Last week, in these essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers, we learned that Gott ist tot and that Nietzsche further instilled the ideas of existentialism and nihilism into our culture. The world was finally made ready for someone to pull their heads out of the religious sand and look around in a secular manner at our own human existence as it is and study the things to be found by comparing and contrasting the religions and cultures that had sprung up in various nations, not through some divine act of supernatural creation, but by the slow and steady hands of men acting naturally in their mostly isolated societies. It was time for someone like Max Weber to come along.

Weber is often cited (along with with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx) as "among the three founding creators of sociology." He doesn't get listed in the usual historical compilations of philosophers, but for me his contributions to political philosophy and his comparative studies of religion's impact on the ethics of societies make him a vital person to know and read. He doesn't have a trove of witty quotes to choose from for inspiration and wisdom, but that wasn't his goal in his writing. His goal was to make clear-eyed studies of the world, and what he found truly changed the way we feel about it. Sometimes, objective observation can be subjectively normative. And since Weber observed a lot, lets get straight to it and give him the time to explain what he found.

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Max Weber (1864-1920 CE) was a German lawyer, politician, historian, political economist, and sociologist, who profoundly influenced social theory and sociology. 

Survives

Needs to Adapt
Weber's most famous work is his essay in economic sociology, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which also began his work in the sociology of religion. In this text, Weber argued that religion was one of the reasons for the different ways the cultures of the Occident and the Orient have developed. Weber argued that the redefinition of the connection between work and piety in Protestantism, and especially in ascetic Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted human effort towards rational efforts aimed at achieving economic gain. Other notable factors included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship and jurisprudence, rational systematization of government administration, and economic enterprise. In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, merely explored one phase of the freedom from magic that he regarded as an important distinguishing aspect of Western culture. He noted the shift of Europe's economic center after the Reformation away from Catholic countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, and toward Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany. Christian religious devotion had historically been accompanied by rejection of mundane affairs, including economic pursuit. Why was that not the case with Protestantism? Weber showed that certain types of Protestantism – notably Calvinism – favored rational pursuit of economic gain and worldly activities, which had been given positive spiritual and moral meaning. It was not the goal of those religious ideas, but rather a byproduct – the inherent logic of those doctrines and the advice based upon them both directly and indirectly encouraged planning and self-denial in the pursuit of economic gain. The Reformation view of a "calling" dignified even the most mundane professions as being those that added to the common good and were blessed by God, as much as any "sacred" calling could. This Reformation view, that all the spheres of life were sacred when dedicated to God and His purposes of nurturing and furthering life, profoundly affected the view of work. In Weber’s research on the competition of religions around the world, we see that it isn’t the choice of god that is the differentiator, but the view towards work and the economy that made Protestantism the “winner.” Their advocacy for effort everywhere leads to progress and long-term happiness for humans. The belief in the supernatural still acts as a retardant and is therefore a danger.

Weber next posed the question why capitalism did not develop in China. He concentrated on the early period of Chinese history, during which the major Chinese schools of thoughts - Confucianism and Taoism - came to the fore. Weber argued that while several factors favored the development of a capitalist economy (long periods of peace, improved control of rivers, population growth, freedom to acquire land and to move outside of native communities, free choice of occupation) they were outweighed by others (mostly stemming from religion): technical inventions were opposed on the basis of religion, in the sense that the disturbance of ancestral spirits was argued to lead to bad luck, and adjusting oneself to the world was preferred to changing it; sale of land was often prohibited or made very difficult; extended kinship groups (based on the religious importance of family ties and ancestry) protected its members against economic adversities, therefore discouraging payment of debts, work discipline, and rationalization of work processes; those kinship groups prevented the development of an urban status class and hindered developments towards legal institutions, codification of laws, and the rise of a lawyer class. According to Weber, Confucianism and Puritanism represent two comprehensive but mutually exclusive types of rationalization, each attempting to order human life according to certain ultimate religious beliefs. Both encouraged sobriety and self-control and were compatible with the accumulation of wealth. However, Confucianism aimed at attaining and preserving "a cultured status position" and recommended adjustment to the world, education, self-perfection, politeness, and familial piety to achieve those ends. Puritanism used those means in order to create a "tool of God," creating a person that would serve God and master the world. Such intensity of belief and enthusiasm for action were alien to the aesthetic values of Confucianism. Therefore, Weber states that it was the difference in prevailing mentality that contributed to the development of capitalism in the West and the absence of it in China. Here we see the danger in a religion that advocates adjustment to the world. It led to stagnation and thousands of years of lost progress for billions of Chinese people.

