Nietzsche, Liberalism, and the Second Reich

In contrast to the common association of Nietzsche with the Third Reich, William Altman's book on Nietzsche makes a brilliant argument for seeing Nietzsche as the philosopher of the Second Reich.

Nietzsche's first book--The Birth of Tragedy--was written in 1871, and it was in January of 1871 that the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to the proclamation in Versailles of the Second German Reich, with Wilhelm I as the Emperor and Otto von Bismarck as the Chancellor.  Nietzsche's last books were written in 1888, before his collapse into insanity at the beginning of 1889.  In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm I died, his son Frederick III became emperor, but then Frederick died three months later, and his son Wilhelm II became emperor.  In 1890, Bismarck was forced to resign, leaving Wilhelm II as the dominant ruler until the defeat of Germany in the war in 1918 brought the end of the Second Reich.  Thus, Nietzsche's intellectual career coincided with the Bismarckian period of the Second Reich.

Altman shows how Nietzsche's thinking was shaped by the political events of his time, despite his pose of "untimeliness."  Moreover, by the time of the First World War, Nietzsche had become so influential that he was seen by many people inside and outside Germany as the philosopher of German culture.  Many German soldiers took copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into their trenches, and the daring courage of the "storm troopers" looked a lot like the military heroism that Nietzsche had foreseen as necessary for the future triumph of the "higher men."

Altman makes a persuasive argument that Nietzsche's thinking illuminates the history of the Second Reich, just as the history of the Second Reich illuminates Nietzsche's thinking.  That mutual illumination leads to the general conclusion that both Nietzsche and the Second Reich suffered from internal contradictions that led to their destruction--Nietzsche's mental breakdown in 1889 and the Second Reich's military and political breakdown in 1918.

Although I generally agree with Altman's reasoning, I disagree with him about two points.

The first point of disagreement is that I am not convinced that in showing Nietzsche's entanglement with the Second Reich, Altman has thereby shown that Nietzsche was not entangled with the Third Reich.  In fact, Altman admits in his Preface that Nietzsche provided all of the intellectual components of National Socialism as understood by Leo Strauss, although Altman insists that these Nietzschean components "did not even come close to being crystallized into the final form that Strauss eventually gave them" (xiv).

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.

In his reading of those writings that began with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Altman sees continuity with the free-spirited science of Nietzsche's middle period--"there is little here that Nietzsche could not have said, and did not in fact say, in Human, All Too Human" (21).  But this ignores the fact that the writings of Nietzsche's middle period reject almost all of the fundamental teachings of his later writings--the celebration of "great politics," Dionysian intoxication, the eternalizing of becoming through Eternal Return, the scorn for democratic "herd-animalization" and equality of rights, the supernatural heroism of genius and the Ubermensch, atheistic religiosity, and the will to power.

Actually, Altman himself occasionally admits that the Darwinian science of the middle period really does look very different from the teachings in the early and late writings.  Altman sees this in the scorn for "great politics" when Nietzsche was "sailing under the flag of Darwinism" (35-36, 75-76, 134-36).

And yet Altman does not see the opening for liberal democracy in Nietzsche's middle period.  Particularly in Human, All Too Human (92-93, 438-482) and in The Wanderer and His Shadow (275-293), one can see a aristocratic liberalism that is very similar to the classical liberalism of someone like Eugen Richter, the leader of "Left Liberalism" in the Second Reich and a leading critic of Bismarck's policies.  Richter's arguments for constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, and religious liberty and his arguments against socialism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and militarism all find support in Nietzsche's middle writings.

If the Second Reich had moved toward Richter's classical liberalism, which could have happened if Frederick III had lived long enough to promote his liberal ideas, then Germany might have avoided the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Will Altman's German Trilogy and Leo Strauss's Third Wave of Modernity

At the end of the summer, the American Political Science Association will be meeting in Chicago.  For that meeting, I have proposed a panel on William Altman's book The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (2011), which makes the provocative argument that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism. 

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on Altman's book on Strauss.  I argued that Altman does not prove his strongest claim--that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516).  But I also conceded that Altman does show a disturbing refusal of Strauss to clearly and emphatically state his defense of liberal democracy against the anti-liberal position of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt.  By contrast, Strauss's friend Hans Jonas was very clear and emphatic in his criticism of Heidegger for failing to apologize for his endorsement of Nazism.

If my panel proposal is approved, my contribution will be to indicate how Altman's book on Strauss needs to be read in conjunction with the other three books that Altman has published in the last three years (all published by Lexington Books): Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012), Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration (2012), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (2013).  (To have published four books in three years that show impressive scholarship and intellectual depth would be a great achievement for any university professor, and so it's remarkable that Altman is a public high school teacher!)

In the Preface to his Nietzsche book, Altman indicates that this book along with his books on Heidegger and Strauss can be seen as a "German trilogy," following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  But if each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggests, it must be Strauss.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

Consequently, Altman's books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss can be understood as a "German trilogy" that works through the three stages of the Third Wave of modernity as the consummation of the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of an anti-liberal alternative.

If Strauss was completing what Nietzsche had started, then we should see all the elements of Strauss's critique of liberalism in Nietzsche's writings.  And, in fact, Altman claims, we see in Nietzsche the five components of National Socialism as Strauss understood it:

"(1) a radical anti-Christianity that explains even Nietzsche's rejection of Christian anti-Judaism, (2) a crystal clear sense of the Jewish origins of Christianity, (3) an interest in the use of exotericism, (4) a rejection of racialist anti-Semitism, and (5) the valorization of Israel's kings as opposed to her prophets." (xiv-xv)

Most fundamental for all of these components of National Socialism is a monistic metaphysics of secularization that rejects the dualistic metaphysics of Plato as expressed in Judaism and Christianity as a Jewish religion.  For this reason, Altman's book on Plato is connected to his "German trilogy" of books, because Altman defends Plato as the proponent of a metaphysical dualism that supports the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and liberal democracy.  Thus does Altman defend a transcendentalist dualism that is Platonic, Jewish, Christian, and liberal against a materialist monism that is anti-Platonic, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and anti-liberal.

Altman suggests that Pope Benedict XVII agrees with his interpretation of National Socialism.  He quotes from the Pope's remarks in 2006 during a visit to the Auschwitz Camp:

"By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they [sc. the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

Yes, Altman argues, that's exactly what Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss wanted to do.

I will have more to say about Altman's account of Nietzsche in my next post.  As you might expect from my previous posts on Nietzsche, I will defend the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period as morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the early and late writings of Nietzsche, and thus I will disagree with Altman in his playing down the distinctiveness of Nietzsche's Darwinian middle period.

My previous posts on Altman can be found here, here, and here.  My previous posts on Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity" can be found here and here.

The Birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln

It's that time of the year when I traditionally observe the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who were born on February 12, 1809.

As I have indicated in previous years, I see at least six points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.

(1) Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) Both abhorred slavery as immoral. (6) Both were moral realists.

I have elaborated some of these points here and here, which include links to even more posts on the Lincoln-Darwin connection.

Part 7 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

Concluding this series of posts, I draw your attention to what Nietzsche says in Dawn (aph. 26) about the evolved animal origins of prudence:

"Even the sense for truth, which is really the sense for security, man has in common with animals: one does not want to let oneself be deceived, does not want to mislead oneself, one hearkens mistrustfully to the promptings of one's own passions, one constrains oneself and lies in wait for oneself; the animal understands all this just as man does, with it too self-control springs from the sense for what is real (from prudence).  It likewise assesses the effect it produces upon the perceptions of other animals and from this learns to look back upon itself, to take itself 'objectively,' it too has its degree of self-knowledge.  The animal assesses the movements of its friends and foes, it learns their peculiarities by heart, it prepares itself for them."

So the virtue of prudence evolves from the animal "sense for truth," which is actually the "sense for security,"  which is also a "sense for what is real" that supports self-control. 

As shaped by evolutionary history, animals must gather information about themselves and about their physical and social environments, and then they must assess that information as it bears upon their needs, so that they can make practical decisions about what they need to do to survive and reproduce.  The human moral and intellectual virtue of prudence arises from this pragmatic mental capacity for detecting and responding to threats and opportunities in ways that secure one's well-being.

