as the uncaused cause of Nature? Or do we need a more biblical conception of God as a divine person who intervenes in nature miraculously? Does the very idea of "Laws of Nature" imply a lawgiver, who must be God? If natural law requires religious belief, does that mean that a regime based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence must enforce religious belief--at least the minimal religious beliefs suggested by the Declaration with its invocation of God as Creator, Legislator, and Judge? If so, why is the United States Constitution silent about these religious beliefs, even as it declares that there shall be "no religious test" for public office, and no congressional "establishment of religion"?
Some of these questions have come up in the exchanges I have had with J. Budziszewski, a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. Budziszewski is an evangelical Christian who writes works of Christian apologetics, which include a defense of natural law reasoning as the basis of ethics. He has criticized my claim that natural law can be rightly understood as a purely natural morality rooted in evolved human nature that can be known to human beings regardless of whether they have any religious beliefs. Against my position, he insists that natural law requires some belief in God as the supernatural ground of natural law.
Budziszewski has developed his critique of my reasoning in an essay that he has published three times. Most recently, the essay appears in his new book--The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (ISI Books, 2009). Three years ago, I wrote a post responding to the earlier version of this essay.
I still believe that Budziszewski's argument is implicitly based on a divine command view of ethics--the idea that we have no natural ground for judging right and wrong independently of God's command. Budziszewski tries to deny this. He writes: "The idea of a divine authority behind the natural law is often misunderstood. Some people imagine that if God had ordained that we rape instead of marry, murder instead of cherish, hate Him instead of love Him, then such things would be right. The absurdity of this idea is considered an objection to God's authority. What the objection overlooks is that a being capable of commanding such things would not be God. God is neither constrained by nor indifferent to the good; He is the good, the uncreated good in which the goodness of created being is grounded" (210-11).
But doesn't this identification of God with the good imply that Budziszewski knows what the good is independently of God's revealed will? For example, since Budziszewski knows murder is wrong, wouldn't he say that the biblical story of God commanding Abraham to murder his son Isaac must be somehow mistaken? Wouldn't he also recognize that Thomas Aquinas was wrong when he concluded that it was right for the Church to sanction the execution of heretics?
Similarly, while the Bible sanctions slavery, Budziszewski knows that this is wrong, and therefore he looks for some way to correct the Bible to conform to his natural moral knowledge that slavery is wrong. In his new book, he writes: "Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave. At least they did eventually. Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did--not spontaneously" (36). The explicit teaching of the Bible is that the "brotherhood of master and slave" is consistent with preserving slavery as a moral good. But Budziszewski rightly judges that Christians had to correct the Bible by seeing that human brotherhood demands the abolition of slavery as a great moral wrong.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Darwin's Understanding of Love and Death
Peter Lawler's contribution to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question is entitled "All Larry Needs Is Love (and Death)."
As I indicate in my response, I don't understand Lawler's claim that "Arnhart denies that love and death are essential to our being," and that I cannot account for "the fact of our deep loneliness or of our deep longing to be known and loved by other persons." It is odd that he says this considering that I stress the natural desires for friendship, conjugal love, parental care, and familial bonding as manifestations of our evolved nature as social animals, and that I also speak about the natural human longings for religious understanding and intellectual understanding in the face of the mysteries of life and death.
I disagree with Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death. Anyone who examines Darwin's life and writings can see how his scientific thinking was influenced by his personal life, and particularly by his experience with love and death in his family and with his friends.
One of the best studies of how Darwin's science arose from his personal struggles with love and death is Randal Keynes' Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2001). Keynes is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin and a great-nephew of John Maynard Keynes. Some years ago, he came across a child's writing case that had belonged to Annie Darwin, the first daughter of Charles and Emma, who had died when she was ten. The writing case was filled with personal items that Emma had saved to remember her daughter. Charles had written a note recording how Annie felt every day during her last months, and then after her death, he wrote a memorial to record his memories of her character and life. As Keynes collected this and related material, he began writing his book as a study of how the death of Annie in 1851 had shaped her father's understanding of love and death in ways that guided his scientific thinking about the natural world.
