Three Cheers for Midwest Straussianism!--Strauss, Science, and the Zuckerts

Although I never met Leo Strauss, I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s where I studied under friends and students of Strauss such as George Anastaplo, Joseph Cropsey, and Herbert Storing. For many years, I have been a political science professor at Northern Illinois University in a department that has had a long tradition of faculty members who were students of Strauss--including Morton Frisch, Gary Glenn, and Martin Diamond.

Under this Straussian influence, I have adopted many of the ideas and habits of the Straussians, such as the deep respect for the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present and a devotion to a careful reading of the classic texts of political philosophy. But in many respects, I am not an orthodox Straussian. For example, I have always been skeptical of the stark ancients versus moderns dichotomy of the Straussians, along with the assumption that the ancients are better than the moderns. A related point of disagreement is that while Strauss and the Straussians are generally suspicious, if not scornful, of modern science as showing the bad traits of modernity, I regard modern science, and especially Darwinian biological science, as a great achievement of the human mind that can illuminate political philosophy.

Now, having read Catherine and Michael Zuckert's book The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (2006), I finally have a label for my position. I'm a "Midwest Straussian"!

Other people have noticed the debate between the "West Coast" and the "East Coast" Straussians. But the Zuckerts are the first to identify the "Midwest" Straussians as occupying a third position in this debate.

This debate arises from what the Zuckerts describe as the "tension-ridden legacy" of Strauss (21). The tension is clearest in the three following propositions that constitute Strauss's position on American liberal democracy:

1. America is modern.

2. Modernity is bad.

3. America is good.

To resolve the obvious contradictions between these propositions, each of the three schools of Straussian thought has had to deny, or at least downplay, one of the three propositions. The West Coast Straussians (led by Harry Jaffa) reject the first proposition, because they argue that the American founding is actually rooted in ancient (especially Aristotelian) thought. The East Coast Straussians (led by Allan Bloom) stress the first and second propositions, while questioning the third proposition, because they doubt that America can ever overcome the moral and intellectual defects of its modernity. The Midwest Straussians (led by Martin Diamond) deny or at least express doubts about the second proposition, because they are impressed by the apparent improvements in the human condition brought by modernity that seem to show clear progress beyond ancient thought. Thus, the Midwest Straussians cast doubt on what the Zuckerts identify as Strauss's "signature idea"--his "return to the ancients" (252-53).

According to this scheme, I would place myself under the category of Midwest Straussian, because I agree with those like Diamond who argue that the American regime manifests the progress that modern political thought has made beyond ancient political thought. The modern liberal constitutional regime provides for individual liberty, civil society, commercial prosperity, and limited government, which secure the conditions for moral and intellectual excellence more fully than was done in the ancient or medieval world.

As the Zuckerts rightly indicate, "modernity" as the Straussians understand it includes modern science. So, the second Straussian proposition--that modernity is bad--includes the proposition that modern science is bad (see, for example, 28, 33, 37-41, 50, 56, 61, 65, 68, 70-72, 78, 82, 84-85, 88, 96, 99-100, 112-14, 192-93, 208, 236-37, 244-45, 252, 255-59). My defense of Darwinian science and Darwinian natural right obviously denies this proposition, and so, again, I am in the Midwest Straussian camp.

On this question of the goodness of science, the Zuckerts are not as helpful in their analysis as they are on other issues, because they speak about "Aristotelian cosmology" as opposed to modern physics without seeing the importance of Aristotle's distinction between cosmology and biology.

The Zuckerts rightly notice that one of the biggest obstacles to Strauss's "return to the ancients" was that Strauss accepted modern natural science in its refutation of "Aristotle's view of the eternity of the world and the species, or his natural teleology" (37). It took Strauss a long time to figure out how to get around this. They write:

"Unlike some of his students (or his students' students), Strauss did not try to resurrect Aristotelian natural science by showing that it is compatible with modern natural science. [In a footnote here, the Zuckerts cite David Bolotin's book on Aristotle's physics and my book Darwinian Natural Right.] He came to think that would not be necessary, even if it were possible. Further study of Maimonides and Farabi convinced Strauss that they were not so much Aristotelian as Platonic philosophers. They did not deduce the characteristics or qualities of the best human life from an understanding of the natural order as a whole. Nor did they propagate Plato's doctrine of the ideas. . . . Philosophy, as represented by Plato's Socrates, constituted a fully satisfying form of human existence that could be enjoyed by private individuals in less-than-perfect regimes. Based entirely on reason, Socratic philosophy nevertheless involved something less than a claim to full knowledge. . . . Explicitly lacking knowledge of the most important things, Socrates did not affirm the truth of any particular account of the cosmic order, although he did have to be able to show why no available account was entirely satisfactory in order to maintain his paradoxical claim that he knew that he did not know. Since modern natural science also explicitly provides less than full knowledge of the whole, Socratic philosophy was compatible with it in a way Aristotelian cosmology was not (38)."

One can see here some of the main themes of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers, which I have taken up in some previous posts. As I indicated in those posts, I generally agree with Catherine's argument that Plato's Socrates distances himself from the cosmological teachings of the Athenian Stranger and Timaeus. But I also indicated that Catherine never really explains Socrates' yearning for some cosmology in which Mind rules everything; nor does she explain why some of the greatest philosophers--from Aristotle to Nietzsche--failed to see that Plato was not a Platonist. Furthermore, the Zuckerts don't explain how Plato could reject the doctrine of ideas while simultaneously affirming the Socratic doctrine that "being is divided into essentially different kinds (or ideas)" that are eternal (112).

But here my main concern is to question the loose language here about "Aristotelian cosmology." As I have noted in previous posts, Aristotle spoke of the cosmology of eternal order as based largely on mythic stories. By contrast, he spoke of the biological study of living beings as closer to human life and more open to direct study. While cosmological science (like that of Timaeus) looks for the eternally fixed order of being, biological science looks to the temporal flux of becoming.

Aristotelian natural right does not depend on a cosmology of eternal, teleological order. It depends on the biology of human nature and its immanent teleology. That empirical biology of human nature is not so far away from modern Darwinian biology. The way that the Zuckerts cite my book indicates that they have missed the point of the book, which is to argue that empirical biology manifests an immanent teleology of enduring but not eternal species that does not depend on any cosmic teleology of eternal order.

In contrast to Aristotle, Plato gave almost no attention to biology, because he was more interested in looking for the eternal patterns promised by mathematical knowledge or astronomy. But then Plato (or Plato's Socrates) could not account for the relationship between the invariant patterns of intelligible being and the variant patterns of sensible becoming.

Modern Darwinian biology continues in the tradition of empirical biology begun by Aristotle. Darwin's evolutionary science is a clear advance beyond Aristotle--one that Aristotle himself would surely have welcomed. In this and other respects, therefore, modern science shows progress in the philosophic study of nature and human nature. Modern science is good, and the modernity that sustains modern science is good.

That's why I'm a Midwest Straussian.

The Idea of Species and the False Story about Essentialism

A major objection to my notion of Darwinian natural right is that Aristotelian natural right assumes an essentialist understanding of species that has been refuted by Darwinian evolutionary science.

My idea of natural right assumes that human beings exist as a distinct species or kind of animal with characteristic traits, which include natural desires that incline human beings to certain natural ends. I can then argue that whatever fulfills those ends of the human species constitutes the natural human good.

But Darwin denied the eternal fixity of species by claiming that species emerge by a historically contingent process of evolution from ancestral species, which would seem to deny the objective reality of species boundaries, since they are in perpetual flux. According to biologists like Ernst Mayr and philosophers like David Hull, Darwin's intellectual revolution was his denial of the ancient Platonic and Aristotelian conception of species as defined by eternal, discrete, and unchanging essences, and his affirmation of species as nothing more than historical lineages that come into being and pass away. Hull has concluded from this Darwinian denial of essentialism that since Homo sapiens is a historically contingent entity, like every other species, there is no such thing as human nature. David Buller, a student of Hull's, has elaborated this point in arguing that evolutionary psychologists do not understand how the evolutionary account of species as historical lineages denies any belief in human nature as anything more than a "superstition."

In chapter 9 of Darwinian Natural Right, I responded to this line of thought by arguing that although the Darwinian must deny the eternity and fixity of species, and thus deny the claims of a transcendentalist essentialism, the Darwinian must still affirm the reality of species as natural kinds. Although species are not eternally fixed, since they have evolved from ancestral species, that does not make them any less real during the time of their existence. I also argued that Aristotle in his biological works anticipated the modern Darwinian criticisms of essentialist classification. Aristotle's biology was misinterpreted in the Middle Ages by those religious believers who viewed his logical concept of "species" as a biological concept of fixed kinds conforming to the teaching of biblical creationism, in which species become eternal ideas in the mind of God.