For social animals, this practical intelligence is largely social intelligence, because the most complex intellectual problem for the social animal is assessing the movements and intentions of one's fellow animals as friends or foes.  This can even require "mind-reading"--projecting oneself into the thoughts and feelings of other animals so that one can predict their behavior in alternative scenarios of action in the future.

Some people like Thomas Nagel and Alvin Plantinga see a problem with such an explanation of the human mind as emerging from the evolutionary adaptation of the animal mind.  If the mind has evolved as a purely pragmatic instrument for survival and reproduction, then the mind has been designed for practical success but not for true beliefs, because one can imagine that an animal's practical success might come from erroneous beliefs about the world.  (In fact, doesn't Nietzsche himself speak of the history of human culture as the history of errors?)  If so, then one has no reason to trust the human mind as producing valid knowledge, and thus one has no reason to trust the mind's belief in the theory of evolution.  In this way, Nagel and Plantinga argue, an evolutionary naturalism becomes self-defeating.

The only escape from this, they insist, is either the theistic belief (Plantinga) that the human mind can be trusted because it was created in the image of the Divine Mind, or a Platonic belief (Nagel) that the human mind can be trusted because it fulfils a cosmic end or purpose as guided somehow by a cosmic mind.

Nietzsche in the writings of his middle period rejects both positions as lacking any scientific support, and he defends the evolutionary account of the mind as showing how the human mind could arise from animal minds as fallible and yet reliable.

I agree with Nietzsche about this, for reasons that I have elaborated here, here, here, here, and here.

Part 6 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

Nietzsche's sociobiology of animal morality includes evolutionary accounts of the four cardinal virtues--justice, moderation, courage, and prudence. 

By comparing what he says about these virtues in his middle writings and what he says about them in his later writings, we can see that his turn away from the Darwinian free-spirited science of his middle writings explains why his later writings became so popular with the Nazis, who would have found nothing appealing to them in his middle writings.

I will consider here two of these virtues--justice and moderation.

JUSTICE
Nietzsche claims that justice originates as exchange or barter (HH, 92).   He sees this as the lesson of Thucydides' story of the meeting of the Athenian and Melian envoys:  justice arises among those who are roughly equal in power, so that to avoid mutual injury, the parties negotiate the claims on both sides.  "Each satisfies the other in that each gets what he values more than the other.  Each man gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives in turn that which he wishes.  Thus, justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of approximately equal positions of strength.  For this reason, revenge belongs initially to the realm of justice: it is an exchange.  Likewise gratitude."

Thus, justice is initially "insightful self-preservation," but later this egoistic origin of justice is forgotten, and justice is assumed to be selflessness.

Of course, the disturbing teaching of the Melian dialogue is that where power is not equal, the stronger rules over the weaker.  But Nietzsche points out that when the Melians refused to surrender, the Athenians were forced to fight them in a year-long siege, and thus the Athenian victory was costly.  This shows us how the weaker gain rights against the stronger, Nietzsche observes, because the power of the weaker to inflict some damage on the stronger creates a kind of equalization of powers that can be the basis of rights (HH, 93).  Even slaves can have some rights if the resistance of the slave to the master's exploitation can inflict some damage on the master.  Nietzsche concludes from this that Spinoza was correct in declaring that "each has as much right as he has power" (Theological-Political Treatise, chapter 16).  "The rights of others constitute a concession on the part of our sense of power to the sense of power of those others," and thus changes in power-relationships bring changes in the natural history of rights and duties (D, 112).

This is similar to what I have argued in some previous posts about how might does make right, in the sense that the natural human resistance to oppression forces oppressors to limit their oppression, and thus we derive rights from wrongs, deriving justice from our violent resistance to injustice.  Animals do this in fighting those who would injure them.  Human beings do this, but they can also use their mental powers of reason and language to formulate social rules of right and wrong that express this natural resistance to injury, and the sense that it's to the advantage of all to agree to norms of mutually beneficial exchange.

If neighboring societies fight one another for many years, Nietzsche suggests, and if their power is roughly equal, then neither side gains a decisive victory, and both sides suffer losses.  If it's possible for some third party to mediate their dispute and establish peace between them, then they might become trading-partners, which increases their welfare and prosperity (D, 190).

The cultures of the past, Nietzsche thinks, have been based on violence.  But what we need now is a gradual change of thinking and feeling so that "justice must become greater in everyone, and the violent instinct weaker" (HH, 452).  A big part of this change comes as the "man of convictions" is replaced by the "man of science" (HH, 630).  Conviction is the belief that one possesses absolute truth, and the struggle between conflicting convictions provoked a long history of violence.  This explains, for example, the history of cruelty in persecuting heretics: "what is the burning of one man compared with the eternal pains of Hell for nearly everyone!" (HH, 101).  A growing scientific skepticism about absolute truth weakens such motivation to violent cruelty.

Moreover, much of the unjust cruelty in past cultures came from a failure to feel or understand the suffering of the victims of cruelty.  "That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely" (HH, 101).  Thus, the cultural evolution in understanding and feeling the suffering of others promotes an expansion of sympathy that brings a progressive expansion of justice.

As we have seen, Darwin also saw this expansion of sympathy as crucial for moral progress.  Matt Ridley shows how this works through the expansion of exchange and the division of labor leading eventually to global networks of trade that foster peaceful cooperation.  Steven Pinker shows how this cultural evolution of liberal humanism has brought a remarkable decline of violence both within and between societies.

While this conception of moral progress towards greater justice as manifested in declining violence and increasing cooperation is affirmed by Nietzsche in his middle period, he scorns it in his later writing as the "herd morality of timidity," which is expressed as "Hurt no one; rather, help all as much as you can," or as "We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of" (BGE, 186, 201).  In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche sneers at this.  "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality," which is the morality of the "democratic movement."  He yearns for "higher moralities" than this (BGE, 202).

The Nietzsche of the later writings is nauseated by "this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims," and he looks to the new philosophers of the future acting as "leaders" (Fuhrer) to do a revaluation of values that will create a new aristocratic morality for higher men (BGE, 203).

MODERATION
Similarly, Nietzsche affirms the virtue of moderation in his middle writings, but then he rejects it in his later writings as a disgusting virtue of herd morality.

In his middle period, Nietzsche sees free-spirited thinking as promoting moderation--particularly, in the cautious restraint in one's practical and intellectual life that avoids the religious inclination to intoxication or frenzy (Rausch) (HH, 114, 139, 149, 464, 631; WS, 212).  The moderation of the free-spirit should not be confused with mediocrity or boredom, because this virtue actually belongs to a cheerful disposition of those who are cautiously self-controlled because they don't want an overheated enthusiasm to cloud their clear view of the world as it truly is (HH, 34; AOM, 230, 326).  Modern evolutionary science helps us to know ourselves as we truly are by teaching us that since we have evolved as mortal animals on earth, we cannot pass over into a higher order beyond the transitoriness of human life on earth.  Understanding and accepting our evolutionary transience as animals evolved from apes can protect us from that "faith in intoxication"--in the ecstatic feeling of exaltation--that has ruined the religious and artistic cultures of the past with delusional fantasies (D, 48-50).

Nietzsche explains that we need moderation as a moral and intellectual virtue to avoid the delusion that there are religious, artistic, or political geniuses who are "superhuman" (ubermenschliches) (HH, 143, 164, 441, 461; D, 548-49).  Napoleon, for example, was eventually ruined by his delusions of superhuman grandeur.  Evolutionary science refutes any belief that human beings as evolved animals can become superhuman (D, 49).  Rather, they are human, all too human.

But in both his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche rejects moderation and yearns for Dionysian frenzy and intoxication (Rausch) (BT, 1; TI.ix, 8-10).  This immoderate frenzy finally expresses itself in Nietzsche's ecstatic proclamation of the Superman, the Ubermensch, as a revelation that will redeem humanity and give eternal meaning to life: "I teach you the Superman.  Man is something that shall be overcome" (Z, prologue, 3).

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is nauseated by the fact that "small people need small virtues" like the mediocrity of moderation.  "At bottom, these simpletons want a single thing most of all: that nobody should hurt them."  Their virtues have clever fingers.  "But they lack fists, their fingers do not know how to hide behind fists.  Virtue to them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal" (Z, 3:5.2).