The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism was Weber's third major work on the sociology of religion. In this work he deals with the structure of Indian society, with the orthodox doctrines of Hinduism and the heterodox doctrines of Buddhism, with modifications brought by the influence of popular religiosity, and finally with the impact of religious beliefs on the secular ethic of Indian society. The ancient Indian social system was shaped by the concept of caste. It directly linked religious belief and the segregation of society into status groups. Weber describes the caste system, consisting of the Brahmins (priests), the Kshatriyas (warriors), the Vaisyas (merchants), and the Shudras (laborers). Then he describes the spread of the caste system in India due to conquests, the marginalization of certain tribes, and the subdivision of castes. Weber pays special attention to Brahmins and analyzes why they occupied the highest place in Indian society for so many centuries. With regard to the concept of dharma he concludes that the Indian ethical pluralism is very different both from the universal ethic of Confucianism and Christianity. He notes that the caste system prevented the development of urban status groups. Next, Weber analyses the Hindu religious beliefs, including asceticism and the Hindu worldview, the Brahman orthodox doctrines, the rise and fall of Buddhism in India, the Hindu restoration, and the evolution of the guru. Weber asks the question whether religion had any influence upon the daily round of mundane activities, and if so, how it impacted economic conduct. He notes the idea of an immutable world order consisting of the eternal cycles of rebirth and the deprecation of the mundane world, and finds that the traditional caste system, supported by the religion, slowed economic development; in other words, the "spirit" of the caste system militated against an indigenous development of capitalism. Weber concludes his study of society and religion in India by combining his findings with his previous work on China. He notes that the beliefs tended to interpret the meaning of life as otherworldly or mystical experience, that the intellectuals tended to be apolitical in their orientation, and that the social world was fundamentally divided between the educated, whose lives were oriented toward the exemplary conduct of a prophet or wise man, and the uneducated masses who remained caught in their daily rounds and believed in magic. In Asia, no Messianic prophecy appeared that could have given "plan and meaning to the everyday life of educated and uneducated alike.” He argues that it was the Messianic prophecies in the countries of the Near East, as distinguished from the prophecy of the Asiatic mainland, that prevented Western countries from following the paths of China and India, and his next work, Ancient Judaism, was an attempt to prove this theory. More evidence of the danger of stagnation that religion poses to society. The success of the asceticism of the Hindu and Buddhist leaders only lead to more stagnation, poverty, and disease for their people. Compared to the corrupt riches the Catholic church accumulated and the acceptance of wealth that engendered in its people, one can see that the more successful a church is at keeping to its original tenets, the worse it is for society! In the quest to survive, religion is evil.

In Ancient Judaism, his fourth major work on the sociology of religion, Weber attempted to explain the combination of circumstances that resulted in the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity. It is especially visible when the inner-worldly asceticism developed by Western Christianity is contrasted with mystical contemplation of the kind developed in India. Weber noted that some aspects of Christianity sought to conquer and change the world, rather than withdraw from its imperfections. This fundamental characteristic of Christianity (when compared to Far Eastern religions) stems originally from ancient Jewish prophecy. For the Jew, the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of that promised for the future, but in the future it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. Since the basic tenets of Judaism were formulated during the time of Israelite confederacy and after the fall of the United Monarchy, they became the basis of the prophetic movement that left a lasting impression on Western civilization. In the final comparison of religions, we see more of the benefits of advocating progress. To repeat, none of these religions “won” based on having a better concept of god, the creation of the universe, or the way the world worked. It was their prescriptions for “what to do about it” that led to positive or negative outcomes relative to one another. Society would do even better if it left the supernatural behind altogether.

Weber was a central figure in the establishment of methodological antipositivism; presenting sociology as a non-empirical field which must study social action through resolutely subjective means. In modern practice, however, non-positivism may be equated with qualitative research methods, while positivist research is more quantitative. Positivists typically use research methods such as experiments and statistical surveys, while antipositivists use research methods that rely more on ethnographic fieldwork, conversation/discourse analysis, or open-ended interviews. While qualitative research methods are useful for gaining understanding and developing theories, a more quantitative scientific method is required to turn those hypotheses into true knowledge. Controlled studies of randomized societies is practically impossible though, so in some cases the theories are the best sociological explanations humans are likely to uncover.

In Politics as a Vocation, Weber unveils the definition of the state that it is the entity that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which it may nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit - a definition that became pivotal to the study of modern Western political science. The state’s actual role is to correct for inefficiencies in the markets. Force, being an element required for the provision of the public goods of defense and justice, must be provided for by the state. And though the state has a monopoly on force, the true transparent separation of powers within a state would ensure that no one person or group could continually wield that force in a hurtful way.