A few days before his wedding, Charles told Emma that while during his five years travelling on the Beagle, "the whole of my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind," he now looked to marriage to take him out of himself. "I think you will humanize me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude." He spent the rest of his life doing his scientific work surrounded by his family in his home in Down. (As I have indicated in a previous post, I found that visiting Down House evokes the life of the Darwins in a poignant way.)
The family included ten children, of whom seven lived to adulthood. Mary died in 1842, within three weeks of her birth. Annie died in 1851. Charles Waring died in 1858, at age four. Annie's death, after six months of severe illness, was especially traumatic for Charles and his family.
Charles responded to his children with both the warm feelings of a father and the methodical observations of a scientist. He kept careful records of how his children developed in infancy to support his "natural history of babies," which would help him understand the earliest psychological development of human emotions and thoughts as compared with other animals. He also learned from his own paternal feelings and from Emma's maternal care the importance of parental love in nurturing the individual development of each child.
Charles's mother had died when he was eight. He regretted later in life that he could not recall many clear memories of her. When Annie died, he was careful to preserve a written summary of his memories of her written one week after her death. In about 1,500 words, he sketched her character, her appearance, and her behavior. He wrote:
"Our poor child, Annie, was born in Gower St on March 2nd 1841 and expired at Malvern at Midday on the 23rd of April 1851. I write these few pages as I think in after years, if we live, the impression now put down will recall more vividly her chief characteristics. From whatever point I look back at her, the main feature in her disposition which at once rises before me is her buoyant joyousness, tempered by two other characteristics, namely her sensitiveness, which might easily have been overlooked by a stranger, and her strong affection. Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour. It was delightful and cheerful to behold her. Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running down stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving pleasure. . . .
"Her figure and appearance were clearly influenced by her character: her eyes sparkled brightly; she often smiled; her step was elastic and firm; she held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness. . . .
"Her health failed in a slight degree for about nine months before her last illness; but it only occasionally gave her a day of discomfort: at such times, she was never in the least degree cross, peevish or impatient; and it was wonderful to see, as the discomfort passed, how quickly her elastic spirits brought back her joyousness and happiness. . . . When so exhausted that she could hardly speak, she praised everything that was given her, and said some tea 'was beautifully good.' When I gave her some water, she said 'I quite thank you'; and these, I believe were the last precious words ever addressed by her dear lips to me.
"But looking back, always the spirit of joyousness rises before me as her emblem and characteristic: she seemed formed to live a life of happiness: her spirits were always held in check by her sensitiveness lest she should displease those she loved, and her tender love was never weary of displaying itself by fondling and all the other little acts of affection.
"We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age: she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her."
Annie's "joyousness" and the sadness in the household from the loss of this joyous child are the clear themes of this memorial statement.
At the time, no one really understood the cause of Annie's death except that she suffered from a "bilious fever." She probably died of tuberculosis, which was known at the time as "consumption," for which there was no cure. It was not until 1882 that the German bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch identified the cause of the disease as a bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
So how should loving parents understand and deal with the death of a child? In Victorian England, there were a variety of beliefs about how to handle such a loss.
Orthodox Christians consoled themselves that their dead children would go to Heaven, and that parents would eventually be reunited with their children in Heaven. Christians could believe that such death was designed by God to teach the need for faith in undergoing suffering.
For many religious believers, death was God's punishment for the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, and even innocent children had to pay the price for the sin of Adam. Or such believers might see the death as the punishment for some personal sin of the parents.
For some people, however, such beliefs were dubious. Despite the common view that the Bible teaches eternal life after death, the Biblical account of the afterlife is vague, and the character of Heaven and Hell is not clearly explained. Moreover, why should we be consoled by belief in eternal life if we can't be sure about whether we (or our children) will go to Heaven or Hell? And why should we rely on scriptural authority for an afterlife if this is not supported by evidence from natural human experience and reasoning?
In any case, it's not clear that even those who profess to believe in an afterlife really believe it strongly enough for this to overcome their natural feeling that death is the end.
Some people wondered why a God who is both all-powerful and all-good would allow the innocent to suffer and die. They also wondered about the fairness of God in condemning most people to eternal punishment in Hell.
Some Victorians thought that we should accept death as a consequence of natural causes that we cannot alter. This seemed to be Alfred Tennyson's response when his first child was stillborn (three days before Annie's death):
Little bosom not yet cold,
Noble forehead made for thought,
Little hands of mighty mould
Clenched as in the fight which they had fought.
