The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Other scholars suggest that Romanticism should not be considered a predecessor of Darwinism, stressing Darwin’s roots in British society, or emphasizing the non-Darwiniancharacter of these evolutionary views.28 They claim that the romantic vision of archetypes is merely a conceptual idea, the variations are not understood as modifications via common descent.29 A causal explanation of adaptation in mechanical terms and of transmutation is certainly missing. Teleological ideas of a directed nisus formativus are linked to Romanticism, even hindering the acceptance of Darwin’s theory in many German biologists up until the end of the nineteenth Century.30 Thus these and similar evolutionary views focusing on ‘developmental evolution’ (understood as directed towards goals or ideal types) have even been labelled Pseudo-Darwinism.31

  Darwin himself, however, included Goethe as one of the many ‘predecessors’ of his views in his introduction to the third edition of the Origin of Species. Darwin therefore understands his own theory as a gradual modification of pre-existing evolutionary ideas: Darwin’s novelty lies, one might argue, not so much in promoting the conception of transmutation itself, but in offering a clear scientific argument for a ‘mechanism’ (natural selection) of evolution and adaptation. From this perspective, the Romantic conception of nature could be considered an intermediate position between the static preordained conception of Entwicklung and the modern understanding of a random, open Evolution.

  34.5 HEGEL

  Hegel puts Entwicklung des Geistes, the unfolding of spirit, at the centre of his philosophy. Already his Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) describes the ‘Erfahrungen des Bewußtseins’, the experiential stages of the mind, on its way from different and deficient epistemic stances towards absolute knowledge. The later system of Hegel complements this perspective with the interpretation of reality as an unfolding of absolute spirit.

  Throughout his Science of Logic (1812–16) Hegel criticizes traditional conceptions of the Absolute as Being or Substance and replaces them with his concept of Subjectivity, a complex unity of Identity and Difference, Being and Essence. The Absolute Idea is characterized as a ‘process’ of ‘self-realization’ via ‘self-negation’ and is therefore intrinsically dynamic. While Hegel at the end of his Logic hints at a ‘transition’ of the Absolute Idea to nature, nature itself is for Hegel essentially void of real development. Hegel emphasizes that his Naturphilosophie in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, 18272, 18303) reconstructs the categories or types of structures that we encounter in nature. He then tries to show how each type compels our thinking to move on to a higher level of natural organization due to inherent contradictions in these categories. Hegel rejects, however, the idea of a dynamic, ascending evolution of the realms of nature; he further explicitly follows the scientific majority of his time in denying biological evolution (Encyclopedia, §249). Hegel asserts in a Kantian fashion that development, understood as an intentional, goal directed unfolding and transition, is a hallmark of the mind, not a characteristic of nature. Hegel reserves the German word Entwicklung explicitly for logical categories and cultural history, that is, for the ‘movement of spirit’. Dialectical movement and the causal reality of nature are separated.32

  At least two ideas in Hegel, however, come close to a modern evolutionary view of nature. Hegel compellingly reconstructs how categories that are crucial for our understanding of nature could be conceptually transformed into each other. The transition from substantiality via causality and interdependency (‘Wechselwirkung’) to (organic) purposiveness in his Logic constitutes a conversion that helps to bridge the conceptual gap between mechanical and organic versions of causality. Secondly, he remarks in the Encyclopedia, echoing Schelling’s ideas, that a chemical process capable of ‘unifying’ the two ‘external dualities’ of ‘educt’ and ‘product’ would be a self-sustaining chemical process, and therefore would be ‘live’.33 The tension, however, between Hegel’s explicit statement of a static nature and his overall metaphorical and dynamic description of the ascending realms of natural complexity remains difficult to resolve. The issue did, nevertheless, inspire F. Engels’ later materialistic conceptions of an overall dialectic of nature (posthumously 1925). Just as strongly as Hegel stresses the ‘fluid’ and transitory nature of conceptual oppositions, Hegel also notes the essential categorical difference of organic life from mechanical and chemical processes, a separation that evokes vitalistic associations.34