In the essentialist tradition of biological classification, logical division was used to classify organisms into genera and species with definitions based on essential properties that are necessary and sufficient for defining each species. So, for example, the essentialist definition of human beings was that they were the rational animals. They belonged to the genus of animals, while being uniquely distinguished from other animals by their rationality. The essence of human nature was thus captured through the necessary and sufficient properties of rational animality, properties that were fixed, discrete, and unchanging.

But contrary to the common view, I argued, Aristotle did not employ this method in his biological writings. On the contrary, he criticized the artificiality of applying logical division to biological phenomena, as Plato did. In his logical works, Aristotle did define "species" through the possession of essential, or necessary and sufficient properties. But in his biological works, he generally accepted the popular classification of species and genera, while turning his primary attention to studying how living beings were adapted for a specific kind of life in a specific kind of environment. The essential traits of a biological species are essential because of the functional role they play in the life of the living being.

When Darwin claimed that all species have evolved from ancestral species so that each species is adapted to a specific manner of life, he was closer to Aristotle than to those nominalists who would deny the natural reality of species.

So, I am now pleased to report that the scholarly writing on the "species problem" seems to be moving towards this position as I argued it in 1998. Increasingly, historians of science and philosophers of biology are questioning the "essentialism story" told by Mayr and Hull that presents Darwin's "populational" thinking as a revolutionary rejection of the "essentialist" thinking that ruled over biology for two thousand years. Instead, scholars are rediscovering a tradition of Aristotelian biological empiricism that broke away from Platonic essentialism and prepared the way for Darwin.

Some of this new scholarship was surveyed a few years ago in an article criticizing the "essentialism story"--Mary Winsor, "Non-essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy," Biology and Philosophy, 18 (2003), pp. 387-400. Now we have two new books that elaborate the issues in this scholarly debate. Newly published is John S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea (University of California Press, 2009). Soon to be published is Richard Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). I have read Wilkins' book, and I have read a few chapters from Richards' manuscript. Wilkins is a philosophy professor at the University of Sydney. Richards is a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama.

Wilkins provides an encyclopedic history of the idea of species from Plato to the present. Running through his history is his argument for the falsity of the essentialism story as told by Mayr and Hull. His argument rests on three claims (x-xi, 231-34).

His first claim is that the essentialism story fails to distinguish species as a logical concept from species as a biological concept. Living species are not the same as formal species. Beginning with Plato, there is a logical tradition of universal taxonomy, which attempts to classify all possible objects into categories defined by necessary and sufficient properties. Beginning with Aristotle, there is a biological tradition of reasoning about species that are identified by a range of traits that are not reducible to logical essences of necessary and sufficient properties.

Wilkins' second claim is that Aristotle's biological writings began a "generative conception of species" that runs through the tradition of natural history as empirical science. Living species are identified by their generative power, which constitutes a lineage by which living form is passed through a reproductive process. Sometimes Wilkins identifies this generative conception of species as beginning with Lucretius and the Epicureans (25-27, 227-228). But I would stress the importance of this generative conception for Aristotle in his book on the generation of animals.

Wilkins' third claim is that in the tradition of empirical biology, species are understood as types rather than essences, and types allow for variation, while essences do not. Biologists can recognize individual organisms as conforming to the type of a particular species, even though there is great individual variation around the type.

As I indicated in Darwinian Natural Right, Darwin is ambivalent about the reality of species. In some passages of his writing, he seems to be a nominalist or conventionalist who views the identification and classification of species as a matter of convenience for the human mind that has no ground in nature. But in other passages, Darwin affirms the natural reality of species by claiming that only evolutionary biology can uncover the natural basis of classification by seeing that "community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking," and therefore, all true classification "must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural." Wilkins is not completely clear about this. Generally, he argues that Darwin believed in "species as real things in nature (albeit temporary things)"; and therefore he was a "species realist" (129-30). But then Wilkins also says that for Darwin "species are the outcomes of the evolutionary process acting on varieties and are not real entities themselves" (230).

The fundamental reason for this ambiguity, I think, is suggested by Wilkins' qualifying phrase--"albeit temporary things." In the Platonic tradition, there's a tendency to identify reality with eternity--what is really real must be eternal. That's why Platonists typically look to mathematics as a model of timeless truths. But unlike mathematics, biology is the study of temporal processes that are everchanging. Unlike mathematical objects, living things come into being and pass away. But Aristotelians and Darwinians can say that the temporality of living things and processes takes nothing away from their reality. A living being is real for as long as it exists.

Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz was one of the leading critics of Darwin's theory of evolution when Darwin proposed it in 1859. As a Christian Platonist, Agassiz regarded species as thoughts in the mind of God and therefore fixed essences that could not have evolved through any historical process. Here then is the Platonic essentialism that those like Mayr and Hull conjure up as the dominant tradition of biological thought prior to Darwin. For Agassiz, Darwin's denial of the eternal fixity of species was a denial of the very reality of species.

Agassiz wrote: "If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? And if individuals alone exist, how can differences which may be observed among them prove the variability of species?" In a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin responded: "How absurd that logical quibble 'if species do not exist, how can they vary?' As if anyone doubted their temporary existence?" (quoted by Wilkins, 158).

Darwin did not doubt the "temporary existence" of species. But for a Platonic essentialist like Agassiz, "temporary existence" is not real existence at all.

Richard Richards goes more deeply than does Wilkins into the history of how Aristotle's biological studies of species were overlooked or distorted by a medieval tradition of Christian Platonism that read Aristotle as a Platonic essentialist who could be brought into alignment with a biblical creationist conception of species as eternally fixed in the mind of the Creator.

My defense of an Aristotelian and Darwinian conception of species and of the reality of human nature can be found in some previous posts here and here.

Cosmology, Morality, and Divine Law: Remi Brague's Response

Over the past two months, I have written a series of four posts on two of Remi Brague's books--The Wisdom of the World and The Law of God. He has sent me an email message responding to my comments, and he has kindly agreed to allow me to post that message here. He writes:

"You have somewhat overstated my commitment to the pre-modern view that I endeavored to delineate in my two books. They are written in the manner adopted by historians of ideas. I describe a worldview that I deem to be obsolete. I do not condone it. I simply ask how we could possibly meet the consequences of its disappearance.

"You write that I am 'defending the idea that moral and political order depends upon a cosmic order of divine design," while I try to show, conversely, that the "denial of cosmic moral order leads to moral confusion if not nihilism." This runs counter to my intention.

"What I do claim is that, according to the standard ancient and medieval worldview (that brooked exceptions, as we both observe), such an order used to depend on a cosmic order.

"You ascribe to me the claim that 'the idea of a morally neutral cosmos did not appear in Western thought prior to the modern era.' This is diametrically opposed to what I wrote--for instance, when I discuss the atomistic worldview (see ch. 4: 'The Other Greece'), or when I quote Marcus Aurelius on pp. 76-77 and again p. 218. I simply claim that this idea was kept at bay by the mainstream platonic-abrahamic synthesis, which drove its rivals out of the market. What you write about Socrates is right, and is precisely what I contend. But again, those aspects of Plato were simply forgotten in the latter tradition. Plato's dialogues were not known to Europe before the 15th century (see my The Legend of the Middle Ages, the University of Chicago Press, 2008, fourth part).

"The same holds true for your sentence according to which I defend 'the premodern idea that norms of human practice must rest upon belief in divine law.' The general thrust of my book is that the idea of a lawgiving God was done away with by Paul, who kept only the Ten Commandments. They constitute some sort of basic survival kit of humankind, hence they are accessible, at least in principle, to human moral conscience and are not revealed, because they need not be.

"You wrote that I 'give the reader the impression that the modern turn away from cosmic or divine norms leads to a nihilistic collapse. But then, by the end of the book, (I) conclude that an 'autonomous ethics' of 'common morality' without religion is indispensable.' The contradiction arises from the impression given to the reader, but this impression is wrong. As for the last sentence, I simply meant that such an ethics is possible, nay that it is real. But I don't venture into the third category of modality . . . Whether religion--and which religion(s)--did prop this common ethics or undermined it could be, partly at least, a question for historians.

"I have some reservations about that concept of 'nature' that you wield, for instance, when you mention 'the nature of the human species.' It looks like the Epicurean and, for that matter, modern (Hobbes) concept of a primitive, 'rough' state of things. Whoever defends the idea of natural law takes his/her bearings from the Aristotelian concept of nature as the full development of the potentialities of a being (see Politics, I, 2, 1252b32-33) and/or from the Stoic concept of a nature that sets morality in the most elementary instincts of man. Hence, the discussion between supporters and opponents of 'natural law' is desperately lopsided.