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche scorns moderation as a virtue of "the herd man in Europe."  Such virtues of the herd cannot satisfy the human need for leadership--for a Fuhrer like Napoleon, who had a superhuman genius for commanding.  Parliamentary constitutions fail because of the futility of attempting "to add together clever herd men by way of replacing commanders" (BGE, 199; TI, ix, 37-44).

Later, Carl Schmitt was to elaborate this Nietzschean Fuhrer principle in denouncing the Weimar republic for its parliamentary weakness, and the decadence of its "last man" culture, and then in promoting the heroic leadership of the Nazis, moved by ideological frenzy free from any restraining moderation.

Of course, Nietzsche's defenders will say that the Nazis were guilty of a vulgar distortion of Nietzsche's teachings.  But that only confirms a warning from Nietzsche in his middle period:

"For the despisers of 'herd humanity'.--He who regards men as a herd and flees from them as fast as he can will certainly be overtaken by them and gored by their horns." (AOM, 233)

Part 5 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

In explaining the past cultural evolution of morality as based on religious, metaphysical, and artistic errors, it might seem that Nietzsche wants to reject morality and become an immoralist.  But in the writings of his middle period, it is clear that he affirms the importance of morality, and that he is looking to see how we might free ourselves from morality as an unconscious inheritance based on errors, so that we might then consciously adopt the moral virtues as based on scientific truth and individual deliberate judgment about how those virtues promote our individual and social goods.

Consider the following passages:

"Concept of morality of custom.  . . . Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of the useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that the hegemony of custom, tradition, shall be made evident despite the private desires and advantages of the individual: the individual is to sacrifice himself--that is the commandment of morality of custom.--Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions--and if it seems otherwise to us that is because we have been brought up in their after-effect: they all take a new path under the highest disapprobation of all advocates of the morality of custom--they cut themselves off from the community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil." (Dawn, 9)

". . . It goes without saying that I do not deny--unless I am a fool--that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged--but I think that one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.   We have to learn to think differently--in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently." (Dawn, 103)

"Immoralists.--Because they dissect morality, moralists must be content to be upbraided as immoralists.  But he who wants to dissect has to kill; yet only for the sake of better knowledge, better judgement, better living; not so that all the world shall start dissecting.  Unhappily, however, people still believe that every moralist has to be a model and ideal in all he  does and that others are supposed to imitate him: they confuse him with the preacher of morals.  The older moralists dissected too little and preached too much: which is why the moralists of today experience this confusion and its unpleasant consequences." (The Wanderer and His Shadow, 19)

"Stages of morality.--Morality is first of all a means of preserving the community and warding off its destruction; then it is a means of preserving the community at a certain height and in a certain quality of existence.  Its motive forces are fear and hope . . . Further stages of morality, and thus of means of attaining the objectives described, are the commands of a god (such as the Mosaic law); further and higher still the commands of the concept of unconditional duty with its 'thou shalt'--all still somewhat coarsely hewn but broad stages and steps, because men do not yet know how to place their feet on narrower, more delicate steps.  Then comes a morality of inclination, of taste, finally that of insight--which is above and beyond all illusionary motive forces of morality but has a clear realization of why for long ages mankind could possess no other." (WS, 44)

"Content of the conscience.--The content of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhood regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honored or feared.  It is thus the conscience that excites that feeling of compulsion ('I must do this, not do that') which does not ask: why must I?--In every case in which a thing is done with 'because' and 'why' man acts without conscience; but not yet for that reason against it. -- The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man." (WS, 52)

"Socrates.--If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason, and when Montaigne and Horace will be employed as forerunners and signposts to an understanding of this simplest and most imperishable of intercessors." (WS, 86) 

"Free of morality. Now that minds are becoming freer and less narrow, it is certain that morality (inherited, handed down, instinctual acting in accordance with moral feelings) is on the decline: but the individual virtues, moderation, justice, repose of soul, are not--for when the conscious mind has attained its highest degree of freedom, it is involuntarily led to them and comes to recognize how useful they are." (WS, 212)

As indicated in this these passages and in aphorism 26 of Dawn,  Nietzsche thinks that a free, conscious mind can see the need for the "Socratic virtues"--the four cardinal virtues--justice, moderation, courage, and prudence.  Even when a free spirit frees himself from the errors that sustained traditional morality in the past, he can see the good reasons for these virtues.

Nietzsche distinguishes four phases in the evolutionary history of morality--the "three phases of morality until now" and the fourth phase that is only now coming into view that he calls "morality of the mature individual" (HH, 94-95).

In the first phase, an animal becomes human when he uses his reason to direct his behavior to his enduring comfort rather than just his momentary comfort, and thus he acts for the sake of what he sees as personally expedient or useful for him.

A higher phase is reached when he acts according to the principle of honor, by which he shows himself to be a social animal, who wants to be respected by others, who is thus dependent on the opinions and feelings of others.

The third phase is the highest stage of morality until now--the preference for general usefulness over personal usefulness, a preference for what has enduring value over momentary value, becomes his standard that he legislates for himself and others.  He then lives and acts as a "collective-individual."  This seems to correspond to the Kantian morality of autonomy in legislating the categorical imperative as the moral ought.

Until now, morality as been interpreted as impersonal, as a sacrifice of one's personal interests to the common good, a sacrifice of one's personal needs "to the state, to science, to the needy."  But now, Nietzsche suggests, we might enter the highest phase of morality--"the morality of the mature individual"--when the mature individual can recognize his personal interest in the common good.  "Now too we wish to work for our fellow men, but only insofar as we find our own highest advantage in this work; no more, no less.  It depends only on what one understands by his advantage.  The immature, undeveloped, crude individual will also understand it most crudely" (HH, 95).

One sees here, I think, the liberal individualism of Nietzsche's middle period.  It's a moral individualism of the mature individual, who understands that caring for others serves his own personal advantage, and thus that there is no self-sacrifice in serving the common good.  But this also recognizes that many if not most individuals will be crude in their understanding of their personal advantage.

Nietzsche's evolutionary account of morality corresponds roughly to Darwin's.  Like Nietzsche, Darwin sees animal morality as originating in the mental capacity to compare one's momentary passions and one's enduring instincts, and then to feel regret when one yields to a momentary passion that conflicts with some enduring instinct.  For example, if a swallow had enough mental capacity, she might regret that she had yielded to her migratory impulse and abandoned her young to die in their nest without her brooding them (Charles Darwin's Notebooks,  619-29; Descent, 120-22, 131, 133-38, 680-81).  This experience of regret could generate feelings of remorse, repentence, and shame that would constitute conscience.

The social instincts leading an animal to take pleasure in the society of others and to feel sympathy for them could then be extended through reason, language, and habit into a general concern for social approbation and disapprobation and a sense of honor.  We want to be praised by others, and we fear being blamed.  Human language allows public opinion to be formulated as standards for how one ought to act for the public good (Descent, 120-22).

Darwin infers that this could give rise to a moral sense or conscience that could be expressed as a moral ought.  This deep feeling of right or duty could then be manifested in Kant's affirmation of moral law: "Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; whence thy original?" (Critique of Practical Reason, AA, p. 86; quoted at Descent, 120).

Finally, Darwin suggests, progress in reasoning and experience lead modern societies to see the goodness of the self-regarding virtues of the individual (Descent, 143, 147, 681-82).

Part 4 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

"THE BEGINNINGS OF . . . THE SOCRATIC VIRTUES, ARE ANIMAL."

Nietzsche identifies only the "beginnings" of the virtues as animal, In the writings of his middle period, he makes it clear that while the evolutionary precursors of human morality can be found in nonhuman animals, the full development of morality requires the evolution of culture and reason in ways that are uniquely human.

In Human, All Too Human (40), he writes:

"The super-animal [Das Uber-Thier].  The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is a white lie, to keep it from tearing us apart.  Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal.  But as it is, he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself.  He therefore has a hatred of those stages of man that remain closer to the animal state, which explains why the slave used to be disdained as a nonhuman, a thing."

The evolutionary history of morality has been a cultural evolution driven by the errors of religion, art, and metaphysics.  The cultural epochs are "systems of thought and feeling" that constitute a distinctive ordering of the good.  So, for example, "if someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral by the standard of an earlier culture, yet by the standard of the present culture, he is immoral" (HH, 42, 274).  These errors were chains that human beings put upon themselves so that they would no longer behave like animals.  This great goal has been achieved, because now man "has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal" (WS, 350). 