Gone Extinct
Weber is also well known for his critical study of the bureaucratization of society, the rational ways in which formal social organizations apply the ideal characteristics of a bureaucracy. Weber outlines a description, which has become famous, of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a value-oriented organization and action (traditional authority and charismatic authority) to a goal-oriented organization and action (legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness," in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control. Rational control does not have to be an iron cage of icy darkness. Rational thinking leads to right action, which leads to joyful emotions. Bureaucracy is problematic when it is run by irrational bureaucrats. This is the same problem all human organizations face. The solution is not a submission to traditional authority or charismatic authority - neither have a basis in truth. The solution is to teach humans the purpose and use of their reason - to achieve the goal of survival for life.
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And with that, we've reached another transition point in this history of philosophy that I'm slowly putting together. Erasmus, Francis Bacon and Galileo brought an end to the 1100-year period of medieval philosophy by loosening the grip of the Catholic church, introducing the scientific method, and harvesting the cosmological fruits that were born of that process. Now, after just 300 years of modern philosophy that saw a host of scientific and logical breakthroughs—from Hobbes' Leviathan, to Spinoza's natural god, to Newton's universal laws, to Montesquieu's separation of power within the state, to Hume's logical separation between is and ought statements, to understanding the economy of Adam Smith, to the usefulness of Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism, to Darwin's powerfully explanative theory of evolution—Weber's wide-ranging observations on the role of cultures has brought this stage of thought to an end. We're about to take a turn inward as the expansive wonders of the age of modern philosophy will give way to the introspective focus of contemporary philosophy. There are only 13 philosophers left now with some important theories to uncover and discuss (and some quacks of course to discuss and uncover), so I hope you are enjoying this ride as it's finally getting pretty close to the end.

We all know Nietzsche as the German philosopher who forcefully declared "God is dead" (which sounds even stronger in his native language: Gott ist tot!). And now, after reading through this series on the survival of the fittest philosophers, we know the background--Erasmus sarcastically praising the folly of the church, Luther literally cracking the edifice of the church with his ninety-five theses of protest, Francis Bacon laying out the principles of the scientific method, Newton finishing off the remnants of the church's earth-centred cosmology, Hume illuminating the gap between is and ought that religions leap over with faith alone, and Darwin relegating the story of Adam and Eve into the stuff of mythology—all of which led to Nietzsche's most famous aphorism. We can see all this now and agree with him, but what a difficulty it must have been for him to come out with it then. Friedrich Nietzsche was named after the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had appointed Nietzsche's father as the town minister of Röcken. Nietzsche's uncle and grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather was "further distinguished as a Protestant scholar, one of whose books affirmed the 'everlasting survival of Christianity.'” Imagine the toll that such a break with family tradition would have on a man.

But Nietzsche's difficulties did not lie in cultural rebellion alone. His father died from a brain ailment when Nietzsche was just five years old, and his two-year old brother died traumatically just six months later. The family was forced to move from the church home his father had held to a nearby town where Nietzsche lived with his mother, his grandmother, his father's two sisters, and his younger sister. Growing up as the sole surviving male surrounded by five other women wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but one gets the sense that for young Fritz, as he was called, it was a difficult time. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once observed that Nietzsche's "opinion of women is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. '[Thou goest to woman?] Forget not thy whip'—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks." This is an unforgivable attitude towards half the population, but slightly understandable when you learn that at the end of Nietzsche's life, "he fell under the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche until his death in 1900. As his caretaker, his sister assumed the roles of curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. Förster-Nietzsche was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster, and reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were strongly and explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through Förster-Nietzsche's editions, Nietzsche's name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although later twentieth-century scholars have counteracted this conception of his ideas." What ugliness to have to deal with during one's whole life.

And it's not as if he was at full strength to deal with this either. Nietzsche had to resign from university life at the age of just 34 when his deteriorating health led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems, and vomiting. At that point, he had been a university professor for only ten years, and he would only have another ten years left in his productive intellectual life. But from then "until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person (having given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship), circling almost annually between his mother's house and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities...never residing in any place longer than several months at a time. On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life...never to return to full sanity." Recent re-examination of Nietzsche's medical evaluation papers "show that he almost certainly died of brain cancer"—a sadly ironic outcome for the man also famous for saying, "what does not kill me, makes me stronger." Taken literally, Nietzsche was clearly wrong about that, but in a figurative sense he was right, because while his body and mind wasted away from the disease that ravaged him, the fight he put up against it remains an immortal part of our cultural heritage. Let's pull out some other good things Nietzsche said before taking a more critical look at the beliefs this sad existence of his led him to.

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.

That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect.

Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire...

No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.

He who has a Why? in life can tolerate almost any How?

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 CE) was a German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism.

Survives
Nietzsche called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral schemes of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. However, Nietzsche did not want to destroy morality, but rather to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world. He indicates his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself. The vital impulses of life are the natural source of value and therefore morality. Analysis and time have shown some of the traditional morals of the Judeo-Christian world to contradict with the long-term survival of the species. Nietzsche was correct to challenge them vociferously.

