I'm feeling a lot of pressure here. In my series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers, I've finally reached Charles Darwin—the man who's credited with the very idea of evolution upon which my philosophy and resulting website have been built. I feel like I need to come up with something profound here, but as James Rachels said in the second quote above, so much has already been researched and written about the man that it hardly seems possible to say anything new. Since I'm writing about philosophy though, it's probably best to stick with the impact I feel he's had on this field. I've done profiles of 41 of of the 60 historical figures in my series so far and most of them have fared poorly. But really, they've all been playing against a stacked deck, having their ideas judged by this philosophy of mine that's built upon the modern evolutionary synthesis when Darwin hadn't even introduced the basic idea to the world yet when they were writing. Let's introduce it now though by seeing what I had to say about Darwin in my first book of Evolutionary Philosophy and then reflect on the monumental impact he has had on the world.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Darwin (1809-1882 CE) was an English naturalist who realized that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of the Species. In 1871, he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed in 1872 by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.

Has Adapted and Grown
Just a quick note to insert Darwin into this timeline. It is obvious from the rest of this information that Darwin’s theory has had a major influence on mankind and our understanding of where we fit into this universe. It is hard to comprehend what it must have been like before Darwin to wonder, “Where did we all come from?” It is no wonder previous explanations ended up with something supernatural or silly. Evolution has made the history of our home known to us and new discoveries continue to unravel the meaning of life. Without this knowledge, prior philosophers had to overcome an enormous obstacle to the truth. Future ones will have no such excuse other than the momentum of history.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Where do great ideas like this come from? Not from thin air, completely untethered from everything that has gone before, but from some new combination of previously separated pieces of knowledge. At a time when "most Europeans believed the world was created by God in seven days as described in the bible," Darwin sailed off on a five-year scientific expedition on the HMS Beagle. He had spent much of his education as a naturalist learning about geology, a field where intellectuals of the day were wrestling with the competing ideas of neptunism (which proposed rocks formed from the crystallisation of minerals in the early Earth's oceans), plutonism (the geologic theory that the rocks forming the Earth were formed in fire by volcanic activity), and uniformitarianism (the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe). On the Beagle, Darwin read Charles Lyell's recently published uniformitarian tract called Principles of Geology, which suggested that the fossils found in rocks were actually evidence of animals that had lived many thousands or millions of years ago.

While Darwin thought about this vista opening up in the natural world to millennia of new history, he surely examined it through the lens of his earlier and varied experiences too. His freethinking father had pushed him into divinity studies to become an Anglican parson after he neglected his medical studies. While in that field, he read about arguments for divine design in nature (natural theology). He met with Unitarians who were welcoming the radical implications of transmutation of species, but he also met Anglicans to whom transmutation was anathema to defending social order. And he traveled in Whig circles that promoted Malthusianism underlying the controversial Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty.

These diverse points of view would all have been clanging around in Darwin's mind during his voyage, when the breakthrough for his ideas on evolution suddenly came to him in the Galapagos Islands. Darwin noticed that each island supported its own form of finches, which were closely related to one another but different in important ways, and suddenly his principles of evolution sprang to mind. Millions of people all over the world must have noticed subtly different species in slightly overlapping habitats before, but only Darwin's mind, prepared by all the other discussions of his day, proved to be the perfect fertile ground to see something new there. And once he did, the world was changed forever by the idea that eventually became these two sentences in the introduction to On The Origin of Species:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

Note how it was his focus on the existential struggle of life that led Darwin to his solution. Suddenly, all the age-old philosophical ramblings on our origins seemed worthless. From Moses' 4.5 Commandments, to Plato's unchanged and eternal forms, to Anselm's reliance on the power of human intellect to justify his ontological argument, to Descartes' dualism injected into human thought alone, to Kant's belief that objective reality is a construct of the human mind; all of these, and many others, crumbled into dust once Darwin deduced the true story about the common origins mankind shares with all the other forms of life on the planet. We can probably expect many of our own current beliefs to similarly be replaced by some new discovery in the future, but that is the fate all of us face in this ongoing project of cultural inheritance that humanity has embarked upon. We take what has come before us, enjoy it, profit from it, do our best to change it into something better, and then tip our hats to the future when we step offstage and allow the world to move on without us.