  Some modern researches have nevertheless equated Hegel’s implicit dynamism in his Naturphilosophie with an evolutionary worldview. John Niemeyer Findlay’s Hegel: A Re-Examination assumes that Hegel only rejects those versions of evolution discussed in his time and would have embraced Darwinism.35 Similarly, it has been pointed out that the modern dynamic picture of nature fits much better into Hegel’s system than the static views of his time.36 S. Houlgate rejects the claim that Hegel is an evolutionist thinker; but while Hegel’s teleological stance is often seen as being incompatible with Darwinism, Houlgate argues that Hegel’s connection of necessity and chance as the two principles of nature (Encyclopedia, §248) might nonetheless fit very well into a certain interpretation of evolution.37

  While Hegel explicitly rejects organic evolution, there can be no doubt about his dynamic conception of cultural development. Understanding each culture’s people and their philosophy, art, religion, and political realities both in their specific historic situations and as a part of an unfolding (ascending) line of ideas characterizes Hegel’s approach to culture. The penultimate goal of reality is the realization of the self-knowledge of spirit ‘in theory’ (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1833–6, posthumously) and the establishment of lawful freedom in the modern state ‘in practical reality’ (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1821; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1837, posthumously).

  For Hegel, much as with Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, world history is a successive unfolding of freedom. Any culture that instantiates the highest possible political realization of freedom in a given time dominates world history, but only until a necessary transition to higher forms of freedom emerges. Therefore, there is no linear progress; instead the philosophy of history has to interpret progress as dialectically mediated through conflicts and regressions. Hegel divides the history of the world into different stages according to different degrees of freedom, from the ‘Oriental World’ through the ‘Greek-Roman World’ to the ‘Christian-Germanic world’, that is, from a despotic age where only the tyrant is free to the declaration of universal freedom and its institutionalization in modern society. In this conception, world history becomes a ‘Weltgericht’ (world court) that pushes the ‘historic individuals’ and ‘subjects of history’, independently of their own individual intentions and goals (‘List der Vernunft’, Cunning of Reason), towards a further realization of freedom.

  Hegel’s formation of the development of Absolute Spirit—art, religion, and philosophy—shows a similarly optimistic teleological pattern. Philosophy is the highest form of self-understanding and interpretation of the Absolute. Hegel claims that all domains of Absolute Spirit aim at an expression and understanding of the Absolute. Therefore, art is surpassed as the highest dominant way to truth once philosophy comes of age (Lectures on Aesthetics, 1835–8, posthumously).

  Hegel’s vision of overall cultural development in all the realms of political and cultural history, with all its hierarchies and evaluations of reality in accordance with the standard of ‘Reason’, is the most striking paradigm of the enlightened teleological idea of Entwicklung. This vision has influenced apologetic theories of the West up to our own times (see, for example, Francis Fukuyama’s, The End of History and the Last Man),38 and underlies Marxist ideas of progressive dialectical history. But Hegel’s teleological cultural optimism could also be used in Eurocentric discourses and therefore attracts polemic attacks in post-modern and post-colonial approaches. Hegel’s conception of cultural development elaborates and epitomizes idealistic philosophy’s model o
f history to the fullest possible extent. It is at the same time the last significant cultural model of a guided Entwicklung in German philosophy. Its overwhelming optimism and finality is rooted in its metaphysical background, a background which will disappear in the less logo-centric, less idealistic, and more materialistic post-Hegelian philosophies.

  34.6 SCHOPENHAUER

  With Schopenhauer and Nietzsche radically different models of reality, and thus of nature, enter the stage. The assumed priority of spirit over matter is slowly but profoundly replaced by views that will eventually turn the ontological hierarchy of the idealistic approaches upside down, culminating in the popularity of ‘materialistic’ philosophies. While, as mentioned earlier in section 34.4, connections between idealistic philosophies and Darwin’s theory have been discussed only very recently, similarities in the general worldviews of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Darwin have been pointed out almost since the moment when these philosophies and Darwinism became popular in Germany.