He had done battle to be born,
But some brute force of Nature had prevailed
And the little warrior failed.
"Some brute force of Nature had prevailed." What more should be said about the death of a child--or of any human being?
How did Emma and Charles respond to the death of Annie? As a Unitarian who believed in the eternal afterlife, Emma tried to console herself with the thought that she would be reunited with her family after death in Heaven. She was troubled that Charles did not find the evidence for such beliefs convincing. Over her life, as she and Charles talked about this and read books on the debate over the evidence for personal immortality with eternal rewards and punishments, she became less confident about her beliefs, although she was always more openly pious than Charles.
In his early life, Charles was an orthodox Christian believer. By the middle of his life, he had concluded that there was insufficient evidence for the divine authority of the Bible and traditional Christian doctrines. By the end of his life, he identified himself as an agnostic. Some people assumed he was a complete atheist. But he always insisted that he was open to the possibility of God as First Cause of the natural laws governing the universe, although he worried that searching for the ultimate causes of all things was beyond the natural limits of the human mind. "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."
He was clear, however, in rejecting the traditional doctrines of God as having separately created every form of life and as providentially intervening to control every event in natural and human history. He laid out the evidence and arguments for species as originating from ancestral species through natural laws of evolution, although he indicated that this was consistent with believing in God as the Creator of those natural laws. Persuaded by the evidence of experience and science that nature was governed by general laws, Charles could not believe in any miracles, except possibly the original miracle by which the laws of nature themselves were created.
Charles rejected the traditional teaching that God would condemn all unbelievers to everlasting punishment as a "damnable doctrine."
He also rejected the traditional belief in God's particular providence, because Charles could not see how a just God could be responsible for "the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." It would be a more sublime notion of God, Charles thought, to say that God was not responsible for the cruelty of nature as governed by the "universal struggle for life." He believed it was "more satisfactory to attribute pain and suffering to the natural sequence of events." So at the end of the Origin of Species, Charles leaves his reader with the image of how "endless forms most beautiful" evolved "from the war of nature, from famine and death."
Charles learned this from his personal experience of love and death. He could love Annie as his beautiful child. He could understand her death as coming from her losing struggle for life in the war of nature. He could cherish his memories of her joyous personality, as preserved in his memorial essay, but without any expectation of being reunited with her in an afterlife.
Charles could also engage in scientific research on the natural causes of suffering and death with the hope that such knowledge could provide some relief. Although he did not understand how Annie's disease was caused by microorganisms, Charles did develop an evolutionary theory of how parasites and hosts coevolve in the struggle for life.
In 1877, a scientific friend of his sent him an article by Dr. Robert Koch, who would later discover the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. The article contained the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases. Charles replied: "I well remember saying to myself between twenty and thirty years ago [about the time of Annie's death], that if ever the origin of any infectious disease could be proved, it would be the greatest triumph to Science; and now I rejoice to have seen the triumph."
So now Charles's science can explain why his daughter died. She died because she lost her struggle for life in the war of nature with tubercular bacteria. She was defeated by a "brute force of Nature."
Without a scientific understanding of her disease, Charles could not save her life. But he could save his memories of her in all her beautiful exuberance. "She held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness."
Does Peter Lawler have any better alternative for understanding love and death?
Some of my thoughts here are elaborated in my post on Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning" and it's famous line that "death is the mother of beauty."
As I indicate in my response, I don't understand Lawler's claim that "Arnhart denies that love and death are essential to our being," and that I cannot account for "the fact of our deep loneliness or of our deep longing to be known and loved by other persons." It is odd that he says this considering that I stress the natural desires for friendship, conjugal love, parental care, and familial bonding as manifestations of our evolved nature as social animals, and that I also speak about the natural human longings for religious understanding and intellectual understanding in the face of the mysteries of life and death.
I disagree with Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death. Anyone who examines Darwin's life and writings can see how his scientific thinking was influenced by his personal life, and particularly by his experience with love and death in his family and with his friends.