This history of cultural evolution has shaped the anatomy of the brain--the oldest parts of the brain manifesting the oldest epochs of human evolution and the latest parts manifesting the latest epochs.  Unusually cruel people might be people who have by accidents of heredity brains structured like those of our prehistoric ancestors (HH, 43).

But now that this cultural history of errors has succeeded in separating human beings from the animals, the next great goal is to throw off these errors as scientific knowledge and the pursuit of truth grow.  Yet this must be done cautiously, because only a few human beings are capable of becoming free spirits embracing scientific philosophy.  The time has not yet come for all human beings to become free-spirited lovers of truth.  Such a life--in which the love of scientific inquiry is the highest pleasure--must be a life for only a few individuals who can live for the sake of Socratic science (WS, 350).

Previously, Nietzsche observes, culture developed unconsciously, but increasingly it becomes possible for culture to develop consciously through a scientific understanding of cultural history.  "The new, conscious culture kills the old culture, which, seen as a whole, led an unconscious animal-and-vegetable life; it also kills the distrust of progress: progress is possible" (HH, 24). 

And yet, progress is not necessary.  Each epoch of cultural progress brings some loss, and it's possible that scientific culture could be completely lost in a reversion to barbarism (HH, 24, 239, 251, 262; WS, 183, 222).  After all, some cultural epochs have shown regression, as when the scientific culture of the Renaissance was later reversed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which retarded the growth of science until it's revival in the 18th century (HH, 237).  Even earlier in ancient Greece, when Socrates turned away from the natural philosophy of the pre-Socratic philosophers, he thus slowed the development of natural science, which was later revived by the Epicureans, and then much later renewed by modern scientists in the Epicurean tradition (HH, 68, 102, 261, 275; WS, 192, 227). To assume that cultural evolution is always and necessarily progressive would be an illusory "deification of evolution," as if evolution were guided by some divine mind (HH, 238).

Now it is possible for a scientific free spirit to repeat in his individual life all the cultural phases of previous human history.  He can move from religion to metaphysical philosophy, to art, and finally to science.  He can thus recapitulate in the first thirty years of his life perhaps thirty thousand years of human cultural history.  He can climb a cultural ladder of a hundred rungs, understanding each cultural epoch through his own life experience, and yet rising above each as he recognizes the impure thinking at its foundation.  He thus becomes "an inevitable chain of culture rings," deducing the course of cultural history in general, and trying to project the future culture.  He does all of this purely for the sake of knowledge as the sweetest pleasure (HH, 272, 276, 278, 292).

If one were such a man, Nietzsche explains:

"one would live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproaches, overzealousness, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly had only to fear.  One would be free of emphasis and would no longer feel the goading thought that one was not simply nature, or that one was more than nature.  Of course, as I said, a good temperament would be necessary--a secure, mild, and basically cheerful soul. . . . a man from whom the ordinary chains of life have fallen in such measure that he continues to live on only to better his knowledge must be able to renounce without envy and chagrin much, indeed almost everything, that other men value.  He must be content with that free, fearless hovering over men, customs, laws and the traditional evaluations of things, which is for him the most desirable of states." (HH, 34)
 

Such a man faces the end of his life without fear.  Nietzsche observes:

"Only when you are older will you perceive properly how you listened to the voice of nature, that nature which rules the world through pleasure.  The same life that comes to a peak in old age also comes to a peak in wisdom, in that gentle sunshine of continual spiritual joyfulness; you encounter both old age and wisdom on one ridge of life--that is how nature wanted it.  Then it is time, and no cause for anger that the fog of death is approaching.  Towards the light--your last movement; a joyful shout of knowledge--your last sound." (HH, 292)  

This could be a description of Charles Darwin.  Before his thirtieth birthday, he had sailed around the world on the Beagle, using scientific observation and inference to study every stage of human cultural evolution--from the primitive foragers of Tierra del Fuego to the global civilization of the British Empire--while beginning to explain how this human history could be understood as part of the entire evolutionary history of life on earth.  At the end of his life, he wrote his Autobiography, which included the history of his moral and religious beliefs--from theistic religion to agnosticism to sceptical rationalism--and concluding that without any belief in a future existence with rewards and punishments: "I believe I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science" (Autobiography, Barlow ed., 95).

Nietzsche believed that modern science had to reverse Socrates' turn away from natural philosophy to moral and political philosophy (described in Plato's Phaedo), because modern science needed to explain how human life could be understood as part of the natural history of the universe, and thus fulfil the dream of the pre-Socratic philosophers of the unification of all knowledge (HH, 261).  (In Consilience, E. O. Wilson presents his own program for the unity of knowledge as a fulfillment of what the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers had sought.)

Similarly, when Darwin died in 1882, Thomas Henry Huxley's obituary in Nature compared him with Socrates:

"One could not converse with Darwin without being reminded of Socrates.  There was the same desire to find some one wiser than himself; the same belief in the sovereignty of reason; the same ready humour; the same sympathetic interest in all the ways and works of men.  But instead of turning away from the problems of nature as hopelessly insoluble, our modern philosopher devoted his whole life to attacking them in the spirit of Heraclitus and of Democritus, with results which are as the substance of which their speculations were anticipatory shadows.
 

Like Nietzsche, Darwin thought that while morality could be explained as having evolutionary roots in the animal world, morality in the strict sense was uniquely human in combining social instincts, habituation, language, and reason.  Morality required innate emotional and intellectual capacities that had been shaped by natural selection.  But the full development of those capacities into morality required cultural evolution.

Also like Nietzsche, Darwin believed that this cultural evolution of morality could be seen as progressive, from the lower morality of savage societies to the higher morality of civilized societies.  The morality of savages is erroneous because they fail to see the bearing of the self-regarding virtues on the welfare of the tribe, because they lack self-control, because their sympathy does not extend beyond the tribe, because they enforce the good of the community in ways that ignore the welfare of individuals, and because human reasoning has not developed sufficiently to allow thoughtful individuals to become the judge of their own conduct.  On all of these points, modern moral culture is superior (Descent, 120-122, 129-37, 141-51, 157-59, 163, 169, 171-72, 679-82, 688-89).  Eventually, the growth in sympathy, self-command, and reasoning could produce a universal morality.

"As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.  If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures.  Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.  It is apparently unfelt by savages, except toward their pets.  How little the old Romans knew of its is shown by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions.  The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas.  This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.  As soon as this virtue is honored and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion." (Descent, 147)
 

Of course, it would be a utopian delusion to expect that we are evolving into a world of perpetual peace and love without any conflicts,  because even if we extend our moral sympathy to all human beings and perhaps even to all sentient beings, that sympathy will always be stronger for those beings closer to us than for those far away, and that love of one's own will always produce tragic conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, as I have indicated in some previous posts, books like Robert Wright's Nonzero, Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, and Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist provide evidence and arguments for the kind of cultural moral progress foreseen by Nietzsche and Darwin.  Indeed, the preceding passage from Darwin's Descent is quoted in all three of those books as a statement of what those authors see as the fundamental pattern of human evolution. 

Can Darwinian Conservatism Support a Pro-Marriage Coalition with Gays and Lesbians?

As indicated by his book The Future of Marriage (2009), David Blankenhorn and I are in fundamental agreement about the Darwinian evolutionary roots of marriage as explained by Edward Westermarck.  For that reason, I have been fascinated by the development of his thinking about gay marriage.

Although Blankenhorn has been one of the leading opponents of gay marriage, he has now changed his mind, and his new view is similar to what I have suggested-- that the evolutionary nature of marriage as based on spousal bonding and parental care can support gay marriage.

As the head of the Institute of American Values, and as a marriage advocate testifying in the 2010 California court case on Proposition 8, Blankenhorn has argued that only heterosexual marriage can combine the biological, social, and legal aspects of parenthood into one bond in a way that secures social order by producing and caring for children.  But now he thinks that the opposition to gay marriage is a mistake, because it distracts attention from the real problem that we face today, which is the decline in marriage, particularly for those in the middle class.  Consequently, he has proposed a new pro-marriage coalition that would combine all of those people who want to strengthen marriage--including gays as well as straight people.

Blankenhorn first announced his change of position in an article published last summer in the New York Times.  As recently reported in the Times, Robert George and other vehement opponents of gay marriage have resigned from the board of Blankenhorn's organization, and they have taken their funding with them.  In the meantime, Blankenhorn has formed a new board that includes some advocates of gay marriage under the directorship of Bill Galston (known to some of us as the Straussian liberal who was an adviser to President Clinton, and now with the Brookings Institution).  This group has just issued a statement in support of their new coalition.  The current debate is over the question, Should gays marry?  They argue that that debate has been fruitless.  A better debate would be over the question, Who among us, gay or straight, wants to strengthen marriage? 

The signers of this statement include liberals as well as conservatives, and including Jonathan Haidt, the proponent of Darwinian moral psychology who has been the subject of some of my posts.

The statement from the Institute for American Values declares:

"Why marriage?"

"Because families are the seedbeds of civil society, and marriage is the basis of the family.  Marriage creates kin.  Marriage is a wealth-producing institution.  And because marriage is the main institution governing the link between spousal association and the parent-child association, marriage is society's most pro-child institution."

"Marriage is fracturing in America.  While the nation's attention is riveted by a debate about whether a small proportion of our fellow citizens (gays and lesbians) should be allowed to marry, marriage is rapidly dividing along class lines, splitting the country that it used to unite.  While marriage is stable or strengthening among our college-educated elites, much larger numbers of Americans, particularly in middle and working-class America, are abandoning the institution entirely, with harmful social and personal consequences."
 

They are referring here to a new pattern in the decline of marriage that has been well surveyed by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead.  Beginning in the 1960s, declining marriage seemed to be a serious social problem in the United States mostly for poor and uneducated people in the inner cities.  But in recent decades, it has become a problem for those in the middle class who are better educated, and this decline in marriage is pushing people out of the middle class into precarious social and economic conditions where children are less likely to be nurtured in ways that will make them successful as adults.  Increasingly, the children of moderately educated mothers--high school graduates who might have some post-secondary training but no four-year college degree--have been born outside of marriage.  Many of these children will fall out of the middle class because of the consequences that flow from the mistake of their mothers in having children without first getting married.  By contrast, those mothers who finished their four-year college degrees and who married before having children are more likely to provide a secure base for the success of their children as nurtured by two parents.

I agree with Blankenhorn and his associates that this decline in marriage has little to do with same-sex couples or the move towards legalizing gay marriage.  Marriage will endure for as long as human beings have natural desires for spousal bonding and parental care that are most fully satisfied in monogamous marriages.  But the problem for us is how to best support those social practices that encourage people to see their need for monogamous marriages to satisfy their desires and to see how mistaken it is to produce children outside of marriage.  More precisely, the problem is how to use marriage to secure the attachment of men to the children they produce.

Although it is not stated as clearly as it should be, the implied assumption of this new pro-marriage coalition formed around Blankenhorn is that gay marriage could secure the two natural ends of marriage--spousal bonding and parental care.  As I have suggested in some of my posts in response to Robert George's arguments, evolved human biology supports heterosexual monogamy as the natural norm for satisfying our natural desires for spousal bonding and parental care; but still, gay men and lesbians might well approximate that norm through homosexual monogamy and same-sex adoptive parenting.

Robert George would say, yes, the decline in marriage is the root problem.  But gay marriage is part of that problem, because gay marriage is not real marriage, and for that reason, legalizing gay marriage adds to the decline in real marriage.  His claim is that it's biologically impossible for gay couples to have a real marriage, because the biological nature of real marriage is necessarily heterosexual.  While heterosexual marriage is naturally oriented to producing and caring for children, gay marriage is not.

The key point in George's argument has been stated by Sean Fieler in explaining why he withdrew his support from Blankenhorn's organization.  "The problem with gay marriage and the position David has taken is it promotes a very harmful myth about the gay lifestyle.  It suggests that gay relationships lend themselves to monogamy, stability, health, and parenting in the same way heterosexual relationships do.  That's not true." 

My response is that while this might be true of many gays, it is not true of all, particularly of those who seek a monogamous marriage with children as the fulfillment of their deepest desires.

My claim--and the implied claim of the Blankenhorn coalition--is that gay marriages with adopted children could approximate heterosexual marriages in serving the two natural functions of marriage--conjugal bonding and parental care of children.

It is significant that one of the people joining Blankenhorn's coalition is Jonathan Rauch, a gay man who wrote Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (2004).  Rauch argues that gay marriage would be good because it would strengthen marriage, and thus it should be supported by social conservatives.  Remarkably, he admits: "If I could have designed myself in the womb, I would have chosen to be heterosexual."

In a recent post, I have commented on Robert George's book What Is Marriage?  This post includes links to my other posts on this debate.

Part 3 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

THE "SOCIAL MORALITY" OF "POLITE SOCIETY"
"The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one's virtues as well as of one's strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank--all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world--and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one's pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one's prey. . . . Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept 'man' or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place: and all the subtle ways we have of appearing fortunate, grateful, powerful, enamoured have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world" (Dawn, 26).

Here Nietzsche describes an animal capacity for social attunement--for that subtle social dance in which animals respond appropriately to others based on their awareness of the intentions, expectations, and feelings of others.  This is the precondition for all animal morality, because it makes it possible for social animals to create and enforce those social norms of acceptable behavior that constitute a moral code. 

Elsewhere, Nietzsche calls this capacity "sympathy" (Mitempfindung) (D, 142).  This is the capacity to simulate in ourselves what others are feeling, which includes imitating the bodily movements of the other person--"imitating with our own body the expression of his eyes, his voice, his walk, his bearing (or even their reflection in word, picture, music)."  This evolved capacity for fellow-feeling allows us to imagine not only the pains of others but also their joys (AOM, 62).

Thus, the individual comes to know himself by seeing himself reflected in the minds of others.  "What one knows of oneself.  As soon as one animal sees another, it measures itself against it in its mind, and men in barbarous ages did likewise.  From this it follows that every man comes to know himself almost solely in regard to his powers of defence and attack" (D, 212).

Through "sympathy, the feeling of being alike or equal," animals evolve social instincts, so that they feel pleasure in being with others, as is shown in animals playing with one another, and particularly mothers playing with their young (HH, 98).  In primeval human beings, animal sympathy and the social instincts allowed them to enter the "oldest covenant" by which individuals formed a community for the protection of all from threats.

Thus, originally, all morality was the social "morality of custom" (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) (HH, 96-97; D, 9).  Originally, "everything was custom" or tradition. Morality was obedience to the traditional way of behaving and evaluation.  And the individual was sacrificed to the community.  Only much later, in the evolutionary history of culture, with the evolution of knowledge and reasoning in a few human beings like Socrates, was it possible for some individuals to exercise individual judgment in the practice of virtues that they judged to be good for them as individuals and as social animals (D, 9; WS, 44, 86, 212).

Obedience to the morality of custom seems to be selfless.  And, indeed, Paul Ree identified morality as selflessness.  But Nietzsche disagreed, because he argued that what looks like selflessness is disguised self-love.  As a product of animal evolution, morality is rooted in the natural inclination to care for oneself--for one's body and mind--but as social mammals, this care for oneself is extended into caring for others to which one is attached--one's sexual mates, one's children, one's tribal group, and perhaps farther out through the extension of sympathy (HH, 57, 98, 102, 104).

The general conclusion from this is that morality is not the fulfilment of a cosmic or divine purpose, because the purpose of morality is a purely human purpose--to secure the conditions for our momentary existence on earth as the kind of animals we are.  "Because good and evil are measured according to our reactions, we ourselves must constitute the principle of the good" (D, 102).

This is why the evolutionary science of animal morality is so disturbing to most human beings, because it denies that human purposefulness fulfils the purpose of the whole universe.  The evolutionary universe has no purpose. And this universe does not care about or for human beings.  But human beings have evolved to care for themselves (WS, 14; D, 26, 49, 100, 122).  When the human species goes extinct, as it must sometime in the future, there will no longer be any human care and thus no human morality.

On all of these points, Nietzsche's science of morality corresponds with Darwin's science.  In The Descent of Man, Darwin follows Hume and Smith in rooting morality in sympathy, while explaining how this capacity for sympathy could have evolved among social mammals with social instincts.  The parental and filial affections that bound people into families could be extended to tribal communities.  Originally, this was a morality of custom directed to the good of the community rather than the good of the species or of the individual.  But with the cultural evolution of civilized societies--including advances in reasoning and knowledge--there has been more opportunity for individuals to recognize the self-regarding virtues that were ignored in savage societies.  There has also been moral progress in extending sympathy beyond the boundaries of tribal life to embrace all of humanity, and even nonhuman animals.