Needs to Adapt
The statement "God is dead," has become one of Nietzsche’s best-known remarks. In his view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively “killed” the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth. Instead, we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism.” Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any importance and that life lacks purpose. Anthropomorphic, meddling gods are not only dead - they never existed. This is a good thing. The multiple, diverse, fluid beliefs in gods are what created conflicting perspectives of reality. Without religion, life can come together around the one true reality of a knowable universe. Without gods, we can find one true purpose - the long-term survival of life. There is nothing of greater importance.

Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. However, Nietzsche cautions that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law.” A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are.” It is not just “exceptional” people who should be unashamed of their uniqueness. Evolution requires species to be diverse to survive in a changing universe. All of life is dependent on each other and should be proud to play their part in the symphony. Everyone should become what they are - this is a message that is central in modern positive psychology. The only true “inner law” to be found is the universal joy over the survival of life. For anyone to selfishly believe they are above this law, they have to ignore their dependence on others, negate cooperation, and undermine their own happiness, peace, and stability - which is exactly what happened to Nietzsche.

Gone Extinct
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced the concept of a value-creating Übermensch. Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution. From Zarathustra: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? ... All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. ... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth. ... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss ... what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” Evolution is the term we use for the rules that govern the way that life survives. The end product of evolution then would be immortal life. Humans may have the intellectual capacity to achieve this. We can be the end.

Nietzsche's notion of the will to power can be viewed as a response to Schopenhauer's will to live. Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer's account and suggests that people and animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim - something necessary to promote one's power. In defense of his view, Nietzsche appeals to many instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare. Nietzsche believed the will to power provided not only a basis for understanding motivation in human behavior, but he also suggested that the will to power is a more important element than pressure for adaptation or survival. In its later forms, Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power. Nietzsche eventually took this concept further still and transformed the idea of matter as centers of force, into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to dispense with the theory of matter, which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance. There are many examples of creatures giving up power in return for life or even just a better life. Life is the ultimate force. Power can now be seen for what it is - a strategy necessary to compete in a short-term-focused environment. There are times when this strategy is required - when enemies of life must be overpowered. But giving in to the emotional high that comes from gaining power is to relegate oneself to an insecure existence and death at the hands of another competitor.

Nietzsche's view on eternal return is similar to that of Hume: the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation - chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law - would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part of the foundation of what became existentialism. Nietzsche contemplates the idea of eternal recurrence as potentially horrifying and paralyzing, and says that its burden is the heaviest weight imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, a love of fate. It is not clear if the universe is finite or infinite, but even if it were infinite, Nietzsche misses the other logical outcome of an eternal multiverse - that not only would our own stories come true, but all other possible stories would arise as well. Any and every possibility could be repeated eternally. This does not doom us to accepting or loving our fate, but rather to choose wisely for the life we know.
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Reading Nietzsche now, reading his terse, declarative, stylised, and emotional prose, it's no wonder that until the 1960s in France, Nietzsche "appealed mainly to writers and artists, since the academic philosophical climate was dominated by G.W.F. Hegel's, Edmund Husserl's, and Martin Heidegger's thought. Nietzsche became especially influential in French philosophical circles during the 1960's-1980's, when his 'God is dead' declaration, his perspectivism, and his emphasis upon power as the real motivator and explanation for people's actions revealed new ways to challenge established authority and launch effective social critique." His philosophical arguments—if you can even call them arguments since he doesn't take pains to establish the justification for his beliefs, just the beliefs themselves—do not hold up under scrutiny. But just as he once appealed to writers and artists, so he still can. An excellent example of which is the novel When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom, which is an ingenious piece of historical fiction imagining this troubled philosopher being lured into talking about his problems with Joseph Breuer, the mentor of Sigmund Freud and father of psychoanalysis. Nietzsche and Breuer were contemporaries in and around Vienna in the late 1800's, and although their meetings are fictional, they do make for great debate about a host of existential crises. Check it out to gain even more sympathy for the devil.

Imagine living in a society where the entire history of the culture consisted of writings and sayings that placed mankind at the centre of a divinely created universe. All the heavens and earth, the stars and the moon, the trees and plants, the birds and bees were created as a backdrop for man alone who was created separately and in God's image. We were the only species that talked, wore clothes, cooked food, built cities, created art, and had religion. No one questioned that we were somehow different than all the rest of creation. All the little phrases, actions, and attitudes of everyday life supported this belief throughout society over dozens and dozens of lifetimes. Then suddenly, Darwin came along and said, wait a minute, actually we are all probably related and this process called natural selection has continually chosen the best of us living things to survive. You might fight this idea (some still are), but the most clear-eyed among the population would look around at the state of things with humans well above the rest of the animal kingdom and decide that we may not be separate from them, but we surely aren't equal to them. Imagine all of that, and then take a guess as to what those people might say if I said morality may not be divine, they may just be a bunch of rules for survival. Whose survival? Well ours of course. And you'd define "ours" in any number of small and human-centred ways.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading a book called The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics that charted the history of such clear-eyed evolutionists who accepted Darwin's new world, but applied the consequences only to slim segments of life that they considered the fittest. They focused entirely on the competition for survival they suddenly realised they were in, and the results were a predictable horror show of classism, bigotry, and speciesism driven by underlying existential angst that has unfortunately tarnished the field of evolutionary philosophy and prejudiced "more enlightened thinkers" against such a crude school of thought. Chief among these thinkers who went down the wrong path was Herbert Spencer, the man who coined the term survival of the fittest. Clearly that shows where his head was at, but let's look at how his resulting ideas fared in my examination of the survival of the fittest philosophers.

