The Monistic Naturalism of Ernst Haeckel
1Exactly a century ago, an outstanding German scientist and philosopher was putting the finishing touches on his final offering to posterity. The man was Ernst Haeckel and the book was his 1899 The Riddle of the Universe. As I read his message a hundred years later I am moved to tears by his dreams for humanity that failed to materialize, and by the manner in which his message was distorted and the author maligned in the following decades. I think of what might have happened if his words had been understood and heeded: of the lost opportunities for the human race; the possibilities unrealized; the needless cultural regression that he had hoped to forestall; and the tragic, unnecessary wars that could have been avoided. Over and over, as I read his message, I think of how different the current situation might have been if our culture had taken the path implied by Haeckel’s evolutionary monism, rather than following the distorted drums of dualism and mysticism, and of the myth-based tribalisms that these world views have continued to nourish.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) began his scholarly career as a physician in Berlin and soon became one of Europe’s foremost scientific thinkers. As a self-styled "child of the nineteenth century" he had been a lifetime optimist, confident that humankind was at long last about to "leave the cave". However, in the dying days of his century -- and of his scholarly life as well -- he was becoming increasingly alarmed. The Riddle of the Universe was a heroic, final attempt to present the scientific knowledge of his time to the reading public and to point out the implications of this knowledge for our understanding of human behavior.
Haeckel began by referring to "the open contradiction that has developed during the century between science and traditional Revelation"
2 and to the unfortunate fact that nineteenth-century philosophy had failed to recognize this contradiction and to incorporate the new scientific knowledge in any meaningful way. He blamed both scientists and philosophers for maintaining an "unnatural and fatal opposition between the two modes of thought"3. He had come to believe that, compared to the remarkable advances in physical science and technology, the entire network of human social and moral organization had remained mired in a state of barbarism. And he predicted, quite rightly, that this did not bode well for the future.Haeckel was dismayed that, in spite of all of the scientific progress to date, "stupidity and superstition" still reigned supreme in human culture. Everywhere, he said, "revealed truths" took precedence over tested knowledge. For him the culprits were the anthropistic dogmas of most of the world’s traditional religions, and all the other dangerous delusions generated and justified by the prevailing dualistic philosophy. He saw the latter as the chief reason why so many educated people continued to grant credence to emotion and revelation over reason and observation as sources of knowledge.
His own major premise was that reliable knowledge can only be acquired through a combination of sense experience and rational thought. The philosophical position that he had developed and promoted was profoundly opposed to prevailing dualistic interpretations of the cosmos. However, as he explained it, his "monism" was not the same thing as the nineteenth-century materialism which had been offered previously as the only alternative to the various idealisms and dualisms of the time. In rejecting the old "matter-spirit" dichotomy, he did not follow Marx in discarding the very concept of "spirit" or "ideal". His monism was, instead, in the tradition of the atomists of Hellenic Greece, and of their intellectual descendants such as Epicurus, Spinoza, Hume and Goethe: all of whom had defined spiritual phenomena as natural aspects of a universal substance. For these thinkers, the human spirit was merely a product of the functioning of the human organism, emerged in a more complex form somewhat as liquid turns into vapour. Haeckel was careful to explain that his concept of spirit had nothing whatsoever to do with "the erroneous idea of a specific ‘vital’ force" -- which he attributed to the writings of Albrecht Haller. (This notion was being revived in a particularly seductive form by Henri Bergson at the very time that Haeckel was warning against it.)
Haeckel’s major contributions to naturalistic thought were in the field of evolutionary science. In tracing the tragic fourteen-century black hole in the history of this study he noted that, prior to the nineteenth century, every serious attempt to explain the origin of species had been lost in the "labyrinth of supernatural stories of creation". This is no exaggeration. Even the great eighteenth century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus was still following Aristotle in believing that a given number of distinct, immutable types -- each with its own immutable "nature" -- had been created by God, and that the scientist’s task was merely to identify these. It is true that Rousseau, early in the same century, had dared to suggest an evolutionary kinship between humankind and the other primates. However, Haeckel noted that only Goethe had been courageous enough to point out, as early as 1775, that a distinctive formation in the jawbone of the higher apes was identical to the corresponding formation in the jaws of humans.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a remarkable, complicated figure whose imagination seems to have incorporated aspects of both the empiricism and romanticism of the Enlightenment. In his early career he did some important work in science with which Haeckel was obviously familiar, but which is seldom recognized today. Like Hume, Goethe may have been a forerunner of Pragmatism, in that he saw the impossibility of ascertaining the final truth of any proposition, by means of either rational or empirical criteria. Whether because of disillusionment with a scientific community that spurned his theorizing, or because he could not give up on his own personal search for a holistic approach to knowledge, Goethe then focused on literature. His powerful writings with the romantic idealist undertones have fascinated scholars for almost two centuries. A mark of his greatness is that, more than anyone, he inspired a virtual revolution in German culture, propelling that country, in the space of two generations, into a leadership role in literature and the arts -- if not in philosophy.