Immediately after the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  Like Nietzsche, Darwin saw the bodily expression of the emotions as showing the continuity between human beings and nonhuman animals in their moral psychology.  He studied emotions such as surprise, sadness, anger, enjoyment, contempt, disgust, shame, and fear.  He was motivated by two  fundamental concerns.  First, he wanted to refute Sir Charles Bell's claim that human emotional expressions showed the work of divine special creation in endowing human beings with special facial muscles for the expression of moral emotions.  Darwin wanted to show the continuity of humans and other animals in their emotional expressions that would be consistent with gradual evolution.  Second, he wanted to refute the claim that the human races were actually separate species by showing a universality of human emotional expression as an innate evolutionary adaptation uniting the races as belonging to one species.  This would also suggest the possibility of extending sympathy and moral concern to the whole human species.  This research has been extended and deepened in interesting ways by people like Paul Ekman.  (Ekman's work was the inspiration for the television show "Lie to Me.")

Nietzsche's science of animal morality is also confirmed by recent research.  Much of the research in the moral psychology and neuroscience of sympathy (or empathy) shows the evolutionary and neural bases for that capacity for fellow-feeling that Nietzsche identifies as the ground for moral experience.  Previously, I have written some posts on this.

Similarly, the research on the social neuroscience of mammalian biology confirms Nietzsche's evolutionary account of human morality as the extension of self-care to care for others.  I have also written some posts on this.

The ethological research on animal behavior--as surveyed by people like Frans de Waal and Marc Bekoff--also confirms Nietzsche's observations about how the evolutionary roots of human morality might be found in animal societies that create and enforce rules of good conduct.  For example, Bekoff has studied how play among canids (wolves, coyotes, and dogs) is governed by social rules.  Animals assume a crouching position to signal "I want to play with you."  This means that they will imitating the behavioral patterns of hunting, mating, and fighting, but in a playful way: so, for instance, they might bite, but the bite must not be too hard.  Those who violate these rules will be punished by being ostracized from playing and perhaps even excluded from the group.  Individuals excluded from the pack who then must live a solitary life are less likely to survive and reproduce.  Bekoff sees this as an example of an animal moral code, and it looks a lot like what Nietzsche means by animal morality.

Moreover, one can also see that much of the reasoning today about the "social brain" hypothesis--that the human brain has evolved primarily for navigating the complex world of social life--was anticipated by Nietzsche.  I have also written some posts on this.

To be continued  .  .  .

Part 2 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"

I will organize my commentary around words selected from the passage I have quoted--section 26 of Nietzsche's Dawn.

"ANIMALS AND MORALITY"
In explaining human morality through the prehistoric evolution of animal morality, Nietzsche was following the lead of his good friend Paul Rée.  Like Nietzsche, Rée had once been shaped by the metaphysical idealism of Kant and Schopenhauer, but then he rejected this and adopted the evolutionary naturalism of Darwin and Lamarck.  In the Introduction to his book The Origin of the Moral Sentiments (1877), Rée rejected Kant's claim that moral consciousness manifests "a revelation from the transcendent world" or the voice of God.  He observed:

"Admittedly, before the theory of evolution appeared, many of these phenomena could not be explained by immanent causes, and a transcendent explanation is certainly far more satisfying than--none at all.  Yet today, since Lamarck and Darwin have written, moral phenomena can be traced back to natural causes just as much as physical phenomena: moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than physical man."

"This natural explanation rests essentially on the following proposition: The higher animals have developed by natural selection from lower ones, for instance, human beings from the apes."

Like Rée, Nietzsche saw that evolutionary science dictated a move from "metaphysical philosophy" to "historical philosophy" or "scientific philosophy" (HH, 1).  The fundamental proposition for this new evolutionary philosophy would be that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved," and therefore the human species is not eternal, because nothing is eternal (HH, 2).  Nietzsche embraced Rée's principle, while adding the word "metaphysical"--"Moral man stands no nearer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than does physical man" (HH, 37).  He commented:

"Perhaps at some point in the future this principle, grown hard and sharp by the hammerblow of historical knowledge, can serve as the axe laid to the root of men's 'metaphysical need' (whether more as a blessing than as a curse for the general welfare, who can say?).  In any event, it is a tenet with the most weighty consequences, fruitful and frightful at the same time, and seeing into the world with that double vision which all great insights have."
 

Nietzsche conceded that one cannot refute the absolute possibility of a metaphysical or transcendent world beyond the natural world of our ordinary human experience.  But one can show that the belief in this transcendent world has been based on emotional errors and self-deception rather than scientific proof (HH, 9).  But notice Nietzsche's hesitancy about totally rejecting the "metaphysical need" of human beings--he is not sure whether a world without transcendent longings would be a blessing or a curse, because this seems both "fruitful and frightful at the same time."

At some points, Nietzsche speaks of the religious or metaphysical need for redemption as an "acquired need" produced in the Middle Ages that might be eliminated in the scientific civilization of the future (HH, 27, 111, 141, 222, 234, 476).  But at other points, he suggests that such transcendent longings cannot be completely extinguished, and that the culture of the future might require a "double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience."  He explains: "In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator.  Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented" (HH, 251).

Indeed, Nietzsche himself could not give up the transcendent longings of his early life, which reemerged in his later writings, where he used his teachings about will to power, eternal return, and redemption of life through the Ubermensch to give eternal meaning to the world.  He promoted a new religion of Dionysian frenzy.  And while in his middle period he had denied the eternality of the human species,  he later affirmed "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (BGE, 230).  Lou Salomé saw this as a reassertion of Nietzsche's deep religious longings that he had suppressed during his middle period when he embraced natural science.

One can see a similar struggle in the minds of some of those influenced by Leo Strauss and Leon Kass, who fear that affirming evolutionary science and denying the eternity of species will lead to nihilism.  It should be noted that there is no evidence that they actually believe the eternity of species to be true, but rather they believe that the illusion of eternity is needed to hide the "deadly truth" of evolution.  Significantly, these people largely ignore Nietzsche's middle writings and concentrate on the late writings.

But while the later Nietzsche turned away from a Darwinian science of morality, Darwin himself had initiated a tradition of evolutionary ethics that continues today.  Darwin in The Descent of Man had referred to the passages in Kant's writing where Kant affirmed that human beings live in "two worlds," and that the human experience of the moral ought manifests a transcendent world of pure practical reason.  By contrast, Darwin set out to explain the purely natural history of morality as rooted in animal evolution, which is what Nietzsche had done in his middle period.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Westermarck elaborated and deepened this evolutionary account of morality as rooted in moral emotions or sentiments that arose from the evolution of animals.  Westermarck showed how this Darwinian science of morality build upon the tradition of Scottish moral philosophy--particularly, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Edward Wilson's sociobiology revives this Darwinian empiricist tradition of ethics as contrasted with the transcendentalist tradition of Kant and others (mostly clearly stated in Chapter 11 of Wilson's Consilience). 

But like Nietzsche, Wilson was a religious believer in his youth, and he admits that he has never shaken off the emotional power of the religious longing for redemption.  He wonders whether a purely scientific account of morality as evolved from animals can satisfy this religious yearning for eternal meaning.  In Sociobiology, he writes: "The enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies.  Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said,  than be void of purpose" (561).  (Here Wilson is quoting from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, 3rd essay, secs. 1 & 28.)

In On Human Nature, Wilson concludes that if "the mind will always create morality, religion, and mythology and empower them with emotional force," then scientific materialism will not succeed unless it harnesses this "mythopoeic drive" to the "evolutionary epic" as "the best myth we will ever have" (200-201).  He suggests that the mental processes of religious belief are so deeply rooted by evolution in human nature that they cannot be eliminated, and so they should be seen as "a source of energies that can be shifted in new directions when scientific materialism itself is accepted as the more powerful mythology" (206-207).  "Scientific materialism," he insists, "is the only mythology that can manufacture great goals from the sustained pursuit of pure knowledge."