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Herbert Spencer (1820-1903 CE) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was an enthusiastic exponent of evolution and even wrote about evolution before Darwin did. Spencer is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest.” He was probably the first, and possibly the only, philosopher in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own lifetime.

Survives
In 1858, Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applied in biology, psychology, sociology, and morality. He appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief, which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science. Hey, this guy sounds pretty promising.

The first objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to demonstrate that there were no exceptions to being able to discover scientific explanations in the form of natural laws of all the phenomena of the universe. Spencer’s volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines. Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover laws of morality that had the status of laws of nature while still having normative content. Yes. The physicalist view of the universe is correct. Also, Spencer is quite prescient to accept evolution as explaining the natural basis for morality.

Needs to Adapt
The second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these same laws led inexorably to progress. In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of the scientific method, Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organization as much as to the human mind. The end point of the evolutionary process would be the creation of “the perfect man in the perfect society” with human beings becoming completely adapted to social life. Spencer didn’t have the cosmological science that we have today so his view of the starting point of undifferentiated homogeneity was certainly incomplete. In the sense that survivors have learned something new, then progress does occur, but it is by no means inexorable in a universe with asteroids, supernovae, and black holes ready to tear life apart. And as long as the universe exists and moves and changes, then evolution will have no endpoint. The early naïveté of believers in evolution is starting to show in Spencer’s thinking.

Gone Extinct
For evolution to produce the perfect individual it was necessary for present and future generations to experience the “natural” consequences of their conduct. Only in this way would individuals have the incentives required to work on self-improvement and thus to hand an improved moral constitution to their descendants. Hence anything that interfered with the natural relationship of conduct and consequence was to be resisted, and this included the use of the coercive power of the state to relieve poverty, to provide public education, or to require compulsory vaccination. Although charitable giving was to be encouraged, even it had to be limited by the consideration that suffering was frequently the result of individuals receiving the consequences of their actions. Hence too much individual benevolence directed to the undeserving poor would break the link between conduct and consequence that Spencer considered fundamental to ensuring that humanity continued to evolve to a higher level of development. And here is where Spencer’s understanding of evolution goes completely off the rails. He misunderstands the fact that cooperation, society, and even government are all “natural” outgrowths of a species trying to survive.

Starting either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued we are ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator or the substratum that underlies our experience of phenomena, we can frame no conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, religion and science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable of relative knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge of phenomena, not of the reality underlying phenomena. Hence, both science and religion must come to recognize as the most certain of all facts that the Power, which the Universe manifests to us, is utterly inscrutable. He called this Awareness of the Unknowable and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith that could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges. Why deify that which we do not know? It only hurts us to worship our ignorance. We should instead continue to seek to know, or accept any true limitations that we do find and do what we can with the rest of our knowledge.

Spencer's last years were characterized by a collapse of his initial optimism, replaced instead by a pessimism regarding the future of mankind. It’s not surprising given the way he advocated for the strict half of evolution characterized by competition. Given our understanding of the other half of evolutionary strategy - cooperation - there is much cause for optimism.
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Spencer was "an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances." His father "ran a school founded on progressive teaching methods and also served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society which had been founded in the 1790s by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle completed Spencer's limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, and enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts." So while he was primed and quick to accept the reality of evolution, Spencer had none of the understanding of ecological niches, mutually beneficial relationships, and cooperative behaviours that exist throughout nature in every place found so far where life exists. He had no way of expanding the circle of the in-group of survivors until all of life was accepted into it. We know how to do that now, and we know that each member of that group must struggle with tradeoffs between choices that benefit either individuals, societies, species, ecologies, or environments over evolutionary timelines. But even if we can't forgive Spencer for some of his thoughts, we can at least understand him for not knowing all these facts about nature and morality. Besides, the man wasn't all bad who was able to say things like this:

The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives.

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation.