Darwin didn't think about cultural evolution in this way. He "had no nature/nurture distinction, and neither did anyone else until the rise of genetics forty years after On the Origin of the Species. So for him if a culture does well relative to other cultures, it must be the same sort of thing as when a variety of wolf replaces another by natural selection." This is a shame, since it probably meant Darwin didn't grasp the full significance of his contribution to our gene-culture co-evolution, but I have to think he felt the weight of history shifting under him even if he didn't have the vocabulary and scholarship at hand to put that into biological and sociological terms. He must have felt it when he wrote such things as:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually through public opinion.

The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.

Darwin may be chiefly known for his naturalist work in the biological world, but these musings show a sensitive mind applied to the philosophical world of ethics as well. Had he lived through all the discoveries we have today about species cooperation and the evolution of moral emotions in non-human animals, I bet Darwin would have made more contributions to the field of philosophy as well. Alas, that wasn't to be, and now I find it highly ironic that Darwin will forever be known as the champion of natural selection when he himself (no matter how sturdy his descendants may have proven to be) is one of the best examples we have of the strength of psychological selections and cultural evolution relative to the mere genetic changes in our collective bodies. The ability at this point in our evolution for a cultural change to impact our species is so much stronger than any slight physical mutation could ever be. We've become much better at survival now that Darwin showed us this is the game we've been playing. How much better would we be if we all agreed there weren't any other rules guiding our behaviour?

Today, knowledge economies are unearthing vast quantities of new facts in all the various scientific fields, and the information age we live in allows all of them to be brought together. Surely this is a time for great ideas to spring forth. For me, I've come to philosophy and morality after my long interests in those fields had been interrupted by practical time spent in the business world where economists, strategists, managers, and human resource leaders are wrestling with ideas such as long-term sustainability vs. short term profits, incentives and success in public companies vs. employee owned organisations, theory x vs. theory y views of employee motivation, findings from positive psychology about the deep success to be had by tapping into personality strengths, and the competitive advantage of ensuring diversity in problem-solving teams. These revolutions in the business world have been driven by research coming from the social sciences and they've been proven to be highly successful. They also helped me see the need to balance competition and cooperation in a pragmatic economic sense, which I believe is the key to understanding how to balance ethical and political concerns over much longer time horizons as well. The application and acceptance of these individual ideas has been frustratingly slow to take hold across the business world (let alone their application to the philosophical one), but I know the pace of change is quickened wherever there is a worldview that can successfully incorporate all of the details, so that's why I spend such time on adapting and spreading this evolutionary philosophy.

Will it be another great idea, a revolution in the study of ethics and the nature of what is right or wrong that helps us all survive and thrive in a more robust manner? I believe this logical extension of Darwin's big idea will be such an aid to us, but there is great difficulty in formulating it in such a way as to overcome the resistance it faces by the mass of thought that has already coalesced around current cultural ideas such as religion, relativism, and nihilism. The difficulty is enough to make me want to give up quite often, but even if he wouldn't have phrased it that way, Darwin is a great inspiration to me of the power of an idea to change our evolution for the better. There was little immediate attention to Darwin (and Wallace's) announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection: "the president of the Linnean Society remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Only one review rankled enough for Darwin to recall it later; Professor Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that "all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old." In the face of this, and harsher ridicule from his contemporaries, Darwin stood strong, knowing his ideas were based on thorough research and were clearly thought through. He responded to criticism and anticipated arguments with such thoughts as:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei (The voice of the people is the voice of God), as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

And since Darwin also said:

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

I'll try hard not to waste any more of mine. There is so much more to do. Onwards!