One of the best studies of how Darwin's science arose from his personal struggles with love and death is Randal Keynes' Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2001). Keynes is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin and a great-nephew of John Maynard Keynes. Some years ago, he came across a child's writing case that had belonged to Annie Darwin, the first daughter of Charles and Emma, who had died when she was ten. The writing case was filled with personal items that Emma had saved to remember her daughter. Charles had written a note recording how Annie felt every day during her last months, and then after her death, he wrote a memorial to record his memories of her character and life. As Keynes collected this and related material, he began writing his book as a study of how the death of Annie in 1851 had shaped her father's understanding of love and death in ways that guided his scientific thinking about the natural world.
A few days before his wedding, Charles told Emma that while during his five years travelling on the Beagle, "the whole of my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind," he now looked to marriage to take him out of himself. "I think you will humanize me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude." He spent the rest of his life doing his scientific work surrounded by his family in his home in Down. (As I have indicated in a previous post, I found that visiting Down House evokes the life of the Darwins in a poignant way.)
The family included ten children, of whom seven lived to adulthood. Mary died in 1842, within three weeks of her birth. Annie died in 1851. Charles Waring died in 1858, at age four. Annie's death, after six months of severe illness, was especially traumatic for Charles and his family.
Charles responded to his children with both the warm feelings of a father and the methodical observations of a scientist. He kept careful records of how his children developed in infancy to support his "natural history of babies," which would help him understand the earliest psychological development of human emotions and thoughts as compared with other animals. He also learned from his own paternal feelings and from Emma's maternal care the importance of parental love in nurturing the individual development of each child.
Charles's mother had died when he was eight. He regretted later in life that he could not recall many clear memories of her. When Annie died, he was careful to preserve a written summary of his memories of her written one week after her death. In about 1,500 words, he sketched her character, her appearance, and her behavior. He wrote:
"Our poor child, Annie, was born in Gower St on March 2nd 1841 and expired at Malvern at Midday on the 23rd of April 1851. I write these few pages as I think in after years, if we live, the impression now put down will recall more vividly her chief characteristics. From whatever point I look back at her, the main feature in her disposition which at once rises before me is her buoyant joyousness, tempered by two other characteristics, namely her sensitiveness, which might easily have been overlooked by a stranger, and her strong affection. Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour. It was delightful and cheerful to behold her. Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running down stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving pleasure. . . .
"Her figure and appearance were clearly influenced by her character: her eyes sparkled brightly; she often smiled; her step was elastic and firm; she held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness. . . .
"Her health failed in a slight degree for about nine months before her last illness; but it only occasionally gave her a day of discomfort: at such times, she was never in the least degree cross, peevish or impatient; and it was wonderful to see, as the discomfort passed, how quickly her elastic spirits brought back her joyousness and happiness. . . . When so exhausted that she could hardly speak, she praised everything that was given her, and said some tea 'was beautifully good.' When I gave her some water, she said 'I quite thank you'; and these, I believe were the last precious words ever addressed by her dear lips to me.
"But looking back, always the spirit of joyousness rises before me as her emblem and characteristic: she seemed formed to live a life of happiness: her spirits were always held in check by her sensitiveness lest she should displease those she loved, and her tender love was never weary of displaying itself by fondling and all the other little acts of affection.
"We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age: she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her."
Annie's "joyousness" and the sadness in the household from the loss of this joyous child are the clear themes of this memorial statement.
At the time, no one really understood the cause of Annie's death except that she suffered from a "bilious fever." She probably died of tuberculosis, which was known at the time as "consumption," for which there was no cure. It was not until 1882 that the German bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch identified the cause of the disease as a bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
So how should loving parents understand and deal with the death of a child? In Victorian England, there were a variety of beliefs about how to handle such a loss.
Orthodox Christians consoled themselves that their dead children would go to Heaven, and that parents would eventually be reunited with their children in Heaven. Christians could believe that such death was designed by God to teach the need for faith in undergoing suffering.
For many religious believers, death was God's punishment for the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, and even innocent children had to pay the price for the sin of Adam. Or such believers might see the death as the punishment for some personal sin of the parents.
For some people, however, such beliefs were dubious. Despite the common view that the Bible teaches eternal life after death, the Biblical account of the afterlife is vague, and the character of Heaven and Hell is not clearly explained. Moreover, why should we be consoled by belief in eternal life if we can't be sure about whether we (or our children) will go to Heaven or Hell? And why should we rely on scriptural authority for an afterlife if this is not supported by evidence from natural human experience and reasoning?
In any case, it's not clear that even those who profess to believe in an afterlife really believe it strongly enough for this to overcome their natural feeling that death is the end.
Some people wondered why a God who is both all-powerful and all-good would allow the innocent to suffer and die. They also wondered about the fairness of God in condemning most people to eternal punishment in Hell.
Some Victorians thought that we should accept death as a consequence of natural causes that we cannot alter. This seemed to be Alfred Tennyson's response when his first child was stillborn (three days before Annie's death):
Little bosom not yet cold,
Noble forehead made for thought,
Little hands of mighty mould
Clenched as in the fight which they had fought.
He had done battle to be born,
But some brute force of Nature had prevailed
And the little warrior failed.
"Some brute force of Nature had prevailed." What more should be said about the death of a child--or of any human being?
How did Emma and Charles respond to the death of Annie? As a Unitarian who believed in the eternal afterlife, Emma tried to console herself with the thought that she would be reunited with her family after death in Heaven. She was troubled that Charles did not find the evidence for such beliefs convincing. Over her life, as she and Charles talked about this and read books on the debate over the evidence for personal immortality with eternal rewards and punishments, she became less confident about her beliefs, although she was always more openly pious than Charles.
In his early life, Charles was an orthodox Christian believer. By the middle of his life, he had concluded that there was insufficient evidence for the divine authority of the Bible and traditional Christian doctrines. By the end of his life, he identified himself as an agnostic. Some people assumed he was a complete atheist. But he always insisted that he was open to the possibility of God as First Cause of the natural laws governing the universe, although he worried that searching for the ultimate causes of all things was beyond the natural limits of the human mind. "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."
He was clear, however, in rejecting the traditional doctrines of God as having separately created every form of life and as providentially intervening to control every event in natural and human history. He laid out the evidence and arguments for species as originating from ancestral species through natural laws of evolution, although he indicated that this was consistent with believing in God as the Creator of those natural laws. Persuaded by the evidence of experience and science that nature was governed by general laws, Charles could not believe in any miracles, except possibly the original miracle by which the laws of nature themselves were created.
Charles rejected the traditional teaching that God would condemn all unbelievers to everlasting punishment as a "damnable doctrine."
He also rejected the traditional belief in God's particular providence, because Charles could not see how a just God could be responsible for "the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." It would be a more sublime notion of God, Charles thought, to say that God was not responsible for the cruelty of nature as governed by the "universal struggle for life." He believed it was "more satisfactory to attribute pain and suffering to the natural sequence of events." So at the end of the Origin of Species, Charles leaves his reader with the image of how "endless forms most beautiful" evolved "from the war of nature, from famine and death."
Charles learned this from his personal experience of love and death. He could love Annie as his beautiful child. He could understand her death as coming from her losing struggle for life in the war of nature. He could cherish his memories of her joyous personality, as preserved in his memorial essay, but without any expectation of being reunited with her in an afterlife.
Charles could also engage in scientific research on the natural causes of suffering and death with the hope that such knowledge could provide some relief. Although he did not understand how Annie's disease was caused by microorganisms, Charles did develop an evolutionary theory of how parasites and hosts coevolve in the struggle for life.
In 1877, a scientific friend of his sent him an article by Dr. Robert Koch, who would later discover the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. The article contained the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases. Charles replied: "I well remember saying to myself between twenty and thirty years ago [about the time of Annie's death], that if ever the origin of any infectious disease could be proved, it would be the greatest triumph to Science; and now I rejoice to have seen the triumph."
So now Charles's science can explain why his daughter died. She died because she lost her struggle for life in the war of nature with tubercular bacteria. She was defeated by a "brute force of Nature."
Without a scientific understanding of her disease, Charles could not save her life. But he could save his memories of her in all her beautiful exuberance. "She held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness."
Does Peter Lawler have any better alternative for understanding love and death?
Some of my thoughts here are elaborated in my post on Wallace Stevens's poem "Sunday Morning" and it's famous line that "death is the mother of beauty."
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