"Whether one can ground morality on the Darwinian description of what evolution has made of man looks doubtful to me, not because it is Darwinian, but because it is a description. Hume's old problem of the 'ought' that you can't derive from the 'is,' or the fact/value problem is hardly solved.

"Furthermore, whereas I am pretty confident that a secular worldview can enable people to get on together in a well-ordered society, because it is the interest of the individuals to do so, I doubt that it can give mankind as a species good reasons to survive, more crudely, to beget children.

"Again, many thanks for the care with which you have read my things and for your interesting discussion."

For those interested in his Law of God book, Professor Brague recommends two recent symposia on the book that have been published in Modern Age, 51, winter 2009, pp. 26-46, and in the Political Science Reviewer, 38, 2009, pp. 1-104.

Remi Brague on Divine Law & Common Morality

In recent months, my posts on the question of cosmic teleology have included comments on Remi Brague--particularly, here, here, and here.

Brague is a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne who has written some of the best studies of cosmological thinking and divine law in the history of philosophy and culture. He has had a lot of influence on Straussians and American conservatives in defending the idea that moral and political order depends upon a cosmic order of divine design, which has been subverted by modern science and philosophy, including Darwinism.

Against Brague, I have argued that we can understand the moral and intellectual goods of human life as rooted in evolved human nature, which does not necessarily depend on any cosmic order or divine law.

Despite my disagreements with Brague, I admire his writing, because he allows his careful readers to see the weaknesses in his position. For example, as I have noted previously, he at least hints that the skeptical questioning of Platonic cosmology began with Plato's Socrates.

Similarly, in his book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (2007), he sets out to defend the premodern idea that norms of human practice must rest upon belief in divine law; but then by the end of the book, he admits that one can reasonably look to "common morality" as founded in human nature without any necessary support from religion.

Brague begins this book by quoting Leo Strauss: "the divine law, it seems to me, is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy. . . . The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner" (18). This quotation is from an essay by Strauss in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (248). But this quotation leaves us wondering what is meant by the "diametrically opposed manner" in which the Bible and Greek philosophy solve the problem of divine law.

After the Strauss quotation, Brague explains: "Greek divine law is divine because it expresses the profound structures of a permanent natural order. Jewish Law is divine because it emanates from a god who is master of history. In both cases, it is external to the human and transcends the quotidian." But if one looks at Strauss's essay, it seems that he wants to suggest an even sharper opposition between the Bible and Greek philosophy. First of all, Strauss casts doubt on any intelligent design cosmology by pointing out "the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it be first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings." Strauss then goes on to say that in Greek philosophy, the idea of divine law is replaced by the idea of natural order or natural law or natural morality. Thus, divine law is abandoned. "And if it is accepted by Greek philosophy, it is accepted only politically, meaning for the education of the many, and not as something which stands independently" (Rebirth, 255-56).

Although Strauss does not draw this conclusion, I would say that Darwinian science completes the Greek philosophic substitution of "natural order" or "natural morality" for "divine law" by providing a natural explanation for how the order of the cosmos could arise by natural evolution, within which human morality could arise as an expression of evolved human nature.

Oddly enough, Brague himself seems to move towards such a position towards the end of his book. At the beginning of his book, Brague sets out to show how--using Kant's terms--the premodern world saw morality as "heteronomy" (a law based on cosmic or divine standards external to human beings) as opposed to the modern project of viewing morality as based on "autonomy" (a law that human beings give themselves)(vii-viii). Moreover, he gives the reader the impression that the modern turn away from cosmic or divine norms leads to a nihilistic collapse. But then, by the end of the book, he concludes that an "autonomous ethics" of "common morality" without religion is indispensable. "There is no religious morality," he says. Rather, "there is a common morality capable of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, 'secular,' or other interpretations." The role of religion is "not to add to morality, but rather to provide it with the nourishing environment" (259-61). This "common morality" sounds a lot like Darwin's natural "moral sense," which does not require religion although it can benefit from religious beliefs and practices.

The crucial turn in Brague's book comes in his account of Paul's remarks on natural law in the opening chapters of his Letter to the Romans: "When Gentiles who do not have the law keep it as by nature [phusei], these men, although without the law, serve as a law for themselves [nomos heauto]. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts. Their conscience bears witness together with that law, and their thoughts will accuse or defend them" (Romans 2:14-15). This is the primary passage in the New Testament for the idea of "natural law" that human beings can know even without any belief in divine law. And it clearly shows, as Brague admits, that the idea of moral "autonomy" arose long before the modern project.

This natural law is what Brague calls "common morality," which contains "the elementary rules that permit the coexistence of individuals and the permanence of the species, what C. S. Lewis called 'the Tao'" (90). The reference to Lewis is to The Abolition of Man, where Lewis claims that in all human cultures through history, there is evidence for a shared morality that can be known without any particular religious beliefs.

And, again, I would say that this is what a Darwinian ethics would recognize as the natural morality that satisfies the conditions for human flourishing, the conditions that secure "the coexistence of individuals and the permanence of the species." To justify these as conditions for a good human life, we don't have to appeal to some cosmological morality or divine law. We only have to see how these conditions conform to the nature of the human species.

C. S. Lewis and the Medieval Model

C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964) sketches the "Medieval Model" of the universe and shows how that model shaped medieval and Renaissance literature. He shows how that cosmic model arose by combining ideas from Plato (especially the Timaeus), Aristotle, the Stoics, the Neo-Platonists, and the early Christians. This model was crafted during the first centuries of the Christian era and became the prevalent conception of the cosmos throughout the Middle Ages. Its influence on literature continued even through to the end of the seventeenth century.

Lewis's book helps us to see the moral, political, and philosophical implications of the modern scientific model of the cosmos, including Darwinian evolution, by showing us what the modern model replaced. In fact, much of the opposition to the evolutionary view of the cosmos is motivated by a longing for the Medieval Model.

One important point that emerges clearly in Lewis's book is that this Medieval Model of the cosmos depends on pagan ideas. Although it is "eminently religious," it is "not eminently Christian" (18-19), because much of it was out of harmony with biblical religion (45-46, 49-51, 76, 79, 119-20). I stress this because it shows that other than the biblical doctrine that God created the universe, biblical religion does not require any specific view of the cosmos; and it certainly doesn't require the geocentric cosmology of the Medieval Model.

That's why even though Lewis admires that model--"the old Model delights me" (216)--he concedes that it is "not true." And as I have indicated in a previous post, Lewis was a theistic evolutionist.

Lewis's appreciation for the Medieval Model is more artistic than philosophical or scientific. His primary concern, he says, is with the "emotional effect" of the Model rather than its literal truth (112).

As an indication of the primacy of artistic emotion over scientific truth in such models, Lewis indicates that medieval philosophers and scientists treated the model as merely "provisional" (16). "It is not in the nature of things that great thinkers should take much interest in Models. They have more difficult and more controversial matters in hand. Every Model is a construct of answered questions. The expert is engaged either in raising questions or in giving new answers to old ones. When he is doing the first, the old, agreed Model is of no interest to him; when he is doing the second, he is beginning an operation which will finally destroy the old Model altogether" (18).

This is the point I have suggested in some of my recent posts on Platonic cosmology: even as Plato has Timaeus and others lay out elaborate cosmological designs, Plato implies that the skepticism of Socratic questioning will never support a dogmatic commitment to any cosmic model.

But even if we doubt the literal truth of such a model, Lewis insists, we should recognize the artistic sublimity of the Medieval Model. He writes:

"Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model, you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall.' When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law,' but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. You need not wonder that one old picture represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball. Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned" (119).

Lewis would say that this "revelry of insatiable love" expresses a truth about the erotic nature of the human soul in striving for eternal truth and union with God. So even if we deny the literal truth of the Medieval Model, we can take seriously the psychic truth of human longing.

Lewis argues that although the Medieval Model is "not true," the move to the Modern Model of the universe is not "a simple progress from error to truth" (216, 222). The reason for this is that every model captures some but not all of the total truth. A model accounts for some aspects of what we experience in the cosmos under the influence of some prevailing psychological propensities. Our choice of models inevitably shows our "taste in universes" (222-23).

The literal truth of models is always limited by their dependence on metaphors. After all, that's what we mean by the word "model." So, for example, Lewis observes: "The fundamental concept of modern science is, or was till very recently, that of natural 'laws,' and every event was described as happening in 'obedience' to them. In medieval science, the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct" (92). Our selection of cosmic metaphors is important. "On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon our universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations" (94).

