The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Apart from these broader similarities, Moore and Johnson have recently asserted the ‘non-Darwinian’ aspects of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, Moore states, is strongly influenced by non-Darwinian evolutionary thinkers, especially the German zoologist Wilhelm Roux (who studied under Ernst Haeckel), Anglo-German biologist William Rolph, and Swiss botanist Carl Nägeli. Roux understands the unity of an organism not from the vantage point of inner adaptation and cooperation but as a struggle of the parts. Rolph rejects the idea of the centrality of the survival instinct and of natural selection, but postulates that organisms aim at an increase of life and at expanding themselves. Nägeli introduces a variation of the Bildungstrieb by affirming the ability of organisms to attain perfection. Nietzsche, accordingly, critiques Darwin by claiming that the basic drive of life aims at an expansion of power, not just at mere self-preservation; struggle and competition in organic life are exceptional behaviours in a normally abundant world (Gay Science, 349). Further, adaptation should not be overemphasized when describing life (Genealogy of Morality, II, 1.2).60 Nietzsche’s idea of an expansion of power is explicit in aphorism 224 of his Human, All Too Human where he claims that the ‘fittest’ in Darwin’s model will simply reproduce the type, whereas the degenerated individual might reach beyond that limitation. This distinction hints at a different vision of evolutionary change that Nietzsche especially favours in his more aristocratic model of cultural change.61 Not adaptation and survival, but special and extraordinary (now of course no longer called degenerated) individuals bring forth cultural progress, while the mass only reproduces the mediocre type and perpetuates the mediocre level of civilization.

  Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality gives a dynamic account of the origin of the moral sense. It distinguishes between master morality and slave morality, and characterizes the rising of Christianity as a triumph of the ‘slave morality’ that is mainly based on resentment of ‘the weak’. Nietzsche equates the popular Darwinian evolutionary explanation of morality—that is, of altruism, cooperation, and conventional values—that was propounded by British thinkers like H. Spencer with ‘slave morality’. Thus, it has been argued, Nietzsche does not want to base his own moral evaluations on an evolutionary account of ethics as a tool for survival, but he aims at a quite different ethics of individuality and expression of vitality instead of altruism, adaptation, and cooperation.62 The attack against conventional morality, and especially Nietzsche’s exaltation of ‘hardness’ over ‘compassion’, ‘selfishness’ over ‘altruism’, his infamous description of the ‘blonde Bestie’, and finally his remarks on eugenics have frequently been linked to Social Darwinism and to the rise of the Nazi ideology, as already mentioned. Richardson compiles the most incriminating passages of Nietzsche’s oeuvre and he concedes some unpleasant similarities between Social Darwinism and Nietzsche.63 Nonetheless Richardson argues that Nietzsche’s exceptional individuals and their creation of values can not be understood to be a result of Social-Darwinian evolution, and Nietzsche’s alternative new values would not ‘excise, but exapt’64 altruism and pity. Given the development of German history and the use and abuse of his philosophy in National Socialism, such debates over Nietzsche are highly likely to continue.65

  34.8 HAECKEL’S MONISM AND MATERIALISTIC PHILOSOPHIES

  While Darwinian ideas became more popular in German culture towards the end of the century it remains true that many important nineteenth-century botanists and zoologists in Germany remained reluctant to accept Darwin’s theory as a whole.66 One can say that it is the merit of Ernst Haeckel to have popularized and fought for Darwin in Germany even if there is an ongoing controversy as to how Darwinian Haeckel’s own views really were. In general, while the idea of a gradual transmutation of species was gaining widespread acceptance, many other important issues concerning evolution remained controversial: is natural selection really the central mechanism of development? Is there a goal or driving force in evolution or is it random? Is there a ranking of species or even races and is human life the culminating point? Is a merely ‘mechanical’ account of morphogenesis possible? Are the physico-chemical laws sufficient to explain life?67 All these unsolved issues led to a mélange of Darwinian and Romantic ideas in Germany, in a time period that recently has been labelled the Non-Darwinian Revolution.68

  Haeckel opts for a more Lamarckian model of evolution that includes progressivism and, under the influence of the Schellingian philosophy of nature elaborated by Lorenz Oken, fuses Darwin’s ideas with Romantic Naturphilosophie.69 Haeckel proposed a version of the recapitulation theory—a ‘biogenetic law’ stating that embryos repeat important stages of phylogeny in their ontogeny—and published his General Morphology of Organisms in 1866. A much shorter popularized version of his ideas was published in 1868 under the title Natural History of Creation and was hugely successful. It was favourably mentioned by Darwin in his Descent of Man (1871). Haeckel nevertheless was and remained a controversial figure. Already in his lifetime he was accused of forging the embryonic drawings in his books, and this debate was very recently picked up again among historians of science.70 Haeckel’s combination of materialistic and mechanical views with Romantic ideas of nature and speculations about panpsychism has been criticized as being opposed to Darwinian naturalism.71 Further, Haeckel has been accused of being a forerunner of scientific racism and German Nationalism. He places the Caucasian race on top of all human races, praising their ‘advanced qualities’ in relation to others.72