  Schopenhauer dies in 1860 and thus cannot incorporate Darwin’s theory in his work.39 Schopenhauer, however, is mentioned in later editions of Darwin’s Descent of Man: in the twentieth chapter Darwin approvingly refers to Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the importance of the erotic drive, citing from a scholarly article that compares ‘Schopenhauer and Darwinism’, by David Asher.40

  Early on, comparisons between Schopenhauer and a ‘Darwinian worldview’ were drawn: see Ludwig Noiré’s Der monistische Gedanke: eine Concordanz der Philosophie Schopenhauer's, Darwin's, R. Mayer’s und L. Geiger’s.41 Emerich DuMont, Der Fortschritt im Lichte der Lehren Schopenhauer's und Darwin's contemplates the similarities in the visions of progress in both thinkers.42 Arthur O. Lovejoy discusses ‘Schopenhauer as an Evolutionist’ in The Monist.43 A semi-popular book of the same year linking Schopenhauer’s pessimism to Darwin’s view was published in Germany by Gustav Weng: Schopenhauer—Darwin; Pessimismus oder Optimismus?44 The newest research typically fosters the view that while Schopenhauer rejects biological transmutation he still anticipates to a striking degree some important aspects of modern evolutionary approaches in neurobiological epistemology, and especially in Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology.45

  While Schopenhauer, as noted, rejects the idea of a transmutation of species and of an origin of life from mechanical or chemical forces alone, his emphasis on struggle, competition, and the transience of individual organisms is at the centre of comparisons to Darwin’s picture of nature. Schopenhauer believes, like the romantic philosophers, in a unity of nature but this unity does not imply that all categorical differences or forces within nature can or should be reduced; Schopenhauer rejects mechanical reductionism, emphasizes the special nature of organisms, understands the species as realizing eternal Platonic ideas, and quotes Kant’s dictum about the Newton of the blade of grass (The World as Will and Representation [1819](=WWR), I.2, §26). Like Kant, however, he distinguishes the inevitable need for a causal natural explanation of events in science from a philosophical interpretation of nature.

  Schopenhauer connects two ideas in his philosophy. Epistemologically speaking, the world we see is a ‘representation’. Schopenhauer follows Kant’s approach in proclaiming that the subject structures reality (WWR, I): the spatial-temporal structure of reality and the plurality of individual objects and events are a ‘creation’ of the subject. What is revolutionary—and one might argue rather inconsistent—is his combination of this Transzendentalphilosophie with a ‘physiological approach’ to epistemology, a move that anticipates later materialistic stances. Ontologically speaking, the world is an expression of ‘the Will’: from this perspective the body and the brain are ‘incarnations’ of the Will, and therefore the world that we see is a creation of our brain. Schopenhauer proclaims in On the Will in Nature (1836): ‘It is not an intellect that has produced nature, but nature that has produced the intellect’. Schopenhauer states that he wants to overcome the ‘Grundirrthum aller Philosophen’ (WWR, II, ch. 19), the basic mistake of all traditional philosophers: the Will is different from, even opposed to, the intellect, and the intellect is secondary; it is a tool for the Will that aims at sustaining existence and procreation. The Will itself is blind; it simply craves existence, or ‘life’.

  Early on, his description of the relation between individuals and species in the organic realm (and in humans) was in particular understood as resembling a ‘Darwinian picture’ of nature. The species aims at self-preservation and the transient individual is only a tool whose existence is dominated by the drive for replication and survival (WWR, I. §§27, 28, II. chs. 20 and 42). ‘So sehen wir in der Natur überall Streit, Kampf und Wechsel des Sieges […]’ (WWR, I. §27) (‘Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, battle, and the alteration of victory’). The struggle in nature for ‘matter’ and realization, that is, existence, is also sketched at the end of §28. What we humans call love, Schopenhauer proclaims in his famous ‘metaphysics of love’, is a trick of the blind Will for existence (WWR, II. ch. 44): love is based on the illusory belief that what is only advantageous for the species is also good for the individual and should therefore be his aim. This competition in life, however, does not lead to progress; it only breeds suffering.