We should remember here that Darwin's idea of "natural selection" is a metaphor that treats nature as acting like a human breeder of plants and animals. In the 6th edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin added (in chapter 4) a defense of this metaphor: "It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? Every one knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten." So in trying to give a literal meaning to his metaphor "natural selection," Darwin uses another metaphor--"natural laws"!

Here we see why, as Lewis suggests, serious thinkers will always treat cosmic models as provisional formulations that approximate, but never fully capture, the whole truth. But even so, we can judge how well our models approximate the truth by seeing how well they account for the facts--both the material facts of the physical world and the mental facts of the psychic world. And by that standard, Darwin could argue for the superiority of his model to the older model.

Richard Weikart's New Book--HITLER'S ETHIC

What difference would it make for our view of morality if we rejected the Platonic/theistic cosmology of intelligent design in favor of a Darwinian cosmology of evolutionary order?

In the Platonic dialogues, the Athenian Stranger (especially in book 10 of the Laws) and Timaeus argue that morality requires a moral cosmology of intelligent design. Much of the tradition of biblical theology--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--has adopted a similar position: God the Creator has intelligently designed His universe to conform to His good ends, and He has created human beings in His Image so that they are endowed with a conscience that can grasp God's moral law. Much of the opposition to Darwinian science has come from Platonic philosophers and religious believers who fear that a Darwinian morality is corrupting, because it denies the intelligent-design cosmology necessary for any healthy morality.

Some of these critics of Darwinian morality have pointed to Adolf Hitler's Nazi morality as a terrifying illustration of how dangerous a Darwinian morality can be. Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004) argued that the evils of Nazism showed the consequences of adopting a Darwinian view of morality that rejected the traditional Judaic-Christian morality based on the belief that human beings have equal moral dignity as created in God's Image. If human beings have evolved by a natural process of evolution in which the strong prevail over the weak in the struggle for existence, then, the Nazis concluded, the rule of the biologically stronger races over the weaker races must be a moral imperative rooted in the laws of evolutionary nature as studied by science.

Some of my previous posts on this book can be found here, here, here, and here.

Weikart's new book--Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (2009)--is a sequel to the earlier book. While the earlier book concentrated on the history of Social Darwinism as shaping Nazi ideology, this new book concentrates on Hitler's own writings as showing the fundamental influence of Darwinian ethics.

The evil of Hitler makes it hard for many people to understand how one could speak of "Hitler's ethic." But Weikart argues that Hitler illustrates how the greatest evils are often perpetrated under the appearance of doing good--especially, if the apparent good is a utopian vision that seems to justify any means to the utopian end. I agree with this, because I am persuaded of the Platonic and Aristotelian principle that people tend to act for the good, or at least for what appears good to them. It is unlikely that any influential moral or political movement can prevail if it does not appeal to some moral sense that a great good is being achieved. The problem, however, is that human beings are often mistaken in their moral beliefs, particularly when they are seduced by some utopian conception of radical transformation that requires evil means to apparently good ends.

According to Weikart, the fundamental end for Hitler's ethic was the evolutionary improvement in the human species. Hitler interpreted the Darwinian conception of evolution as dominated by a struggle for existence as teaching that the only moral imperative was the survival and reproduction of the superior races over the inferior races. The Aryan or Nordic race prevalent in the German Volk arose in evolutionary history as the superior race. Promoting the progressive expansion of that race would therefore promote the biological improvement of the human species.

The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the "leadership principle," eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence.

Proponents of Darwinian ethics--like myself--should be honest in recognizing the impressive evidence that Weikart marshalls from Hitler's writings and speeches to show how Hitler's thought and actions were driven by a coherent view of Darwinian ethics.

But once this is conceded, then we are left with at least three questions. First, was Hitler's Darwinian ethics scientifically correct? Second, was it logically derived from Darwin's science? Third, what alternative view of morality is Weikart offering us?

In response to the first question, Weikart admits that Hitler's evolutionary thinking was scientifically false--often ridiculously so (201-202). But Weikart's point here is that its falsehood was not evident at the time. In Hitler's times, many prominent people--including many prominent scientists--embraced the same crude ideas about the evolution of superior races that run through Hitler's thought.

Weikart's response to the second question seems to be that even if Hitler's ethic did not arise by logical necessity from Darwin's teaching, Darwin's language could easily be interpreted as supporting Hitler. Although I agree with Weikart that some of what Darwin says is open to Hitler's Social Darwinist interpretation, any careful reader of Darwin would have to conclude that Hitler and the Nazis had to distort Darwin's teaching to get the conclusions they wanted.

First of all, it should be noted that, as Weikart indicates, Hitler never uses the term "Darwinism" or refers directly to Darwin. The only evidence that Hitler ever specifically mentioned Darwin comes from a report by Otto Wagener, a Nazi associate of Hitler (36, 41, 185). In any case, it is clear that Hitler had no direct knowledge of Darwin's writings.

And yet Weikart insists that Hitler's writing shows the influence of thinkers who did read Darwin and who did find support for their Nazi thinking in Darwin's writing. Weikart admits that Darwin never recommends violence against "inferior races," and he never says anything to support anti-Semitism. But Darwin does describe the conflict between "the higher civilized races" and the "lower savage races," which was interpreted by Darwinians like Ernst Haeckel as supporting scientific racism.

But here Weikart overstates his case and glosses over weaknesses. For example, he notes that Haeckel taught that the human races were actually separate species (57-58). But he doesn't tell his reader that Darwin denied this, and that affirming the unity of the human species was part of Darwin's life-long argument against slavery and scientific racism. Moreover, while Weikart cites Daniel Gasman's book on the fundamental influence of Haeckel on Hitler's Social Darwinism, Weikart does not mention the fact that Gasman argues that Haeckel's thinking "had little, if anything at all, to do with Charles Darwin" (The Scientific Origins of National Socialism). Here is one of many examples of where Weikart passes over in silence evidence and argument that works against his position.

As Weikart indicates, Hitler was a crude genetic determinist who believed that not only physical traits but even morality and culture were inherited genetically along racial lines, so that moral and cultural evolution depended on genetic evolution. But Weikart doesn't indicate to his readers that Darwin denied this. Although the capacity for human morality requires biologically inherited social instincts and cognitive abilities, the actual progress of morality and civilization depends more on social learning, cultural traditions, religious ideas, and individual reasoning than on biological evolution by natural selection. (See, for example, in the first edition of the Descent of Man, vol. 1, pp. 72, 165-66, 173; vol. 2, pp. 326, 404.)

As our final question for Weikart, we might wonder what exactly he is suggesting as an alternative view of morality that would avoid the horrors of Hitler's Nazism. In his earlier book, he spoke of traditional "Judeo-Christian ethics," particularly as based on the idea of humans with equal dignity from being created by God in His Image. Is this the alternative to Hitler's evolutionary ethics? Well, not exactly. Weikart admits that Hitler often refers to God as Creator and to human beings as created in His Image (38-39, 50-51, 56, 85). Weikart says he wants to write another book showing that Hitler was "neither an atheist nor a Christian" (40). He doesn't explain this except to say that if Hitler was a "theist," he was a "theistic evolutionist"--that is, someone who thought God did His creative work through a natural process of evolution (51). "Hitler saw evolutionary ethics as the expression of the will of God" (40).

So where exactly did Hitler go wrong, according to Weikart? Weikart writes: "In none of the relevant quotations from Mein Kampf does Hitler state that humans were specially created in the recent past by the miraculous intervention of God. On the contrary, Hitler repeatedly insisted that humans are subject to inescapable natural laws and that they are the product of eons of change. He often presented evolution as a universal process encompassing humans as well as other creatures" (51).

So what exactly is Weikart suggesting here? To avoid the evils of Hitler's evolutionary ethics, it seems, it is not enough to believe that God created human beings in His Image. Is Weikart saying that one must be a young-earth special creationist who believes that human beings were created a few thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden? Is he saying that believing that God would use a natural evolutionary process to bring about His creative intentions would necessarily lead to something like Hitler's Nazi ethics?

If Weikart is suggesting that the only reasonable basis for morality is young-earth creationism based on a literal 6-days-of-creation reading of Genesis, then he is in disagreement with the Discovery Institute's promotion of "intelligent design theory" as something distinct from young-earth creationism. If this is Weikart's position, then he is also opposed to those many thoughtful Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have become theistic evolutionists--people like C. S. Lewis, for example.

Unfortunately, this book is grossly overpriced by Palgrave Macmillan. Although it is only 254 pages long with a plastic binding, the publisher's price is $80, and the Amazon price is $54. Instead of buying this book, you should find a library copy and photocopy it.

Writing at the Discovery Institute's blogsite, Weikart has responded to this review of his book.

Does the Life of the Mind Require a Platonic Cosmology?

Over the past two months, I have written a series of posts on the moral and intellectual implications of Platonic cosmology, its dominance of Western culture for almost two millenia, and the overturning of that cosmology by modern science, especially Darwinian science. As most elaborately stated in the Timaeus, that Platonic cosmology presents a cosmic model of divine intelligent design in which there is an eternal and purposeful order that constitutes the cosmic standards of moral and intellectual perfection.

The fundamental claim of that Platonic cosmology is that Mind (nous) governs everything, and that this cosmic Mind has designed everything for what is best. By contrast, the fundamental claim of Darwinian science is that the design of the universe arises by a natural evolutionary process that does not require a cosmic Mind.

What difference does this make for the intellectual life of human beings? Sometimes, it seems that the Platonic/Socratic argument for the supremacy of the philosophic life as the best human life depends on the principle of "mind rules all"--so that the life of the mind can be understood as an erotic striving to contemplate the eternal ideas of that noetic cosmic order. But, then, sometimes it seems that the Socratic life of philosophy can be justified as satisfying the deepest human needs and desires, regardless of whether this is grounded in any kind of cosmic Mind.

Some of the critics of evolutionary science have warned that any denial of divine intelligent design is self-defeating, or self-referentially incoherent, because this would deny the grounds for any confidence in human reason, and thus deny the rationality of science or philosophy. If our human minds are products of an irrational evolutionary process, then we have no reason to believe our cognitive faculties are reliable. But if this is the case, then we have no reason to trust our belief in evolutionary science. So we are caught in a self-denying position. Those like C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga would say that the only escape from this confusion is to conclude that our confidence in human reason--and in the claims of the philosophic or scientific life--presupposes a theistic cosmology in which Mind has created the universe with noetic order and created our human minds to discover that order. (This argument that evolutionary naturalism without theism is self-refuting can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Arthur Balfour and G. K. Chesterton.)

Much of the writing of Plato seems to point in the same direction, and yet there is also evidence in the dialogues of a Socratic skepticism about any cosmology of intelligent design, and thus an openness to the thought that cosmic order might have arisen by a natural process that does not require cosmic intelligence or intentionality.

I am inclined to believe that we can account for the reliability of the human mind, and thus support the claims of philosophy or science, through an evolutionary explanation for the origins of the human mind. But sustaining that position will require some future posts.

Three New Books on Darwinism, Philosophy, & Biotechnology

Some of my writing has appeared in three recently published books.

Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Michael Ruse, has just been published by Princeton University Press. This book brings together a broad selection of writings on the philosophic implications of Darwinism, along with helpful commentary by Ruse. It includes readings from Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Alvin Plantinga, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, David Sloan Wilson, and many others.

This book reprints two selections by me--a couple of chapters from Darwinian Conservatism and an essay on "The Darwinian Moral Sense and Biblical Religion."

Ruse has carefully selected the readings to convey the contrasting positions in the continuing philosophical debates over Darwinism. So, for example, a reading from Singer on "the Darwinian Left" is followed by the reading from me on "Darwinian conservatism." Plantinga's argument that Darwinism undermines a naturalistic epistemology is followed by Evan Fales' critical response to Plantinga.

This book should be useful both for those scholars interested in the philosophic debates over Darwinism and for teachers looking for a text to introduce these debates to students.

The other two books on my table have been mentioned previously on this blog. Biotechnology: Our Future as Human Beings and Citizens, edited by Sean Sutton, has been published by the State University of New York Press. This book captures the philosophic debate over biotechnology with essays by Leon Kass, Ron Bailey, Ron Green, Lee Silver, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Richard Sherlock, and me. My contribution is entitled "The Bible and Biotechnology." The theological side of this debate runs through at least five of the essays.

Finally, I will put in another plug for Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Ken Blanchard and published by Imprint Academic. This book reprints the entire text of Darwinian Conservatism, followed by critical assessments from Neil Blackstone, Lauren Hall, Carson Holloway, Peter Lawler, Timothy Sandefur, Richard Sherlock, Michael Shermer, and John West. I have a response to these critics. And then Blanchard has an excellent concluding essay on "Natural Right and Natural Selection," which takes up the Aristotelian character of Darwinian natural right.

Zuckert's Plato: Teleology and Eternity

The Straussian proponents of Platonic political philosophy reject Darwinian natural right for two reasons.

First, they think it promotes a reductionism that denies the cosmic teleology of natural ends. Second, they think it promotes a historicism that denies the cosmic eternity of natural kinds.

When modern natural science sets aside any teleological conception of the universe, they say, it deprives human purposefulness of any cosmic support and thus leads to a reductionistic nihilism. When modern natural science sets aside any conception of the eternity of species or kinds, it deprives human morality and politics of any eternal standard of human nature and thus leads to historicist relativism.

That's why the Straussians are deeply suspicious of modern science and why they look to Plato's argument that the human good must be judged by a cosmic model of eternal, teleological order.

But as I have indicated in my posts over the last two months, I am not convinced that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) supports this position. As I have suggested previously, I see Catherine Zuckert's new book--Plato's Philosophers--as a helpful guide to these questions as they arise in the Platonic dialogues. By taking up each of the dialogues in their dramatic order--rather than in the order in which Plato wrote them--and by comparing what Socrates says in comparison with what is said by four other philosophers in the dialogues--the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger--Zuckert shows that Plato's teaching about cosmic teleology and the eternity of the ideas is much more complex than is often recognized.

Moreover, she shows that these two topics really are the fundamental issues running throughout the dialogues. The question of cosmic teleology is raised at the end of the Laws. "If no connection can be found between the most pressing concerns of human existence and the order of the whole, we humans would appear to be set adrift in a fundamentally indifferent, if not hostile environment" (145-46). The Athenian Stranger offers a teleological cosmology based on the intelligent design of a divine mind. But, Zuckert observes, his arguments are not very plausible; and Socrates is not present in the dialogue to question him. So we are left wondering "whether we can discover an all-encompassing, intelligible order, and second, if such an order can be found, whether it supports or fosters human happiness."

The question of the eternal ideas is raised in the Parmenides. A young Socrates cannot defend his doctrine of the ideas against the criticisms of Parmenides. In particular, Socrates cannot explain exactly how the unchanging, purely intelligible ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings. In fact, as Zuckert sees it, Socrates never solves this problem anywhere in the dialogues.

As I have noted in some of my previous posts on Zuckert's book, she generally emphasizes that Socrates never clearly develops a cosmic teleology. "In contrast to Timaeus, Socrates never gives a specific account of the order of the movements of the heavenly bodies or the geometric construction of the four elements" (421).

Instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, Socrates looks to human wants and desires. "In contrast to Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, Socrates never suggests that human beings can discover what is good for them by contemplating the intelligible order of the movements of the heavens. Not moved by the same wants and desires, the heavens cannot tell us what to do" (419).

If this is the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates would be close to my position--that human morality and politics depends not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires. If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether these ends have any cosmic reference. Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

This suggests that Plato's Socrates could embrace a conception of the cosmos as morally neutral, while seeing the species-specific desires of human beings as sufficient grounds for moral teleology. This seems to be the stance of the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist. The Eleatic concludes that although the gods might have cared for human beings in the past, the gods no longer rule us directly. And so, as Zuckert states it, human beings now live "in a godforsaken universe in which they have to rule and provide for themselves" (714-17). Joseph Cropsey--in his Plato's World--interprets this denial of cosmic teleology as Plato's understanding.

Although Zuckert generally agrees with Cropsey, she occasionally suggests disagreement. In contrast to the "godforsaken universe" of the Eleatic Stranger, Zuckert asserts, Socrates' universe looks like that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger. "All three of these philosophers suggest that studying the intelligible motions of the heavenly bodies will help human beings learn not merely how the cosmos is ordered but, even more important, how to order their own souls" (718). But this contradicts what Zuckert says elsewhere in her book about how Socrates never clearly embraces the cosmological arguments of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger.

Zuckert's confusion here reflects a confusion in Socrates' position. On the one hand, Socrates never develops any precise cosmology comparable to that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, and he never clearly endorses what they say, although he does say that Timaeus represents "the peak of all philosophy." On the other hand, Socrates does show a yearning for some cosmic explanation of everything as guided by "mind" (nous) so that everything is ordered for the best. It seems, as Zuckert suggests, that Socrates wants this to be the "best of possible worlds" (in Leibniz's famous phrase), because if it is not, then this world is in some essential sense accidental, and that would frustrate Socrates' yearning for a cosmic order that is ordered for the best.