  Haeckel’s main philosophical ideas are expounded in his The Riddle of the Universe (1899). His defence of a materialistic monism led to the foundation of the Deutscher Monistenbund (German Monist League) which aimed at propagating a scientific and materialistic worldview. Haeckel’s vision of the unity of nature included, however, a panpsychic view of matter: atoms also have a ‘soul’, have crude emotions and memory, and perform goal-directed behaviour. Haeckel opposes dualistic views that separate nature and spirit, body and mind, and energy and matter. There is only one ‘Urkraft’ (basic force) active in the universe. The gap between inorganic and organic should not be considered unbridgeable. Yet Haeckel rejects vitalism as a form of dualism: there is no need to postulate a special life energy. Thus he embraces the early monistic approaches of Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow while rejecting their later more vitalistic views. Natural selection is the ‘blind God’ behind development; human mind is a product of complex ‘carbon compounds’, and psychology and sociology are parts of physiology and biology. The book includes attacks against idealistic philosophies and the dualism and ‘somatophobia’ of Christianity. It rejects the three Kantian postulates of Freedom, Immortality of the Soul, and the Existence of God. Haeckel calls philosophers who, like him, embrace the radical mortality of the individual ‘Thanatisten’. He thus aligns his views with other materialistic philosophies of the time, explicitly mentioning Ludwig Büchner, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, and Herbert Spencer. Similarly to Schopenhauer, he links this new ‘thanatistic’ world view to Buddhism and Confucianism.

  Haeckel’s materialistic monism and his anti-idealistic tendencies are thus representative of a growing mainstream movement in German culture that shaped the debate about ‘Darwinism’ in philosophy: idealistic philosophies are replaced by materialistic accounts.73 While ‘Vernunft’ (reason) was one of the key concepts of the worldviews of Enlightenment thought and German Idealism, it is now replaced by ‘Leben’ (life), and by ‘Geschichtlichkeit’ (historicity). If Hegel and Schelling see organic life as an important first step in the dynamic realization of an absolute principle in the world, now mind and culture, religion, but also philosophy, must be a transient expression of life. One should note, for example, the famous genealogical investigations of the origins and transformation of Christianity in Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, 1841.

  Marx embraces Feuerbach’s dynamic perspective, but objects that he still understands the changing phases of Christian religiosity from the perspective of an unhistorical
human nature or essence. He proposes an even more radical dynamic view in his ‘historical materialism’. Even though Marx quotes Darwin only once in a footnote of Capital (1867–94), his view of a cultural evolution of societies via struggle and conflict bears some resemblance to the Darwinian model. Marx himself, however, rejected the Malthusian element of a struggle due to overpopulation in Darwin’s account and claims that Darwin only projects English society with its competition and hunger for new markets into nature.74 Marx’s view is teleological, aiming at a class free society, and is mainly spelled out in the dynamics of cultural mechanisms alone. His materialism is shaped in opposition to the idealistic tradition, famously claiming that this new ontology is ‘inverting Hegel’ to let him ‘stand back on his feet again’.75

  Marx’s views, together with Freud’s genealogical developmental explanation of higher reason as a sublimation of lower erotic and organic desires, then the cultural Historicism of W. Dilthey and the emerging Lebensphilosophie of the twentieth century, form a chain; they have been linked to an overall Darwinian dynamic worldview76 that replaces ‘Wesensanalyse’ (an idealistic conception of the eternal essences) with genealogical investigations focused on the ‘real causal’ mechanism of change. While the dynamic views are, as sketched, already implicit in the idealistic philosophies of Schelling and Hegel, these sometimes anti-teleological and materialistic interpretations reflect a certain ‘modernity’ and radicalism, but often also a rather more pessimistic tone in the new German philosophical Darwinian worldview.

  The dominance of the genealogical historical perspective fosters in many approaches an overall historical relativism that was both embraced and also criticized. While in twentieth-century Germany Logical Positivism, Neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s Phenomenology still stick to a more or less traditional notion of unchanging constitutive rational principles, influential parts of mainstream and popular philosophy embrace the more radical dynamic views of nature, culture, and reason. This focus on change will eventually find its philosophical expression in Heidegger’s emphasis on the essential temporality of Dasein in his Being and Time (1927). The legacy of the still loosely Christian or Kantian oppositions of Life or nature, understood as dynamic, blind, and non-rational, and Reason, understood as sublime fighting against the blind will and dark desires, becomes a key feature of German literature and philosophy of the twentieth century; one only has to look at Expressionism in German literature or at Thomas Mann’s famous opposition of life and spirit, or life and culture. (See also this motif in Ludwig Klages and Max Scheler.) Instead of reconciling Darwinism with conventional ethical views77 and the main achievement of the idealistic tradition, an opposition is felt and played out in German philosophy, literature, and the public discourse of the early twentieth century. Social Darwinism, on the one hand, and historical materialistic Marxism, on the other, fill the ethical void left by the attacks against Christianity, idealistic philosophies, and their grounding of universalism in an a-temporal reason.