But isn't this blending of science and mythology incoherent?  A more reasonable response to the problem here is suggested by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human.  The scientific "free spirits" who pursue pure knowledge will always be a small group of people, because we can expect that most human beings will not be inclined to such a life of free-spirited science and philosophy.  But in a liberal democracy with freedom of thought and speech, the "free spirits" can live their lives in peace, while most human beings are free to live the lives of practical people, where religious belief has become a private concern of individuals, families, and social groups, but without any coercive enforcement by the state of any established religion.  In contrast to Nietzsche's later writings, these "free spirits" of the middle writings do not need or wish to rule over their culture--and thus they are not tempted to tyranny--although they might expect to have some indirect influence on their culture through their freedom to speak and write.  Isn't this the kind of influence that people like Wilson can have in a liberal society?

There is more to come in future posts.

Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality

In 1975, Edward O. Wilson declared on the first page of Sociobiology that it was time to take ethics away from the philosophers and turn it over to the biologists.  He explained that "sociobiology" as the scientific study of the biological bases of all social behavior would have to include the evolutionary explanation of morality.  Later, in 1998, Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge renewed his argument for an empirical science of ethics based in evolutionary biology as an alternative to the transcendentalist view of ethics as belonging to a metaphysical (or "noumenal") world of normative imperatives beyond the natural world of animal life.

Wilson's argument for a Darwinian science of morality has provoked intense criticisms not only from many moral philosophers but also from many scientists.  Philosophers like Thomas Nagel have rejected Wilson's proposal as a reductive materialism that fails to recognize ethics as a purely theoretical subject of moral logic that belongs to a transcendent world of normative imperatives, which are beyond the biological world of animal life.  Even the evolutionary psychologists, who agree with Wilson in pursuing a Darwinian science of human nature, have often scorned his argument for an evolutionary ethics.  In 1996, when Wilson addressed the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and explained his biological view of ethics, many of the members of HBES protested vehemently that he was committing the "naturalistic fallacy" by failing to see the radical separation between the empirical world of facts and the normative world of values.

More recently, however, over the past decade, a growing number of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers have worked to develop a Darwinian moral psychology that looks a lot like what Wilson had originally proposed.  This research is new in so far as it draws from new knowledge in evolutionary biology, ethology, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience.  But the fundamental ideas for such an evolutionary moral psychology were first stated by Charles Darwin in 1871 in his Descent of Man.  And one of the first people to develop these ideas in the late 1870s was Friedrich Nietzsche.

In contrast to the writings of his early and late periods, the writings of Nietzsche's middle period--Human, All Too Human (1878), Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1879), The Wanderer and His Shadow (1879), and Dawn (1881)--are devoted to the natural sciences, and especially evolutionary science.  In this middle period, he rejects the mythopoetic metaphysics of Dionysian frenzy manifested in his early and late writings as illusory fantasy refuted by empirical evolutionary science.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, I regard the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period as morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the mythic metaphysics of his early and late writings.  This science is morally superior because it promotes a sober morality of moderation that restrains tendencies to intoxicated extremism.  This science is politically superior because it promotes a prudent respect for liberal democracy that restrains tendencies to tyrannical power-seeing.  And this science is intellectually superior because it can be grounded in empirical evidence and methodical reasoning rather than the delusions of enthusiastic fantasizing.  In contrast to the Darwinian science of the middle period, the distinctive teachings of the late Nietzsche--the will to power, eternal return, and the Ubermensch--are morally corrupting, politically dangerous, and intellectually confused.

The Darwinian moral psychology of Nietzsche's middle period anticipates Wilson's sociobiology of animal morality.  One way to see this is to look carefully at section 26 of Nietzsche's Dawn in the context of his other writing during this period.  So I will begin by quoting that entire section, and then I will organize my comments around some of the language he uses in this section.

Here's the passage (as translated by R. J. Hollingdale):

"Animals and morality.--The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one's virtues as well as of one's strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank--all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world--and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one's pursuers and be favored in the pursuit of one's prey.  For this reason, the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their coloring to the coloring of their surroundings (by virtue of the so-called 'chromatic function'), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colors of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate 'mimicry').  Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept 'man,' or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place: and all the subtle ways we have of appearing fortunate, grateful, powerful, enamoured have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world.  Even the sense for truth, which is really the sense for security, man has in combination with the animals: one does not want to let oneself be deceived, does not want to mislead oneself, one hearkens mistrustfully to the promptings of one's own passions, one constrains oneself and lies in wait for oneself; the animal understands all this just as man does, with it too self-control springs from the sense for what is real (from prudence).  It likewise assesses the effect it produces upon the perceptions of other animals and from this learns to look back upon itself, take itself 'objectively,' it too has its degree of self-knowledge.  The animal assesses the movements of its friends and foes, it learns their peculiarities by heart, it prepares itself for them: it renounces war once and for all against individuals of a certain species, and can likewise divine from the way they approach that certain kinds of animals have peaceful and conciliatory intentions.  The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, courage--in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues, are animal:  a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies.  Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal."
 

This summary of Nietzsche's account of the animal roots of morality can be confirmed at every point by recent biological studies of evolved animal morality.  In supporting this conclusion, I won't offer many detailed citations of the research, but much of this is well surveyed not only in Ed Wilson's writings, but also in Frans de Waal's Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Harvard University Press, 1996) and Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (University of Chicago Press, 2009).  Bekoff and Pierce argue that while human morality is uniquely human, other animals have their own moral codes.  They have presented some of their ideas from their book in an article.

I will begin to lay out my reasoning in the next post.

Nietzsche Under Lou Salomé’s Whip

This famous--if not infamous--photograph was taken in a photographer's studio in Lucerne, Switzerland, on May 13, 1882.  Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée are pulling a cart on which Lou Salomé sits, holding a whip fashioned with sprigs of lilacs.  Later, in a letter to Lou, Nietzsche wrote: "Oh, that naughty photographer!  And yet: what a lovely silhouette perches there on that delightful little cart."  Some readers of Thus Spoke Zarathustra have wondered whether the "little old woman" is referring to this photograph when she declares:  "You are going to women?  Do not forget the whip!"  And give the whip to the woman!

When this photograph was taken, Nietzsche was truly under Lou's whip.  Earlier in the day, he had proposed marriage to her for the second time that spring, and for the second time, she had turned him down.

Nietzsche and Rée had been close friends for about seven years.  In March of 1882, Reé had met Lou--a 21 year old Russian woman travelling with her mother--and Rée became enthralled with her after long philosophic conversations.  He wrote letters to Nietzsche describing her spirited intellect.  He arranged for Nietzsche and Lou to meet on April 25 in Rome at St. Peter's Basilica.  Nietzsche first words to her were "From what stars have we fallen together here?"  She replied, "I came from Zurich."

The three of them developed a plan to live together as an intellectual community of three people who could stimulate one another in their philosophic work.  Nietzsche spent many hours with Lou alone, during which she was the first human being to hear about Nietzsche's world-shattering idea of eternal recurrence.  He identified her as "the most intelligent of all females," and as someone who could help him develop his intellectual vision for the future.  But soon Nietzsche and Rée became romantic rivals in their pursuit of Lou, who insisted that she wanted only intellectual friendships with them.  At the same time, Nietzsche's sister became resentful of Lou's influence over her brother.  By late October, Nietzsche found the situation so tense that he left his two friends and never met them again.

From 1883 through 1885, Lou and Rée continued to live and work together, but their love was never sexual.  Lou then married Friedrich Carl Andreas, but forced him to accept that their marriage would never be consummated.  Later, she had a long love affair with Rainier Maria Rilke, who drew inspiration from her for his poetry.  She became a novelist, a poet, a literary critic, and even a psychoanalyst who joined Sigmund Freud's inner circle.  She became a muse for some of the greatest thinkers and artists of her time, beginning with Nietzsche.

During her time with Nietzsche, Lou began writing notes about Nietzsche's philosophy, which eventually led to the publication in 1894 of her book Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken.  This was the first book on Nietzsche, and it is still perhaps the best book ever written on Nietzsche.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, I find that Nietzsche's best writing was during his "middle period," when he wrote Human, All Too Human, which shows the influence of Darwinian evolutionary psychology coming through his friendship with Rée.  Human, All Too Human was also Lou's favorite of Nietzsche's books.  But this is not the common view.  Most popular readers and scholars of Nietzsche assume that his greatest work is found in the early writing (The Birth of Tragedy) and the late writing (beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra).  But despite the obvious brilliance of Nietzsche's early and late writing, Lou shows that his middle writing has a scientific basis that makes it far more intellectually defensible than is the case for the other writing, which shows a delusional religious fantasy that has no grounding in reality and thus leads to the madness into which Nietzsche fell.

