Thursday, April 25, 2013

What would Nietzsche think of sociobiology?


In his early notebooks Nietzsche wrote: “My task is to comprehend the internal coherence and necessity of every true culture.” The study of sociobiology since Nietzsche has more or less done that.

Sociobiology would probably be what Nietzsche called “Socratic-Alexandrian” rather than “Tragic-Dionysian,” which is not the direction early Nietzsche thought Germany (and the West?) needed to go to save culture.  Postmodernism seems to begin here and has not been able to get past Nietzsche's solution.  Nietzsche preferred the Tragic-Dionysian as more true to human nature and human culture, and he thought science was not up to the task of defining the real truths of life. But sociobiology has excellently defined and explained human nature and human culture. What we need is a new field to help make cultural sense of the sociobiological perspective in human nature and culture, call it philosophical sociobiology.

What would Nietzsche think of sociobiology? I think he would have been courageous enough to affirm it, but he would have expanded it into the humanities, which also happens to be what the founder of sociobiology, E.O.Wilson has called for. Sociobiology also points toward another recurring theme of early Nietzsche's, the necessity of a “master of drives” and an “exalted and overall transfiguring goal.” The reflections in this blog have pointed in that direction regarding theological materialism and the Evolutionary Church, which brings sociobiology into new/old religion, even as we have kept the old intellectual intuition and the old faith somewhat independent from science, yet open to future scientific synthesis.

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