A few weeks ago, I profiled Jeremy Bentham in this series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers, noting his importance in history as one of the founders of utilitarianism. As I said at the time, "Bentham laid down what was to become the fundamental axiom of this school of morality by saying, "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Bentham's definitions for happiness came down simply to feelings of pleasure and pain, but he inspired a disciple who further refined this school of thought, helping to turn it into one that is still highly influential today among non-religious thinkers who usually espouse some combination of utilitarianism and Aristotelian virtue ethics when they are asked for their definitions of good and moral actions. The disciple? John Stuart Mill.

When I say Bentham "inspired" Mill though, it was more like Bentham was crammed down his throat. Mill's father, a radical Scottish follower of Bentham, moved to London to help promote utilitarianism. He rigorously taught John Stuart with the the goal of "creating a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died." Mill started learning Greek at the age of three, Latin at the age of eight, and by the age of fourteen "he had read most of the Greek and Latin classics, had made a wide survey of history, had done extensive work in logic and mathematics, and had mastered the basics of economic theory." At twenty, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent years going through crippling bouts of depression, which Mill eventually found relief from in the poetry of Wordsworth, among other things. How is that for maximising happiness, dad? It's a real credit to Mill that he fought through all this excessive advantage and disadvantage to become the sane and considerate thinker that he was.

As we'll see below, Mill joins Bentham as one of only ten philosophers for whom I reported nothing major has gone extinct. (The others being Bacon, Galileo, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Darwin, de Beauvoir, and Chomsky.) This distinction doesn't necessarily mean a place among the best and deepest thinkers in history—it merely means that their major contributions didn't contain any major errors in my opinion—but in Mill's case, he is almost certain to crack the top seven in my subjective list of the top philosophers of all time when I get to that at the end of this series. I'll stop with the introduction now to leave more room for some of his best quotes to show you what I mean.

In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

Those only are happy ... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.

Unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE) was a British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. He was also an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.

Survives
Mill’s works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. One argument that Mill develops further than any previous philosopher is the harm principle. The harm principle holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. He does argue, however, that individuals should be prevented from doing lasting, serious harm to themselves or their property. Because no one exists in isolation, harm done to oneself also harms others, and destroying property deprives the community as well as oneself. This limited definition of liberty is correct. Unfortunately, many libertarians do not recognize their ties to society. We must be given the freedom to discover our own best roles for society, but we cannot be allowed to endanger society or the survival of life in general.

Needs to Adapt
Mill's famous formulation of utilitarianism is known as the "greatest-happiness principle.” It holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, within reason. Mill's major contribution to utilitarianism is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures. Bentham treats all forms of happiness as equal, whereas Mill argues that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to more physical forms of pleasure. Mill distinguishes between happiness and contentment, claiming that the former is of higher value than the latter, a belief wittily encapsulated in the statement that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” As was said for Bentham, once the greatest happiness is defined as the joy of the survival of life (and all that entails for a cooperative society focused on the long-term), then utilitarianism tends to work well in developing a moral philosophy. But it is still merely a derivative of the principle of survival.

Mill originally believed that "equality of taxation" meant "equality of sacrifice" and that progressive taxation penalized those who worked harder and saved more and was therefore "a mild form of robbery.” Given an equal tax rate regardless of income, Mill agreed that inheritance should be taxed. A utilitarian society would agree that everyone should be equal one way or another. Therefore, receiving inheritance would put one ahead of society unless taxed on the inheritance. In our modern economy, income is not tied merely to effort - income is generated far out of proportion to effort by the use of technology. In a hierarchical construction, those at the top are able to abuse their power by forcing their view on others that they “deserve” the lion’s share of this surplus income. But might never makes right. This surplus income is owed to the society whose rules and history created it. The efforts of even the best individuals are not worth exponentially more than their peers so their taxation should be more progressive. This also keeps society relatively more equal, which is vital to its need for cooperation and stability. The principle easily justifies a strong inheritance tax as well.