I see at least four deep insights in Lou's book that open up Nietzsche and the intellectual drama surrounding him and his work.

First, Lou was the first person to see the division in Nietzsche's writing into three periods.  As in The Birth of Tragedy, his early period shows the influence of the romantic metaphysics of Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer in filling the void left by his loss of his childhood Christian faith.  His second period began with his break from Wagner and Schopenhauer and his friendship with Rée.  This was the period in which he wrote under the influence of modern natural science and a free-spirited skepticism in the pursuit of knowledge rooted in evolutionary science.  After breaking off his friendship with Rée, Nietzsche turned away from scientific naturalism and adopted an atheistic religiosity expressed in his teachings about the Ubermensch, eternal return, and the will to power, which was first shown in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The second insight in Lou's book is seeing that Nietzsche's philosophizing is autobiographical--that it expresses the personal experiences of Nietzsche himself.  Thus, she applies to Nietzsche what he had said about other philosophers, and he agreed with her about this in one of his letters to her.

The third insight is that the deepest motivation for Nietzsche was his religious longing, so that once he lost his childhood faith in the Christian God, he had to find a replacement for God that would give the world some eternal meaning; and he did this by divinizing himself as Dionysus and eternalizing human experience through eternal return.

The fourth insight is that in contrast to the scientific reasoning of the middle period, the appeal of Nietzsche's early and later writing is purely mythopoetic delusion unsupported by empirical evidence or argumentative reasoning.  For example, she reports that in 1882 Nietzsche told her that he wanted to spend the next ten years studying natural science to find scientific support for his idea of eternal return.  But then when it quickly became apparent to him that natural science could not confirm his teaching, he wrote Zarathustra as a purely poetic expression of his teaching that would not require any grounding in reality.

For me, all of this confirms my conclusion that the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period--particularly, Human, All Too Human--is the only intellectually defensible part of Nietzsche's work.

And yet, the rest of his work is valuable--as Lou shows--by indicating how the Darwinian refutation of the universe as a moral cosmology provoked a turn to art and religion as mythmaking to escape from this "deadly truth."  (As I have indicated in some previous posts, Leo Strauss and his students show this in their scorn for Darwinian science as a dangerous truth, and their preference for Nietzsche's later writings and rejection of the free-spirited evolutionary science of his middle period.)

I do see, however, at least two deficiencies in Lou's book.  First, while she recognizes the scientific character of Nietzsche's middle works as influenced by Rée--which she identifies as "positivism"--she does not recognize this science as specifically evolutionary or Darwinian science.

The second deficiency is that she does not consider the political implications of Nietzsche's teaching in the middle period.  She says nothing about Nietzsche's support for liberal democracy as compatible with a free-spirited science (particularly, in sectons 438-82 of Human, All Too Human).  Thus, she does not see the connection between science and liberalism in Nietzsche's middle works or how his move away from science in his later works leads him to antiliberal politics, which inspired the Nazis.

Perhaps if Lou had agreed to marry Nietzsche, she could have calmed his religious longings and sustained his free-spirited love of scientific knowledge in a way that would have avoided the dangerous delusions of his later writing.

Some of my previous posts on Nietzsche and Darwin were posted in August of 2009.

The Neurological and Philosophical Causes of Nietzsche's Madness

In December of 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche's friends began receiving letters from him with disturbing signs of madness.  He signed the letters as "Nietzsche Caesar," "the Crucified," or (most commonly) "Dionysus."  He identified himself as superior to Jesus as a world-historical figure who would divide the history of the world into two halves.  He was possessed by delusional megalomania and a Dionysian state of orgiastic ecstasy.  He was observed shouting and dancing around his room, naked with an erection.  On January 7, 1889, Franz Overbeck arrived at Nietzsche's room in Turin, Italy, and decided to have him moved to a mental institution in Basel, Switzerland.  He never recovered his sanity, and he eventually died in 1900 in Weimar, under the care of his mother and sister.

Nietzsche's madness has added to the popular fascination with him and his thought because of the romantic notion that the deepest thinkers and artists must risk insanity.  But this madness has also been used by Nietzsche's critics as evidence of the self-destructive and delusional character of his philosophizing.  Some of Nietzsche's defenders have responded to this by arguing that his collapse into madness was caused by a neurological disorder that had nothing to do with his philosophical thought.

My suspicion is that there was a combination of neurological and philosophical causes of his madness.  After all, Nietzsche himself in the writings of his middle period warned about the dangers of Dionysian intoxication and ecstasy and the need for the moderation that comes from a free-spirited science rooted in a Darwinian science of evolutionary naturalism.  In his later writings, however, he turned away from this scientific moderation and back to the Dionysian frenzy of The Birth of Tragedy expressed in the new religious doctrines of eternal return, the will to power, and the Overman.

Nietzsche was diagnosed by the doctors who examined him as suffering from neurosyphilis, a form of syphilis in which spirochaetes (a kind of bacteria) attack the brain.  That has remained the most common explanation for his madness.

But in recent years, doctors examining the evidence have rejected this diagnosis, because many of the symptoms of his illness (including the severe migraines that began when he was a child) don't seem to be explained as caused by neurosyphilis.  Dr. Leonard Sax has proposed that Nietzsche suffered from a brain tumor that would explain many of his symptoms.  Others have proposed that Nietzsche manifested manic depression with late-developing psychotic features.  This is supported by Julian Young in his Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, which surveys the whole debate over Nietzsche's insanity.

Recently, a good argument has been made for diagnosing Nietzsche as suffering from cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL).  This is a genetically inherited disorder that causes a slow degeneration of the smooth muscle cells in blood vessels that damages the brain in ways that would explain all of Nietzsche's symptoms: migraine headaches, mood swings from depression to euphoria, delusions, visual problems, strokes, and progressive dementia.

But even if one is persuaded by the evidence for a neurological disorder underlying Nietzsche's madness--as I am--one must still consider the clear connection between the Dionysian character of his madness and the Dionysian character of his philosophy. 

When Nietzsche rejected the Darwinian science of his middle period, and plunged back into a Dionysian religious frenzy (announced by Zarathustra) in 1883, was he thereby taking the path that would lead him to madness?  Does this cast doubt on all of the central doctrines of his later works as delusional?

Lou Salome thought so.  She'll be the subject of my next post.

Some of these points have been elaborated in previous posts--for example, here and here.

Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in Evolutionary History

This past New Year's Day was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which was formally issued on January 1, 1863.

I have often written about the many points of agreement between Lincoln and Charles Darwin, which includes their evolutionary understanding of slavery and its abolition.

From his reading of Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Lincoln accepted the idea of evolution, including human evolution. 

Lincoln had a remarkably deep understanding of human cultural evolution that follows the pattern of Darwinian universal history set forth by Darwin and by David Christian in his Maps of Time.

In his "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, his "Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society," and in his meeting with some American Indian chiefs, Lincoln laid out his conception of cultural evolution as moving through three stages of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to societies based on commercial exchange and free labor.

Like Darwin and Christian, Lincoln believed that what made human beings unique in the animal world was the human capacity for symbolic speech, which allowed for collective learning in the artful domination of nature for the material, moral, and intellectual improvement of human life. Originally, all human beings lived by foraging--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Some of the native American Indians manifested this way of life. The invention of agriculture--based on the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals--supported human civilization as an advance beyond the savage life of foragers.

But despite the advance in civilization in agrarian states, such states were founded on slavery and other forms of coerced labor so that rulers lived by exploiting peasant labor. Lincoln saw that the Industrial Revolution based on commercial exchange and free labor was bringing a new revolution in human cultural evolution that promised the physical, moral, and intellectual liberation of labor. He saw the abolition of slavery as the crucial move towards this new state of society that would bring a "new birth of freedom," in which all human beings would have a fair chance in the "race of life."

Thus, Lincoln's classical liberalism was based on an evolutionary understanding of human history.

A few of my many posts on Lincoln, Darwin, and the Emancipation Proclamation can be found here, here., here, and here.