Thursday, May 21, 2020
What would Nietzsche have thought of the rise of sociobiology? (from 2013)
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. Science working with religion and art can unite the
Alexandrian and Dionysian cultures. Theological materialism can revive myth-religion, this time it is the Alexandrian which can save
us. The God first seen inwardly is now the
Godhood evolved to outwardly applying religion and science.
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