Mill recognized wealth beyond the material, and argued that the logical conclusion of unlimited growth was destruction of the environment and a reduced quality of life. He concluded that a stationary state could be preferable to never-ending economic growth. Stationary size does not necessarily mean a lack of progress. Economic growth comes from expansion and differentiation. Mill is correct that expansion cannot be indefinite. Differentiation through the progression of knowledge and freedom, however, means that perpetual economic growth may still be possible.

Gone Extinct

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Very nice stuff. But there is a fatal flaw in utilitarianism in that by proclaiming the endpoint of morality as "maximising happiness for the greatest number," it can too easily lead to overpopulation and a crashing of the planet's ecosystems because not enough attention is being paid to the actual objective basis for morality—the long-term survival of life. Mill saw an inkling of this when he said the following:

There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

Sadly for us, the world population was only about 1.2billion in 1848 when Mill said that. So even though he spent time handing out literature on birth control and didn't see why we would desire to grow, we're now at 7 billion people and apparently climbing towards 11 billion. We're crossing dangerous planetary boundaries every day with little concerted effort to fight those problems even though it may take little or no overall cost to the economy to do so. Without meeting the fundamental need of survival, there will be incalculable billions of lives lost with no hope of ever maximising their happiness. By taking that into account though, our own existential dreads, guilts, and anxieties will be lessened, and we would live much more confident and worry-free lives. Come on people...wake up and be happy!

Non-religious gatherings have been in the news a lot over the last few years. Ever since the four horsemen of the non-apocalypse (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris) started aggressively promoting New Atheism in 2004 in a series of books and lectures, it's suddenly seemed more acceptable to put your non-beliefs out there and go find other like-minded human(ist)s to hang out with. Groups like Skeptics in the Pub, the Sunday Assembly, and the Godless Revival have hundreds of local chapters all over the world, and may inspire its members to all go on a pilgrimage someday to Alain de Botton's Temple to Atheism in London if it ever gets built. Certainly social networking has enabled this latest iteration of anti-Church churches to bloom far and wide, but they are about 150 years too late to be doing something new. (Not that that is a bad thing. I think the time for this idea to finally adapt and survive is here now.)

Auguste Comte--the first in my series on the survival of the fittest philosophers to have been born after the American and French revolutions bestowed radical freedoms on its citizens—spent years designing a Religion of Humanity in the mid-1800's. That religion has almost entirely disappeared now, but it did once inspire followers all over the world. The motto written on Brazil's flag--Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress")—was inspired by Comte's motto: L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base; le progrès pour but ("Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal"). Several of the revolutionaries involved in the military coup d'état that unseated the monarchy and turned Brazil into a republic were fervent followers of Comte's ideas. In fact, a few Temples of Humanity still exist in Brazil. The last one in Europe is in Paris, near where Comte lived for 16 years until his death in 1857. The chapel there is exactly (apart from its reduced size) as the layout conceived by Auguste Comte with thirteen arches depicting the thirteen months of the positivist calendar. See six of them in the picture below, plus a bonus arch for the leap-year day dedicated to women.

So yeah, that's right, Comte created his own calendar for his religion. Just like Alain de Botton called for in his Atheist 2.0 TED talk, Comte borrowed from the rituals and rights of Christianity—the things that strengthen bonds within a community of believers—to create his own very formalised system of worship. The Positivist Calendar observes a 7-day week while restricting the months to exactly 4 weeks. It thereby accommodates 13 months a year (13x7x4=364), plus an annual festival commemorating the dead, and a leap-year festival dedicated to women. This sounds reasonable in theory; the math makes the calendar nice and uniform and easy to follow, although it would be very hard to have halves, quarters, or thirds of a year, which is a prime benefit of using the number twelve in any situation. But let's see how the veneration aspect of the calendar works in practice.