But what then about the other big issue--the question of the eternity of species? If Darwin's evolutionary science is correct, then all the species of life come into being and pass away. Species are not eternal or everlasting. This would seem to contradict the Platonic/Socratic teaching that being--what is really real and fully intelligible--is to be identified as eternal and unchanging, as distinguished from the temporal and ever-changing flux of the sensible world.

This identification of the real as what is eternally fixed is Parmenides' teaching. Socrates adopts this Parmenidean position, although he departs from Parmenides claim that being must be one and undifferentiated, because Socrates insists that being must be differentiated into multiple forms or ideas. As Zuckert says, Socrates is a "pluralistic Parmenidean" (684, 688).

But as long as he adheres to this Parmenidean assumption that being is eternally unchanging, Socrates cannot bridge the gap between the unchanging ideas and changing sense experience. The Eleatic Stranger points out that any absolute separation of unchanging intelligibles and changing sensibles cannot explain human knowledge, because human cognition is in motion. "The intelligibility of being seems to require that it somehow be both in motion and at rest" (700). The Eleatic proposes that we understand the world by sorting things into classes according to the ways they are like or unlike one another.

I am on the side of the Eleatic Stranger. Karl Popper--in his The World of Parminides--captures the main thought here: we need to go beyond the Parmenidean search for invariants and see that reality is a mixture of fixity and flux. We need to see, as Popper suggests, that the history of the cosmos shows an evolutionary emergence of variance and novelty. As the Eleatic Stranger argues, we can sort things out according to their enduring patterns of similarity and difference. But these enduring patterns are not eternal.

This is certainly true for our study of human nature. The human species is not absolutely invariant or eternal. Human beings did not exist before the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens, and we can expect that some day the human species will go extinct. But for as long as our species exists, there will be natural propensities that characterize us.

And yet the present reality of the human species is not invariant, because each human being is unique in being a product of a unique natural history. Biological history depends upon the variation that comes from sexual mating in which the random assortment of genes results in the procreation of unique individuals. So while we can identify the human species as a range of traits, we know that within that range, there is immense variation expressed in individual diversity. Human nature as we know it is neither absolutely fixed nor absolutely chaotic.

Without realizing it, Zuckert implicitly endorses this Darwinian understanding of the human species in her criticisms of Timaeus's cosmological explanation of the human species. As she indicates, Timaeus cannot account for the unpredictable variation in human beings that comes from human mating and reproduction, because he has to assume that the divine craftsman created human nature as absolutely unchanging. Consequently, Timaeus has to assume that all human beings are born absolutely the same in their natural abilities and traits, which denies the reality of natural individual differences (842). Thus, as Zuckert indicates, Timaeus' cosmology--in its search for eternal invariance--must deny the obvious facts of sexual reproduction and individual identity.

My conclusion from all this is that the Platonic dialogues give us reasons to believe that conceptions of cosmic teleology and the eternity of species are implausible because they contradict what we know by experience. More plausible, I suggest, would be the Darwinian conceptions of immanent teleology and the evolution of species.

Darwinism, Reductionism, and the Socratic Turn

One of the most common criticisms of a Darwinian political science is that it must assume a materialist reductionism that denies the freedom of the mind. I often hear this criticism from my colleagues in political philosophy who sometimes cite the famous account in Plato's Phaedo of why Socrates turned away from natural philosophy to moral and political philosophy.

Speaking to some of his friends the day before his execution in Athens, Socrates recounts that as a young man he studied natural philosophy. He was particularly attracted to the teaching of Anaxagoras that everything in the cosmos is ordered by Mind (nous). Socrates thought it was good that Mind should be responsible for ordering all things in just the way that would be best, so that to explain the cause of anything--why it exists or why it comes into being or passes away as it does--one should discover why it is best for it to be as it is, as fulfilling the intention of the cosmic Mind. Socrates thought he had discovered "a teacher after my own mind" (97a-d).

But later Socrates discovered that he was wrong about Anaxagoras. Instead of explaining how each thing in the universe is ordered by Mind for what is best, Anaxagoras explained things through material causes such as air and water. For Socrates this can't be right. He observes:

"To me this seemed most similar to that of somebody who--after saying that Socrates does everything he does by mind and then venturing to assign the causes of each of the things I do--should first say that I'm now sitting here because my body's composed of bones and sinews, and because bones are solid and have joints keeping them separate from one another, while sinews are such as to tense and relax and also wrap the bones all around along with the flesh and skin that holds them together. Then since the bones swing in their sockets, the sinews, by relaxing and tensing, make me able, I suppose, to bend my limbs right now--and it's through this cause that I'm sitting here with my legs bent. And again, as regards my conversing with you, he might assign other causes of this sort, holding voices and air and sounds and a thousand other such things responsible, and not taking care to assign the true causes--that since Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here and more just to stay put and endure whatever penalty they order. Since--by the Dog--these sinews and bones of mine would, I think, long ago have been in Megara or Boetia, swept off by an opinion about what's best, if I didn't think it more just and more beautiful, rather than fleeing and playing the runaway, to endure whatever penalty the city should order" (98c-99a).

The explanations through physical causes correctly describe the necessary material conditions for what Socrates is doing. But they don't explain the true cause of his actions here, which is his opinion about what it's best for him to do.

Socrates goes on to report that his frustration with Anaxagoras led him to undertake a "second sailing" in search for the causes of things. Instead of looking directly into beings, like those who blind themselves by trying to look directly at the sun during an eclipse, he decided to study the accounts or arguments (logoi) that people make about being, like those who look at the sun's reflection in water. This is what some have called the "Socratic turn" away from studying natural science to philosophical conversations about what people think about the world, which includes a turn towards moral and political philosophy.

But many modern biologists would agree with Socrates in criticizing the inadequacy of materialist reductionism. Consider, for example, Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the last century, who writes:

"The conceptual framework of biology is entirely different from that of the physical sciences and cannot be reduced to it. . . . The courtship of a male animal, for instance, can be described in the language and conceptual framework of the physical sciences (locomotion, energy turnover, metabolic processes, and so on), but it can also be described in the framework of behavioral and reproductive biology. And the latter description and explanation cannot be reduced to theories of the physical sciences. Such biological phenomena as species, competition, mimicry, territory, migration, and hibernation are among the thousands of examples of organismic phenomena for which a purely physical description is at best incomplete if not irrelevant" (Toward a New Philosophy of Biology [1988], p. 18).

One of the irreducible features of biological explanations, Mayr argues, is teleology--or at least the kind of teleology that Mayr identifies as "teleonomy." Mayr observes:

"Goal-directed behavior (in the widest sense of this word) is extremely widespread in the organic world; for instance, most activity connected with migration, food-getting, courtship, ontogeny, and all phases of reproduction is characterized by such goal orientation. The occurrence of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the world of living organisms" (p. 45).

"Teleonomy" is Mayr's term for the idea that such goal-directedness is guided by a genetic "program" that has ultimately been shaped by evolutionary history.

For animals with nervous systems and brains, some of this goal-directed behavior can be steered by cognition. Some animals can act voluntarily in so far as they are conscious of their goals. Human beings can act deliberately in so far as they have the cognitive capacity to aim at their goals in the light of past experience and future expectations. As Darwin saw, human beings are moral animals because they can deliberately act under the guidance of their moral sense of what is best for them.

Modern Darwinian biology is not reductionist, because it recognizes the irreducible, emergent complexity of the living world, which shows teleological behavior and mental causality. And yet there is no basis in this biology for cosmic teleology--for the idea that the cosmos as a whole is directed by some intelligent cause to some goal or purpose.

As Socrates indicates in the Phaedo, the idea that Mind rules the cosmos and orders it to good ends is an inference from our introspective human experience of mental deliberation and intentional choice. While Darwinian biologists can accept the idea of intentional order in the behavior of animals with some cognitive capacity for intentional behavior, they cannot accept the projection of this intentionality onto the whole universe.

As I have suggested in some previous posts, it's not clear whether Plato (or Plato's Socrates) endorses cosmic teleology. That Socrates was so attracted to the idea of Mind ruling the cosmos suggests an inclination in that direction. And the Timaeus would seem to lay out the cosmic teleology--the ordering of the cosmos by a divine craftsman looking to the eternal ideas of perfection--that Socrates had hoped would come from Anaxagoras. But the silence of Socrates during Timaeus's speech and the ridiculously implausible assertions in Timaeus' "likely story" leave careful readers wondering whether Plato endorses any conception of the cosmos as ordered by Mind for some cosmic purpose.

Nietzsche, Darwin, and Christian Morality

It is remarkable that religious believers who fear Darwinian science as a threat to religious morality can quote Friedrich Nietzsche as supporting their position. I have noticed, for example, that whenever I defend a Darwinian conception of morality, some religious believers will remind me of what Nietzsche said about David Strauss and George Eliot.

