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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment