Friday, April 19, 2013
What would Nietzsche have thought of the rise of “Alexandrian” sociobiology?
According to Quentin Taylor and others, early
Nietzsche hoped that the Germans could find a culture analogous to
his beloved Hellenics (not copy it), and they could do this by doing
as the Greeks did: preserving the values of real life over all the
pseudo-needs of knowledge for knowledge sake, or by not spending so
much time on gaining knowledge of the cultures that surrounded them,
Persians, Egypt etc. This would mean bringing unity to diversity, or
“harmonious manifoldness.” Nietzsche rejected the
Socratic-Alexandrian and affirmed the Tragic-Dionysian believing that
the Germans had gotten lost in Alexandrian specialization and
scholarship, they were mere “pupils of declining antiquity.”
But what would Nietzsche have thought
of the rise of “Alexandrian” sociobiology, which has done just
what he asked for in modern times, organized the chaos of
scholarship, found the values of real life, let go of the pseudo
explanations of culture and life. Now what is needed, as E. O.Wilson pointed out, is for sociobiology to enter the humanities,
which have become almost completely divided from real human nature
and real life.
Science, specifically sociobiology, can
save culture when it is also seen as an aid of our sacred
evolution to Godhood in the cosmos. This is where I part company with Nietzsche, as well as the Traditionalist School; science working with religion
and art can unite the Alexandrian and Dionysian cultures. Theological materialism can revive myth-religion, but
not in the way Nietzsche preferred, this time it is the Alexandrian
which can save us, in place of the Dionysian. The God first seen inwardly is now the Godhood evolved to outwardly applying religion and science.
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