Nietzsche's long essay on "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873) was published as the first of four essays collected under the title Untimely Meditations. It is a scornful attack on Strauss's book The Old Faith and the New.

In 1835, Strauss's book The Life of Jesus provoked intense criticism and even violence against him, because he denied the historical reality of Jesus and argued that he was a purely mythical creation of the early Christian community. (This book was translated from the German into English by George Eliot in 1846.) Nietzsche's reading of the book as a theology student in 1864-65 helped to convince him to reject his Christian faith and to refuse to take communion at Easter 1865.

The Old Faith and the New extends Strauss's reasoning by rejecting any conception of a personal God and by arguing that the moral teaching of Christianity can be preserved as part of the "new faith" in Darwinian science.

Nietzsche dismisses Strauss as a foolish philistine who does not understand that in rejecting Christianity, he has rejected the foundation for a Christian morality of universal love that cannot be sustained by Darwinian science. Strauss does not realize, according to Nietzsche, that a truly Darwinian ethic would be based on a Hobbesian "war of all against all" with the rule of the stronger over the weaker. Instead, Strauss declares: "Do not ever forget that you are a man and not a mere creature of nature: do not ever forget that all others are likewise men, that is to say, with all their individual differences the same as you, with the same needs and demands as you--that is the epitome of all morality." But this ignores the fact that, according to Darwin, man is "precisely a creature of nature and nothing else."

Moreover, Nietzsche notes, Strauss fails to see that Darwinian science does not support his metaphysical belief in the moral character of the cosmos, his belief "that everything proceeds according to eternal laws out of the one primeval source of all life, all reason and all goodness--that is the epitome of religion." By contrast, Nietzsche explains: "Modern natural science and study of history have nothing whatever to do with the Straussian faith in the cosmos."

In the Twilight of the Idols (ix.5), Nietzsche makes the same point in ridiculing George Eliot:

"G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.

"We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth--it stands or falls with faith in God.

"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English moraltiy has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem."

But notice the crucial assumption here in Nietzsche's reasoning--his agreement with those Christians who claim that human beings cannot know what is good for them unless they receive Christian morality as a command from God. I reject this assumption, because I believe that human beings can know what is good for them from their natural moral experience. And in rejecting Nietzsche's assumption, I also reject his conclusion--that Christian morality cannot rightly be sustained if one no longer believes in the Christian God.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin says that "to do good unto others--to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you--is the foundation-stone of morality," and he claims that even primitive human beings might act according to this principle as impelled by "the love of praise and the dread of blame," because they care about how they appear to others (1:165). He writes: "The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need not say anything on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to show that the social instincts--the prime principle of man's moral constitution--with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule. 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;' and this lies at the foundation of morality" (1:106).

That Darwin here quotes the statement of the golden rule from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12) might be taken by Nietzsche as evidence for his assertion that Christian morality depends on Christian faith. But notice that Darwin presents this rule as flowing "naturally" from human experience as combining social instincts, social habits, and intellectual activity. In referring to the social instincts as "the prime principle of man's moral constitution," Darwin has a footnote citing Marcus Aurelius, which suggests that the recognition of this moral sociality does not depend on Christian theology. Elsewhere in the Descent, Darwin explains the golden rule as a conclusion from the human experience of reciprocity--the natural tendency of human beings to respond in kind, rewarding those they trust and punishing those they don't. Consequently, when Jesus states the golden rule, he is not commanding something that human beings could not have figured out for themselves. Rather, he is reinforcing a lesson of human practical experience. Given our evolved human nature as social animals, our socially evolved habituation, and our intellectual powers for reflecting on our natural inclinations and social habits, we can understand the wisdom of the golden rule as "the foundation of morality."

Religious belief can reinforce our recognition of moral principles such as the golden rule, and that's why, as Darwin indicates, religion is important for moral history as contributing to our moral habituation. But still that morality can stand on its own natural ground even without any specific religious doctrines.

That's why I disagree with those like John Hare, Carson Holloway, and Peter Lawler, who agree with Nietzsche that there is no natural ground for Christian moral principles like the golden rule. (As I have indicated in some recent posts, it was only in his "middle period" that Nietzsche could see how morality could be rooted in evolved human nature without any need for a transcendent moral cosmology.)

A couple of previous posts on these points can be found here and here.

How Nietzsche's Pietism Overturned His Darwinism

As Nietzsche fell into madness at the beginning of January in 1889, he wrote and mailed a series of letters. A letter to Peter Gast was only one sentence: "Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy." It was signed "The Crucified." Other letters were signed "Dionysus."

To many readers, it seems odd that Nietzsche--the self-proclaimed "Antichrist" who announced the death of God--would use such religious imagery and identify himself with Jesus and the god Dionysus. We might dismiss this as only a manifestation of his madness. But the signs of religiosity appear throughout Nietzsche's early and late writings. For example, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche professes his "faith" in the belief "that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole." And he declares: "Such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus" (ix.49).

One doesn't see this religiosity in the writings of Nietzsche's "middle period." In Human, All Too Human and Dawn, he strives for a Darwinian philosophy based on a scientific history of evolution. Rejecting all metaphysical and religious philosophy grounded on the idea of a cosmic teleology of eternal moral order, Nietzsche works from the thought that "everything has evolved: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths" (HATH, 2). Even though there are no eternal truths, a properly historical science can discover the "humble truths" of historical development.

Nietzsche believes that modern science continues the skeptical spirit of the Socratic tradition. He acknowledges, however, that most human beings cannot live the skeptical life of a Socratic "free spirit," because they yearn for transcendent truths and transcendent values that are absolute and eternal. Religions such as Christianity satisfy the transcendental longings of human beings to be redeemed from ordinary earthly existence so that they can feel an ecstatic rapture in the prospect of entering an eternal realm of perfect bliss. In Human, All Too Human, he speaks of this need for redemption as an "artificial" or "acquired" need that was cultivated by the Christian church in the Middle Ages, and he suggests that a future society might eliminate this need while serving "the common true needs of all men" (HATH, 27, 476). But Nietzsche also indicates that this need for redemption has become so strong that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art. Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music (such as Wagner's operas) that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines. Indeed, romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art (130-31, 150-53).

But then, as Nietzsche began writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, he seemed himself to fall under "the magic of religious feeling." In Human, All Too Human, he had warned against the "cult of the genius," based on the "religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of superhuman [ubermenschlichen] origin," and that they have some deep insight into reality (164). But then Zarathustra proclaims the "superhuman" or "overman" as the redeemer. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looks to "the redeeming human of the great love and contempt," to "this human of the future who will redeem us from the previous ideal," and he foresees: "this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this Anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness--he must some day come" (II, 24).

In his middle writings, Nietzsche came under the influence of Darwinian science, which overturned the romantic metaphysics and religiosity of The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. But, then, beginning in 1883, he returned to some of the religious and metaphysical propensities of those early writings. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, he had warned that scientific history--and particularly, Darwinian evolutionary history--was dangerous to life, because this "science of universal becoming" denied the eternal meaning of life as supported by belief in a cosmic teleology. He indicated that there were only two possible antidotes to this intellectual poison. The "unhistorical" antidote would require forgetting history and enclosing one's cultural life within a bounded horizon. The "suprahistorical" antidote would depend on "the powers that lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and recurring, towards art and religion." The problem is that science "sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal; it likewise lives in a profound antagonism towards the eternalizing powers of art and religion." And thus science "robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal" (4, 9-10).

After going through his middle period devoted to historical or evolutionary science, Nietzsche in his later writings returned to his earlier fear of science as subversive of life as he looked to "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" as the only way to restore meaning to life.

In Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche--the first book on Nietzsche's writings--she explained this history of his writing as showing his struggle with a "religious drive" that he could never shake off. On the one hand, he denied the God in whom he had devotedly believed in his Lutheran household. On the other hand, he needed to replace that orthodox religion with a new religion of Dionysus and the Overman. She thought that only in his middle writings--during the time of his deep friendships with Paul Ree and herself--did Nietzsche achieve a position of scientific skepticism free of religious ideas.

In Bruce Benson's recent book Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (2008), Salome's reading of Nietzsche as tormented by the conflict between his religious longings and his denial of God is deepened and made more precise. Benson shows how Nietzsche moved from the Christian Pietism of his youth to the Dionysian Pietism of his philosophic works. Far from being godless, he moved from one god to another.