The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

People … become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

Spencer and the rest of the early evolutionary ethicists may have poisoned the well for research and thought into this field, but it's obvious there was promise there. Luckily, life will always explore fallow fields until it figures out a way to adapt and survive there, and hopefully my evolutionary philosophy can learn from that trick to help revive this dormant area of research. Onwards.

I mentioned in last week's essay about Kierkegaard that the ground had shifted in the world of ideas. In this series examining the survival of the fittest philosophers, we've seen how Darwin's theory of evolution was crystallised in 1859, how Hume questioned the gap in religious theologies between their description of what is and what ought to be, and how Montesquieu taught revolutionaries about the separation of powers in government. All of these were developed hand in hand with the English, American, and French revolutions that were completed by the end of the 1700's, and after those cracks in authoritarian rule were allowed to form, the Springtime of the Peoples erupted in 1848 when "a series of political upheavals throughout Europe...[led to a] widespread revolutionary wave in European history. The revolutions were essentially bourgeois-democratic in nature with the aim of removing the old feudal structures and the creation of independent national states. The revolutionary wave began in France and immediately spread to most of Europe and parts of Latin America. Over 50 countries were affected. Five factors were involved: widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership; demands for more participation in government and democracy; demands for freedom of press; the demands of the working classes; the upsurge of nationalism; and finally, the regrouping of the reactionary forces based on the royalty, the aristocracy, the army, and the peasants." Within a year, reactionary forces had regained temporary control of their states, but in the midst of this fighting fever, Karl Marx published his slim 23-page pamphlet, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in February of 1848. This call to arms that led eventually to the Russian Revolution in 1917, began with a awfully simple message:

The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. —The Manifesto of the Communist Party, section 2, paragraph 13.

What nonsense. But Marx had been travelling through Germany, France, Belgium, and England in the years preceding the Manifesto. This was the end of the Industrial Revolution: "the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal." However, "while growth of the economy's overall productive powers was unprecedented during the Industrial Revolution, living standards for the majority of the population did not grow meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries, and in many ways workers' living standards declined under early capitalism." In reaction to this exploitation of poor workers, the wealth that was in the hands of the captains of industry, and the recent ability to truly question the rule of kings, Marx decided we should throw it all away and he preached a new message to ears that were hungry to hear about change.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

Besides longing to return to the thousands of years of nasty, brutish, and short human existence, this is a highly ironic expression of individualism coming from the originator of communism. Biological cells aren't generalists. They specialise to work together to create a much better organism. And although humans aren't mere cells, neither are they lone islands existing outside of societies either. We can and should specialise, in non-binding ways, to work together to create a much better whole. Let's see where else I said Marx went wrong when I analysed the survival strength of his major ideas in my original evolutionary philosophy.

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Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894). Revolutionary socialist governments espousing Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.

Survives
Marx’s doctoral thesis, which he finished in 1841, has been described as a daring and original piece of work in which he set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy. In 1843, Marx published Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he dealt more substantively with religion, describing it as "the opiate of the people.” Religion must give way to philosophy. Religious answers have been a soothing opiate that endangers humanity with calls for subservience or detachment that lead to stagnation. Truth comes from scientific discovery, not from divine revelation.

Needs to Adapt
Another famous Marx quote, from his Critique of Gotha Programme, was, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Abilities are diversely distributed through the population of a successful species. Need alone, however, is no basis for the distribution of wealth. This does nothing to provide incentives for work and progress, which are necessary for the survival of the species. From each according to his ability to each according to his effort.

Gone Extinct
Marx's theories about society, economics, and politics, which are collectively known as Marxism, hold that all societies progress through class struggle; a conflict between an ownership class which controls production and a lower class which produces the labor for such goods. Heavily critical of the current socio-economic form of society, capitalism, he called it the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie," believing it to be run by the wealthy classes purely for their own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. He argued that under socialism society would be governed by the working class in what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the "workers’ state" or "workers' democracy.” He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless, classless society called communism. Society progresses through class cooperation. Conflicts between the classes lead to inefficiencies and instability. Unchecked capitalism promotes class differences, class competition, and class struggle. Replacing a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, who have money on their side, with a dictatorship of the proletariat, who have numbers on their side, is merely exchanging one form of class struggle for another. Putting people in charge who are led by a competitive outlook on life and have previously been squashed under that competition is a perfect recipe for what happened in the brutal communist regimes of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cambodia, Cuba, Angola, and others. Marx’s revolution was a cure far worse than the disease he diagnosed.