Comte's thirteen months were given chronological themes, and a single person was chosen to represent each one of them. They are: (1) The Initial Theocracy: Moses,  (2) Ancient Poetry: Homer, (3) Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle, (4) Ancient Science: Archimedes, (5) Military Civilization: Caesar, (6) Catholicism: Saint Paul, (7) Feudal Civilization: Charlemagne, (8) Modern Epic Poetry: Dante, (9) Modern Industry: Gutenberg, (10) Modern Drama: Shakespeare, (11) Modern Philosophy: Descartes, (12) Modern Policy: Frederick, and (13) Modern Science: Bichat. Today, for example, September 12th, is Shakespeare 3rd according to the online Positivist Calendar converter. Each month was also given 28 human "saints" so there would be one to be remembered each day. That's too many to list here, but today's, in the month of Shakespeare, is dedicated to Fernando de Rojas, the author of La Celestina, which was published in 1499 and "considered to be one of the greatest works of Spanish literature, and traditionally marks the end of medieval literature and the beginning of the literary renaissance in Spain." The story of that book is about "a bachelor Calisto who uses the old procuress Celestina to start an affair with Melibea, an unmarried girl kept in seclusion by her parents. Though the two use the rhetoric of courtly love, sex not marriage is their aim. When he dies in an accident, she commits suicide. The name Celestina has become synonymous with procuresses, especially an older woman used to further an illicit affair." This is just a random exercise, but I gotta say I think Comte could have chosen some better humans to revere. And maybe that's a good point about this whole exercise in a religion of humanity. We're humans; not gods. I think it's a great idea to regularly remind ourselves of what the best of us have done in the past, but to create a religion around those remembrances comes too close to mimicking the uncritical worship and blind deification that goes along with religions. Let's hear two good quotes from Comte though to show that he had good intentions before I go over his main beliefs in further detail.

The principle of co-operation is the basis of society, and the object of society must ever be to find the right place for its individual members in its great co-operative scheme. There is, however, a danger of exaggerated specialism; it concentrates the attention of individuals on small parts of the social machine, and thus narrows their sense of the social community, and produces an indifference to the larger interests of humanity. It is lamentable to find an artisan spending his life making pin-heads, and it is equally lamentable to find a man with a mind employing his mind only in the solution of equations.

Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral.

(Note that by having duties to one another, we grant each other freedoms and benefits that some try to claim as god-given rights. Rights don't exist, but by working together we can earn freedoms and benefits within a just society.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Auguste Comte (1798-1857 CE) was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outmoded, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists, evolving into modern academic sociology as practical and objective social research.

Survives
Positivism holds that in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are rejected. Comte saw the scientific method replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. This has been a long-running theme, so again, yes. Introspection and intuition may guide directions for hypotheses and experimentation, but they cannot produce true knowledge on their own.

Needs to Adapt
Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general law of three stages. Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive. The theological phase was seen as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions upon man were referenced to God. Man blindly believed in whatever he was taught by his ancestors. He believed in a supernatural power. Fetishism played a significant role during this time. By the "Metaphysical" phase, he referred not to the metaphysics of Aristotle or other ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a higher plane than the authority of any human ruler. This stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world that questioned authority and religion. In the positive scientific phase, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science started to answer questions in full stretch. These three phases have occurred in the history of mankind, but not in a straight line, and often all at the same time. If we want to know real truth, we do have to follow these steps, but in the blindness of evolution there is no guarantee that we will figure this out.

Comte proposed a Religion of Humanity for positivist societies in order to fulfill the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. He proposed a calendar reform called the positivist calendar in which months were named after history's greatest leaders, thinkers, and artists, arranged progressively in chronological order. Each day was dedicated to a thinker, in the manner of Catholic saint's days. In Système de Politique Positive, Comte stated that the pillars of the religion are: altruism, leading to generosity and selfless dedication to others; order: Comte thought that after the French Revolution, society needed restoration of order; progress: the consequences of industrial and technical breakthroughs for human societies. In Catéchisme Positiviste, Comte defined the Church of Humanity's seven sacraments: Introduction (nomination and sponsoring); Admission (end of education); Destination (choice of a career); Marriage; Retirement (age 63); Separation (social extreme unction); Incorporation (absorption into history three years after death). The Religion of Humanity was described by Thomas Huxley as "Catholicism minus Christianity.” Although much declined, the church survives in present day Brazil. Religion does need to be replaced, although its use of calendar reminders and ritual traditions to instruct humans is something that could be very useful. The word religion, however, connotes deity belief and worship. After evolutionary philosophy is honed, the Religion of Humanity could be replaced with something like a “Society for Life.” Some new atheists and secular humanists appear to be working along these lines already. I hope to contribute to their efforts.