In spite of giving Goethe credit for a number of prescient conclusions on the subject of evolution, Haeckel acknowledged Lamarck’s 1809 treatise on the subject as the only really systematic contribution until Darwin’s remarkable revolution a half-century later. In comparing these two great pioneers of evolutionary science, he said, "We find in Lamarck a preponderant inclination to deduction, and to forming a complete, monistic scheme of nature; in Darwin we have a prudent concern to establish the different parts of the theory of selection as firmly as possible on the basis of observation and experiment".
4 (He could have added that the early evolutionary concepts of Spinoza and Goethe may have actually represented a third approach: the pantheistic one in which both scientific deduction and induction tend to be superseded by a belief in the possibility of some form of holistic, direct access to "nature’s truths".)Haeckel neglected to mention, in this book, many of his own accomplishments. Thirty years before the discovery of the first transitional fossils he had offered a hypothesis of the lineage of human evolution that has stood the test of subsequent evidence. He suggested a remote ancestor, an ape-like primate with a relatively small brain who walked upright and used simple language. He coined the phrase, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as well as the name of "ecology" for a new science of the diversity of life. He was also the first to employ the term "monism" for the evolutionary perspective of a seamless web of nature existing in a hierarchy of increasingly complex, emergent forms.
However, it was on the subject of psychology that Haeckel was particularly committed to breaking new ground. He was the first to point out the significance of evolutionary theory for that "colossally confused" would-be discipline. He went so far as to declare that psychology must necessarily provide the foundation and postulate for all of the sciences, in that all knowledge is ultimately dependent on how the individual assimilates and organizes incoming sensations . He viewed psychology as the scientific study of "the soul" (or psyche), which he defined in thoroughly naturalistic terms as the product of a functioning brain.
The problem, he said, was that most of the psychologists of his time knew nothing about the nature and development of the human organism. They were trying to operate, as scientists, within a dualistic frame of reference that defined their very object of study as beyond the reach of science. He thought this impossible dead-end situation was due chiefly to Descartes’ unwarranted conceptual separation of the human psyche from that of other animals. Haeckel also blamed the continuing popularity of Kant’s philosophy -- and the Medieval Christian doctrine which both perspectives had long supported. He concluded that there would be no real progress in psychology until its practitioners understood that "man’s highest mental powers -- reason, speech and conscience -- have risen from the same faculties in our primate ancestors... [and that] his whole psychic life differs from that of the nearest related mammals only in degree and not in kind".
5Haeckel maintained that the concept of "consciousness" is the citadel of the most misleading of the dominant mystical and dualistic errors found in psychology, "before whose ramparts the best-equipped efforts of reason threaten to miscarry".
6 His own view was that consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon like any other psychic product of the brain, and fully as subject to the laws of cause and effect that govern all existence. He envisaged a new "monistic religion" that would celebrate the organic origin and the scientific and artistic achievements of human consciousness. It would be a thoroughly naturalistic one capable of guiding the course of cultural evolution in life-fulfilling directions. This is an objective with which many modern humanists might well agree. However, Haeckel did not associate monism with the term, "humanism". In his day that label was still being used chiefly to define an orientation toward the humanities -- most of which were then predominantly dualistic and romantic in their philosophical foundations.Haeckel’s final book makes sad reading in the light of the lack of progress in philosophy and social science during the century that followed him. Nevertheless, the most tragic aspect of his story is what was happening, even as he wrote, to the evolutionary world view which he had helped to pioneer. It was already well on the way to being co-opted and perverted by a powerful current of pseudo-scientific racism. The latter had been first spelled out in an 1853 publication called The Inequality of Human Races, written in France by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. Perhaps the most influential contributor to the distortion of Darwin’s theory was Friedrich Nietzsche -- an enemy of science as well as of religion -- who transmitted the evolutionary perspective to posterity in the form of a ruthless Social Darwinism featuring the Superman and the principle that "might makes right". More than anything, it was the mistaken association of Haeckel’s authentic Darwinian approach with this grotesque dehumanizing caricature that has prevented social science from benefitting from the remarkable progress in the life sciences that occurred during the twentieth century. The resulting anti-science prejudice at the core of social science has been disastrous for humanism as well. We can thank Nietzsche and his intellectual descendants -- and the fundamentalist religious backlash that they fostered -- for all the wasted decades.