  With Schopenhauer a specific connection of naturalism and pessimism, and therefore implicitly of Darwinism and pessimism, enters the German stage. The inherited Cartesian–Kantian opposition of mechanical nature and freedom of the mind or spirit continues in Schopenhauer, but the metaphysical hierarchy is now beginning to be transformed.

  34.7 NIETZSCHE

  Nietzsche is the first influential German philosopher to explicitly react to Darwinian ideas. Nietzsche’s relation to Darwin is complex: while some readings stress the Anti-Darwinism of Nietzsche,46 based on Nietzsche’s scathingly blunt criticism of Darwin and the ‘damnable Anglomania of modern Ideas’ (see esp. Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 252 and 253), others link Nietzsche’s views to an evolutionary ‘Darwinian worldview’.47 This debate is further complicated by the controversial question of to what degree Nietzsche’s ideas contributed to the rise of Social Darwinism and Power Positivism in Nazi Germany. Criticism condemning Nietzsche includes, famously, Georg Lukács’s Von Nietzsche zu Hitler oder: Der Irrationalismus und die deutsche Politik;48 as well as similar short critical remarks in Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies;49 see also Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain.50 Alternatively, Nietzsche’s anti-collectivist stance and his rejection of German Nationalism and Anti-Semitism (Beyond Good and Evil, 251) is emphasized in Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (eds.), Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Use and Abuse of a Philosophy.51

  Summarizing recently published interpretations by Moore, Richardson, and Johnson,52 it seems plausible to separate Nietzsche’s overt attacks against Darwin, whom he lumps together with other ‘modern’ British thinkers, from more striking general similarities that connect some of Nietzsche’s own ideas to a broadly understood Darwinian worldview. While Nietzsche probably did not study Darwin’s book,53 following Richardson (2004) he should be reconstructed as a Darwinian naturalistic thinker54 who focuses on genealogical perspectives, drawing radical consequences from the new evolutionary worldview. According to this account, Nietzsche only rejects a certain naive and moralistic interpretation of Darwinism that he encounters in Herbert Spencer (and similarly in the combination of materialism and conventional ethics in thinkers like David Friedrich Strauß, and in Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism) which Nietzsche equates with Darwin’s own views. Nietzsche deems such a combination of traditional ethics, teleological ideas, and radical evolutionism incompatible. Nietzsche no longer aims at reconciling the historicism and related perspectivism of his genealogical accounts with traditional philosophical claims of moral objectivity, absolute truth or essentialist ideas.55 Quite on the contrary, the two camps of ‘eternal reason’ and ‘causal change in nature’, which were separated by Kant and harm
onized by the Idealists, are now pitted against each other.

  Similar to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche emphasizes the primacy of ‘life’ over ‘intellect’ and over conventional ethical values (see already On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1874 = second Untimely Meditation), a stance that Richardson56 equates with modern evolutionary approaches. Repeatedly in his works, Nietzsche uses the oppositions of healthy and sick to describe worldviews that either foster or suffocate human vitality.57 From The Birth of Tragedy (1872) up to his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), ‘Socratic’ intellectual optimism and conventional ethical values are attacked as being opposed to life, vitality, and health. Accordingly, Nietzsche remains fascinated by the phenomenon of (cultural) degeneration and decadence58 and conversely by the possibility of a radical enhancement of human nature, culminating in his opposition of the letzte Mensch and the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5).

  Nietzsche is the first major thinker in German philosophy to contemplate a possible radical transformation of human nature, ideas that are obviously interconnected with evolutionist views. Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is willing to concede that life as a basic force of reality includes selfishness, brutality, and competition (see Genealogy of Morality, 1, 11), and aims at power. Nietzsche, however, breaks with Schopenhauer’s high acclaim of compassion and with his pessimism. Nietzsche’s ‘pessimism of strength’ (The Gay Science, 1882/1887, Book 5) also wants to embrace what Schopenhauer considered the negative consequences of the ‘Will to life’. Philosophy should not be in opposition to what must be regarded as an essential trait of nature. By rejecting a transcendent counter-principle to nature Nietzsche is thus more immanentist than Schopenhauer, and therefore, arguably comes close to a modern evolutionary naturalism.59