Gone Extinct
Comte saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences and integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole. This grand vision of sociology as the centerpiece of all the sciences has not come to fruition. The biologist E.O. Wilson uses the term consilience to describe the unity of knowledge. Based on that theory, I subsume sociology into the biological sciences, slotting in above organismic biology, but below ecology in terms of size and scope. Based on its MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) nature of inquiry, philosophy could be seen as the centerpiece of all the sciences, but only in the sense of categorizing and analyzing the rest of knowledge.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comte's good friend John Stuart Mill (who I'll be covering next week) characterised the lifetime of Comte's work as dividing into phases of "good Comte and bad Comte." I think my analysis bears this out as well. I can sympathise with that all too human description of the man though, which is precisely why I'll stay away from his religion of humanity, even if I also long for more communion with others who may think similarly.

In one way, I really admire how Arthur Schopenhauer wrote. He aimed for the stars; to become a bright light in the firmament of human thought. In "The Art of Literature" he said:

Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry “There!” and it is gone forever. Planets last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit — their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.

We'll see a little later whether Schopenhauer himself reached the status of a fixed star, but there's another writer alive today who's a real favourite of mine to become a star and who happens to have written a novel that does a fantastic job introducing readers to the philosophies of this 19th century German. That novel is The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom. Yalom is an existential psychotherapist in San Francisco who wrote a wonderful non-fiction book about the kinds of cases he deals with in his practice (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy), as well as an astounding piece of historical fiction (When Nietzsche Wept) that imagined Nietzsche discussing his personal problems with Sigmund Freud's mentor, and a founder of psychotherapy, Joseph Breuer. Those two books are among my most influential, and although The Schopenhauer Cure didn't quite speak to me at the same height, it is still better than almost anything else being published these days. Re-reading the detailed description of the book below makes me want to try it again to see if maybe I've changed enough to get something more out of it. See if this grabs you too.

"From novelist and master psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, author of Lying on the Couch and When Nietzsche Wept, comes the world's first accurate group-therapy novel, a mesmerizing story of two men's search for meaning.

At one time or another, all of us have wondered what we'd do in the face of death. Suddenly confronted with his own mortality after a routine checkup, distinguished psychotherapist Julius Hertzfeld is forced to reexamine his life and work. Has he really made an enduring difference in the lives of his patients? And what about the patients he's failed? What has happened to them? Now that he is wiser and riper, can he rescue them yet?

Reaching beyond the safety of his thriving San Francisco practice, Julius feels compelled to seek out Philip Slate, whom he treated for sex addiction some twenty-three years earlier. At that time, Philip's only means of connecting to humans was through brief sexual interludes with countless women, and Julius's therapy did not change that. He meets with Philip, who claims to have cured himself -- by reading the pessimistic and misanthropic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Much to Julius's surprise, Philip has become a philosophical counselor and requests that Julius provide him with the supervisory hours he needs to obtain a license to practice. In return, Philip offers to tutor Julius in the work of Schopenhauer. Julius hesitates. How can Philip possibly become a therapist? He is still the same arrogant, uncaring, self-absorbed person he had always been. In fact, in every way he resembles his mentor, Schopenhauer. But eventually they strike a Faustian bargain: Julius agrees to supervise Philip, provided that Philip first joins his therapy group. Julius is hoping that six months with the group will address Philip's misanthropy and that by being part of a circle of fellow patients, he will develop the relationship skills necessary to become a therapist.