In 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Labor is not the primary means of producing value - the use of technology and knowledge as the means of production are the primary creators of value. Surplus value comes about from capitalist owners having access to technology and knowledge that laborers do not have access to and cannot bargain for. Exploitation comes from this access, which arises after small differences in the rate of material accumulation become amplified through continued investment and inheritance of that material towards ever more expensive means of production. This does not lead to a collapse of profits as Marx forecasted; this leads to a concentration of profits, which can be used to fortify the owners’ access to the means of production, thus entrenching capitalism. What undermines capitalism is not the falling rate of profits, but the rising levels of inequality that foment revolution. This is a threat to the stability of society and the survival of the species. This is why access to the means of production must be shared. This is why employee-owned cooperatives are a more just and sustainable means of organizing corporations and the economy. These cooperatives must compete with one another, thus ensuring their continued investment in progress, but no few individuals capture an unfair portion of the profits to be used for exploitative means. The same principles of checks and balances of power that make government cooperative and tenable must be applied to corporations as well.

Marx's tombstone bears the carved message of the final line of The Communist Manifesto: "Workers of all lands, unite!” It shouldn’t be just Marx’s workers. All humans, unite with each other for life!
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Jesus of Nazareth was the first in this series to give spiritual strength to the poor and the meek, and the religion of Christianity that followed his messages eventually rose to power and dogmatically kept its stern boot upon the people of the medieval age for a thousand years. Luckily, the reign of Marx's underclass didn't last as long, although its terrors were inflicted upon billions in China and all the satellites in the sphere of the Former Soviet Union. As a grim illustration of this, the picture above is one I took from a beating room in the KGB Museum in Lithuania where enemies of the state were made to suffer for any thoughts expressed against their ludicrous rule. The chains of oppression were simply handed from the upper class to the lower class, and what a disaster that proved to be. We can see that now. But as Marx said:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Marx unquestionably managed to change the world, but its just as clear now that he did so for the worse. It's up to new philosophers to interpret him and the rest of our past in order to figure out how to change the world for the better. Let's drop the class struggles, learn the lessons from evolution about how to survive and thrive by balancing competition and cooperation, and work together to find that better way!

So here we are, getting towards the end of modern philosophy in this series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers. Charles Darwin's big idea has come into the thoughts of mankind, and although it isn't everywhere yet, things are clearly changing. A ground has fallen away. The criticisms of religion have been protected, tolerated, and disseminated. The discoveries of science have undermined theological cosmologies. Utilitarians and economists are busy trying to calculate the right and the good with no place for any gods in their ledgers. The structured order of the medieval world resting on the rock of the eternal word of the church has given way to a volatile brew of competing religions, political ideas, and economic ways of life.

There are a two chief ways to respond to this turmoil—to accept it and simply do ones best to help clarify the new state of affairs, or to reject it and bury one's head in the sand, mistaking the continuing darkness for a static picture of reality. Did you know that In many languages, the word doubt is etymologically related to the word two? Think of Spanish: uno, dos; French: un, deux; Italian: uno, due; Russian: odin, dva. This definitional link makes sense as the feeling of doubt creeps in precisely where there is a difficult choice to be made between one of two ways. And in the case of the choice between two world views, the modern and the medieval, Soren Kierkegaard condemned himself to feelings of deep perpetual doubt by accepting that things had changed in the world, but taking the leap back to bury his head in the sand anyway. Let's look at the elements of his philosophy and see how they have fared in the light of today to see what I mean.

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Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855 CE) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. His theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the Church, and on the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives, focusing on the priority of concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. Kierkegaard has been called the Father of Existentialism, both atheistic and theistic variations.

Survives

Needs to Adapt
According to Kierkegaard, the idea of congregations keeps individuals as children since Christians are disinclined from taking the initiative to take responsibility for their own relation to God. Communities can be supportive, but when they support a mob mentality, they are harmful. Members of congregations would find the church’s god wanting if they examined it on their own.

Gone Extinct
One of Kierkegaard’s well-known ideas is the notion popularly referred to as “leap of faith.” The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God or how a person would act in love. Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love. No such evidence could ever be enough to pragmatically justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love. Faith involves making that commitment anyway. As Kierkegaard writes, "doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.” Utter nonsense. We can get lots of actual evidence that a person is worthy of love. We talk to them and learn their actions. Nothing of the sort has ever been seen from a god. Doubt is a practical emotion in a world of probabilistic knowledge. Faith is an impractical, irrational response to that probability.

Kierkegaard also stressed the importance of the self and its relation to the world as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection. He argued that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity.” This has to do with a distinction between what is objectively true and an individual's subjective relation (such as indifference or commitment) to that truth. People who in some sense believe the same things may relate to those beliefs quite differently. Two individuals may both believe that many of those around them are poor and deserve help, but this knowledge may lead only one of them to decide to actually help the poor. Kierkegaard primarily discusses subjectivity with regard to religious matters, however. He argues that doubt is an element of faith and that it is impossible to gain any objective certainty about religious doctrines such as the existence of God or the life of Christ. The most one could hope for would be the conclusion that it is probable that the Christian doctrines are true, but if a person were to believe such doctrines only to the degree they seemed likely to be true, he or she would not be genuinely religious at all. Faith consists in a subjective relation of absolute commitment to these doctrines. Exactly as I already described. Faith is an irrational response to a world filled with probabilities. The certainty that Kierkegaard calls for is reckless, dangerous, and promotes an unbridgeable chasm between rational and irrational humans.