As a child, Nietzsche was shaped by Lutheran Pietism, in which Christian faith is understood as a matter of the heart rather than the head, because to have a right relationship with God one must have a childlike trust in God that does not depend upon doctrinal propositions. As an adult, Nietzsche rejected Christian Pietism, because he denied the Christian God. But his Dionysian religion is a kind of Pietism in requiring a childlike trust in life, a joyful acceptance of life that allows him to say "yes and amen" to life.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche affirms: "Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and made sacred by the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective survival through reproduction, through the mysteries of sexuality. . . . All this is signified by the name Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian rites. In them, the deepest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is experienced religiously--the very way to life, reproduction, as the holy way" (x.4). Nietzsche's Dionysian religion is pietistic in the sense that it requires a change of heart--perhaps through music and dance--that will allow him to say "Yes and Amen" to everything in life, which would be "an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life" (WP 1050).

Benson succeeds in laying out the character of Nietzsche's Dionysian Pietism. But one major weakness in his book is that he fails to contrast this religious longing as it appears in Nietzsche's early and later writings with his evolutionary science as it appears in his middle writings. Salome sees this contrast, as Benson does not. And so Salome shows how Nietzsche might have freed himself from religious mysticism if he had adhered to the scientific stance of Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science.

Did Nietzsche really become a faithful follower of Dionysus? In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Dionysian rapture: "Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up and away into the air above. His gestures speak of his enchantment. . . . he feels himself to be a god, he himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams" (BT 1). Franz Overbeck reports that in the early days of Nietzsche's insanity, he danced and improvised music at his piano, telling his friends that he could only express his feelings in music.

Perhaps Nietzsche did finally achieve ecstatic union with his god Dionysus by giving up his reason and being swallowed up in madness.

Nietzsche and Darwin

For a long time, it has been hard for me to understand Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to Darwin and Darwinism.

On the one hand, Nietzsche seems to embrace Darwinism in declaring that everything has evolved--including human nature--because what appears fixed is the evolutionary product of selection carried out long before the 4,000 years of history that we are familiar with. So, there are "no eternal facts." Moreover, he seems to agree with Darwin in denying any cosmic teleology, in affirming that there is no purpose, no reason, no divinity in the apparent design of the cosmos, because it has all emerged by natural evolution. Human values, therefore, cannot be rooted in any cosmic order of rational or divine intention. Rather, values arise as the evolved conditions for human life.

On the other hand, Nietzsche often criticizes Darwin and Darwinians (especially Herbert Spencer) for failing to see that life is governed not by a "struggle for existence" but a "will to power," and for failing to see that apparently altruistic behavior is ultimately egoistic. Moreover, in arguing for the "will to power" as a cosmic force that rules the whole universe, Nietzsche seems to assume a cosmic, vitalistic teleology that contradicts his acceptance of the Darwinian attack on cosmic teleology. His teleological conception of the "will to power" resembles Leibniz's pan-animism, which manifests the influence of the cosmic teleology in Plato's Timaeus.

My thinking about this has been helped by some recent books--particularly, Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (2002), John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (2004), and Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree.

Moore's book is a "historical" study of how Nietzsche's biological thinking was shaped by the biological ideas that he picked up from his extensive reading of nineteenth-century science. Richardson's book is a "philosophical" study of how Nietzsche's ideas can be made plausible by putting them into a Darwinian framework, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself never lays it out in this way. Small's book is a "biographical" study of how Nietzsche's thinking about Darwinism was influenced by his friendships with Paul Ree and Lou Salome. (Nietzsche, Ree, and Salome called themselves the "holy trinity" when they were trying to set themselves up as a household of free spirits who would share ideas and perhaps more. This strange menage-a-trois was made famous by the picture they staged in May, 1882, with Nietzsche and Ree pulling Salome in a cart with her holding a whip. That explains the true meaning of Nietzsche's remark about "when you go to a woman, take a whip"!)

There is no evidence that Nietzsche read any of Darwin's major writings, although it is probable that he read Darwin's article "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant." But Nietzsche did pick up Darwinian ideas from his reading of Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism, Spencer's Data of Ethics, John Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, and Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics. He learned a lot about Darwinian ethics and psychology from Ree, whose writings lay out a Darwinian view of morality as a product of natural evolution. He also read extensively and carefully various books by scientific critics of Darwinism.

Nietzsche's acceptance of a Darwinian view of the cosmos and human nature as products of evolutionary history is clearest in his writings in the "middle period" of his life--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science. This was the period of his close friendships with Ree and Salome, who reinforced Nietzsche's interest in natural science and especially Darwinian science.

In both their style and their content, these middle writings are more moderate and sensible than Nietzsche's early and late writings. This sensible moderation comes from a Darwinian naturalism that is free from the romantic transcendentalism of his early writings or the ecstatic poetry and cosmic teleology of the "will to power" in his later writings.

Richardson does a wonderful job in restating Nietzsche's ideas in the most systematic and cogent manner by putting them into the framework of a Darwinian science that works through three levels of selection--natural selection, social selection, and self selection. Natural selection explains innate animal values. Social selection explains acquired human values. Self selection explains the possibility for a superhuman transvaluation of values by heroic individuals.

Richardson concedes that Nietzsche himself never lays out his thinking in precisely this way. But Richardson's argument is that this is the best way to make Nietzsche's thinking plausible.

Although I agree with much of what Richardson claims, I disagree on various points. First, he insists that the Nietzschean account of "social selection" and "self selection" goes beyond the Darwinian inclination to reduce everything to natural selection. But I would argue that Darwin and the Darwinian tradition generally recognizes the importance of social selection through cultural learning and self selection through individual judgment. These three levels correspond to what I have analyzed as a hierarchy of natural order, customary order, and deliberate order. In the study of morality, this would correspond to the three levels of moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Similarly, Frans de Waal distinguishes the three levels as moral sentiments, social pressure, and judgment/reasoning. (Occasionally, Richardson himself acknowledges that Darwin allows for social evolution through cultural learning and that this is an important part of modern coevolutionary theorizing.)

Although a Darwinian science recognizes "self selection" in the deliberate judgments exercised by individuals, it also recognizes that this deliberate choosing is constrained both by nature and by culture. This recognition of the severe restraints on the self-choosing freedom of even the most "free spirits" is evident in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. But this moderation falls away in his later writings as he looks up to the superhuman freedom of the "overman." Occasionally, Richardson admits that freedom as self selection is never complete or absolutely unbounded (103, 115-16, 170, 188-89, 215, 218, 261, 267, 270). I would stress this point. And I would also stress that the extremism of Nietzsche's later writings comes from a tendency to heroic transcendentalism that ignores the sober limits on human nature and human society that are prominent in the more Darwinian stance of his middle writings.

Richardson sees that the "dominant" view of "will to power" in Nietzsche's writings assumes, at least implicitly, a cosmic teleology and anthropomorphism in which a cosmic mind rules over all. I agree with Richardson that a "recessive" view of "will to power" as a product of natural selection would be more plausible. We could say then that the natural disposition of living beings to expand, increase, and dominate--to enhance their power--has arisen by evolution because it enhanced their fitness. The desire for power is teleological, because it is directed to ends or goals, but the teleology here is immanent rather than cosmic. This desire is not the product of some cosmic intelligent design such as that set forth in Plato's Timaeus. This desire can be explained as the product of a selective process--natural selection working on inherited variations and social selection working on cultural variations--that does not itself have any "purpose."

Nietzsche's inclination in his early and late writings towards a cosmic teleology of eternal values reflects the religious longings seen by Salome. In his middle writings, he shook off those religious longings under the influence of Darwinian science. But they returned in his later writings. So, for example, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human declares that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts" (sec. 2). But the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil looks to "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (sec. 230).

In his article on Beyond Good and Evil, Leo Strauss stresses the importance of this appeal to eternal human nature. This raises the question of whether Strauss--like Nietzsche--yearned for an eternal cosmic order that would support human values.

In his Untimely Meditations (ii.9), Nietzsche worries: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines which I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future."

Some of the Straussians agree with Nietzsche's fear of the deadliness of Darwinian science. For example, Harvey Mansfield warns: "Darwin was not a nihilist, but he prepared his generation and later generations for nihilism. His theory of evolution not only denied the eternity of the species but also undermined all eternities, all permanence of meaning" (Manliness, 83). Mansfield presents the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt as a rebellion against the Darwinian teaching that there is no purposeful and eternal cosmic order of nature to provide standards for human excellence and importance (86, 89, 93, 105, 111, 121). Nietzsche looks to the manliness of the "overman" (Ubermensch), while TR looks to the manliness of the "leader" (Fuhrer).

But isn't there something dangerous about the extremism of this vision of redemptive leadership? Far more healthy, I suggest, is the moderation of Nietzsche's Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human.