  Up until to today it remains controversial exactly what lessons need to be learned from this German transition from a tradition that stresses freedom and universal ethics to an ideological climate that proclaims power-positivism, social Darwinism, totalitarian ideas, and brutal injustices. A general suspicion against Darwinism and the theory of evolution as such that has recently been voiced—for example, from the perspective of intelligent design approaches with reference to its German reception78—is surely misguided, since, as we have seen, highly diverse philosophers embrace the Darwinian idea of a transition of species, a view that can be reconciled with an ethical universalism as we see in the Idealists. Thus, the diverse and fruitful discourse of nineteenth-century German philosophy may not only be of historical interest, it may also inspire new perspectives on the philosophical discussion of Darwinism in our time.79

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bowler, Peter J., The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988).

  Gasman, Daniel, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald; New York: American Elsevier, 1971).

  Golomb, Jacob and Wistrich, Robert S., eds., Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Use and Abuse of a Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  Houlgate, Stephen, Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

  Johnson, Dirk R., Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  Junker, Thomas, Der Darwinismus-Streit in der deutschen Botanik. Evolution, Wissenschaftstheorie und Weltanschauung im 19. Jahrhundert (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011).

  Kolb, David, ‘Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature have a History?’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, nos. 57/57, 2008, 97–116.

  Lenoir, Timothy, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, Holland and Boston, USA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1982).

  Lukács, Georg, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler oder: Der Irrationalismus und die deutsche Politik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1966).

  Moore, Gregory, ‘Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 517–31.

  Moore, Gregory, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  Richards, Robert, J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  Richards, Robert, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  Richardson, John, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Sloan, Philipp. R., ‘Darwin’s Romantic Biology: The Foundation of His Evolutionary Ethics’, in J. Maienschein and Michael Ruse (eds.), Biology and the Foundation of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113–53.

  Töpfer, Georg, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2011).

  Wandschneider, Dieter, ‘Hegel und die Evolution’, in Olaf Breidbach, Dietrich. v. Engelhardt (eds.), Hegel und die Lebenswissenschaften (Berlin: VWB, 2002), 240–55.

  * * *

  1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, repr. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985)[1859]. The first German edition (a translation of the second edition) was published in 1860.

  2 See Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Wien: A. Pichler, 1808), vol. 1, 1841. Wilhelm Traugott Krug: Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaft (Leipzig: F. M. Brockhaus, 1827), vol. 1, 666, distinguishes the Entwicklung of a living organism from the ‘Entwicklung eines Begriffs’, that is, the mental unfolding of a concept.

  3 Following the Latin meaning of unreeling a script, also in its metaphorical implications of unfolding the content of a book or thought; see Georg Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2011), 481.

  4 For a further overview of the development of the philosophical interpretation of the concept of Entwicklung, see K. Weyand and G. Mühle, ‘Entwicklung’, in Joachim Ritter, Karl Gründer, et al. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007), vol. 2, 550–9.

  5 Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, 1, 481. In exactly this sense the two biological terms (predetermined) evolution and epigenesis are discussed in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

  6 William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London: Printed for J. Faulder, 12th ed., 1809), an influential book for the Bridgewater Treatise
s. Similar attacks are, of course, found in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. But the genre of the dialogue implies a more indirect way of proposing this critique than Kant’s prose.

  7 Making fun of naive teleology to prove God’s infinite wisdom becomes a famous topic in Germany in the nineteenth century following Kant, for example, in Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel.

  8 ‘[S]‌o kann in der Physik nicht nachgefragt werden, woher denn alle Organisierung selbst ursprünglich herkomme? Die Beantwortung dieser Frage, würde, wenn sie überhaupt für uns zugänglich ist, offenbar außer der Naturwissenschaft in der Metaphysik liegen.’ (Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie, A 127). See also Critique of Judgment, §§77–8, §80.

  9 Critique of Judgment, §§80–1.

  10 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1790).

  11 G. Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, vol. 1, 481.

  12 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845), vol. 2, 308.

  13 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808), Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1846), vol. 7, 306.

  14 On the tension of a physical and an idealistic conception, see Scott Scribner, F., ‘Die “Physicierung des Idealismus” im “Tagebuch über den animalischen Magnetismus”’, in Wolfgang H. Schrader (ed.), Die Spätphilosophie J.G. Fichtes (Amsterdam and Atlanta [GA]: Rodolphi, 2000), 319–28.

  15 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1835), vol. 3, 328.

  16 See also Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, vol. 1, 482.