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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