Perhaps the most oft-quoted aphorism from Kierkegaard's journals, and a key quote for existentialist studies, is: "The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” The motto of the suicide bomber.
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I mentioned briefly in his introduction that Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the "father of existentialism". Plenty of philosophers from as far back as the pre-Socratics have maintained that the existence of a thing precedes its essence (the opposite of Plato's essential forms spawning individual examples of existence), so why does Kierkegaard get this title? Because he was the first to maintain that "the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom." This view of the world as absurd and meaningless, that one's existence is all there is in life, is a chief addition to the school of thought now called existentialism, and it rightfully earned Kierkegaard his moniker. The problem with Kierkegaard is what he chose to do with his life once he came to this conclusion. Rather than learn to lean on others and find meaning in the shared struggle for life, Kierkegaard fell back on his individual view of lonely existence and suffered deeply while he tried to commune with the god of his imagination.

In one of the chief encounters of his life, Kierkegaard ruined the one true love he shared with Regine Olsen by seducing her into an engagement only to subsequently run to his studies and ignore her to the point where he finally had to break things off, even though "Regine was crushed by the whole affair, as was Kierkegaard, who described spending his nights crying in his bed without her." The reasons for his actions are uncertain, but presumably, this quote from his journals sheds some light:

Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone. His misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

So the young man made some mistakes and faced doubts about them. Big deal! Kierkegaarde's inability to effectively deal with his doubts though was to be a lifelong theme in his existence. His first major publication, which turned out to be his magnum opus, was actually titled Either/Or (1843), and it was released under the pseudonym Victor Eremita, Latin for "the victorious hermit," who supposedly discovered papers from unknown authors "A" and "B" (more pseudonyms) in a secret drawer. The book is basically an argument about faith and marriage with a short discourse at the end telling them they should stop arguing. So Kierkegaard's doubt literally split him into multiple personalities that spilled onto his publicly published pages. Meanwhile, in his private journals, he also struggled with this theme, writing things such as:

Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

This is so sad! For there is no reason that our psychology cannot get past the dizziness of freedom. Billions of us do it all the time, because, well, because there is no other choice than to get on with things. It was only Kierkegaard's psychology that was unable to deal with this. In fact, it seems that Kierkegaard, a Danish surname that literally means a church farm, but has the colloquial meaning of a graveyard, might as well have consigned himself to one with his doubt, practically dying from it at the age of 42. As we saw, he was a deeply religious individual, but once two father figures in his life had died (his actual father (at age 82!), and his father's close friend Bishop Mynster), Kierkegaard launched an attack on the Church of Denmark through newspaper articles and a series of self-published pamphlets called The Moment. Before the tenth issue of his periodical The Moment could be published, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street. He stayed in the hospital for over a month, refusing communion, and dying soon after, possibly from complications from a fall he had taken from a tree in his youth, but I have little doubt that his personal isolation and torment contributed heavily to the exacerbation of his condition. We know today from many studies of longevity that communal bonds are one of the most important things that keep us alive, and Kierkegaard's existential individualism, fuelled by doubts that kept him separate from everyone in his life, had long since threw off those bonds. To wit, some other quotations from his journals:

Job endured everything — until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world.

Had he had the option, Kierkegaard would perhaps have benefited greatly from some philosophical counselling. Irvin Yalom, an existential psychotherapist, wrote in Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy: "I have found that four existential givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life." He, and others like him, have spent entire careers dealing with patients afflicted with the troubles that Kierkegaard expressed. In Plato Not Prozac!, Lou Marinoff described the steps he uses to guide a client through philosophical counselling. The steps are abbreviated by the acronym PEACE—the client identifies the Problem he or she is facing, determines what Emotions are being stirred up by this problem, takes some time to Analyze the options for dealing with the issue, and then Contemplates the whole situation from beginning to end in the hopes of eventually coming to a sustainable Equilibrium after the best answer to the original problem is reached. So when Kierkegaard expressed worries like this...

So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.

...we see that he was not at PEACE, even though he struggled for years to philosophise his way to get there. Though he is hailed today as one of the brightest minds of the early 19th century, his short and lonely life dedicated to an ultimately dead-end point of view clearly could have benefited from some wise interventions. And even if that wisdom would have had to come from someone with a lesser intellect, Kierkegaard should have been prepared to accept that. After all, he also said:

A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

I'm not sure which of those four categories I fall into or you fall into, but if you are struggling with doubt in your life and it is affecting the way you enjoy it, find someone to talk to, and see if you can't achieve some PEACE. Beware the example of Soren Kierkegaard.