Philip enters the group, but he is more interested in educating the members in Schopenhauer's philosophy -- which he claims is all the therapy anyone should need -- than he is in their individual problems. Soon Julius and Philip, using very different therapeutic approaches, are competing for the hearts and minds of the group members.

Is this going to be Julius's swan song -- a splintered group and years of good work down the drain? Or will all the members, including Philip, find a way to rise to the occasion that brings with it the potential for extraordinary change? In The Schopenhauer Cure, Irvin Yalom elegantly weaves the true story of Schopenhauer's psychological life throughout the narrative, knitting together fact and fiction to form a compellingly readable tale.

Conflict. Big philosophical ideas. Competition. Short-term vs. long-term relationships. This is a novel that's right up my alley, and something I should really read again as I consider the possibility of going down the road towards working as a Philosophical Counsellor myself someday. (At the moment, I have a lot of options I'm considering for what to do with the last half of my life.) As for re-reading Schopenhauer himself? Well, while I do think the man had some nice turns of phrase, his most important thoughts just don't hold up to the scrutiny of evaluation among the survival of the fittest philosophers. Let's see what I mean by that. First, some quotes.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philantos, not a philosophos [a lover of ego, not a lover of wisdom].

No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.

A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.

The chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company. What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

The chief objection that I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

The bad thing about religions is that instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.

There are two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.

For a work to become immortal it must possess so many excellences that it will not be easy to find a man who understands and values them all; so that there will be in all ages men who recognise and appreciate some of these excellences; by this means the credit of the work will be retained throughout the long course of centuries and ever-changing interests, for, as it is appreciated first in this sense, then in that, the interest is never exhausted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860 CE) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers.

Survives
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world. These ideas foreshadowed Darwin’s discovery of evolution, Freud’s concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind, and evolutionary psychology in general. Love, in its many forms, is one of the primary emotions we use to propagate the species and cooperate with each other for its long-term survival. It is immensely powerful.

Needs to Adapt

Gone Extinct
Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated only by their own basic desires, or Will to Live, which directed all of mankind. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. For Schopenhauer, human desiring, willing, and craving cause suffering or pain. He therefore favored a lifestyle of negating human desires, similar to the teachings of ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, Buddhism, and Vedanta. But suppressing our desires leads to the death of the species! Striving for life is not futile. The direction is towards immortality for the species. We merely struggle with balancing short-term desires and long-term needs.

A temporary way to escape the pain of life is through aesthetic contemplation since art diverts the spectator's attention from the grave everyday world and lifts him or her into a world that consists of mere play of images. This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way. Escapism leads to stagnation and the extinction of the species. Art should instead be used to motivate the species. It is most powerful when it does this.

Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed three primary moral incentives: compassion, malice and egoism. Compassion is the major motivator to moral expression. Malice and egoism are corrupt alternatives. Survival is the major motivator to moral expression. Egoism is feeling positive towards yourself. You are alive. This is worth celebrating and encouraging. Malice and compassion are negative and positive feelings towards others. They have their roles in a cooperative society that follows the tit for tat strategy to punish cheaters and remain stable over the long-term.

Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. He shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species, but what he thought was essential was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation.” And so long as government was thus limited, Schopenhauer preferred "to be ruled by a lion than one of his fellow rats" - i.e., by a monarch, rather than a democrat. An unelected monarchy is much more likely to produce a rat than a democratic election conducted by an educated population.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For someone as pessimistic about humanity as Schopenhauer was, and who believed the universe to be a fundamentally irrational place, is it any wonder that his thoughts ended up different than mine? To me, observing the actions of life trying to stay alive make the world make sense. Sometimes, organisms make poor choices for the long term, but they are usually understood from the perspective of the individual or their narrow interests. Surrounded by nearsightedness, I admit I often give in to feelings of Schopenhauer's pessimism, but it usually only takes a few moments of gazing at the fixed stars of our best writers in human history to remind me of the progress we are making. For them, I say thanks, and I'll do my best to join your ranks some day.