Truth
Karl Kautsky on the Materialist Ethic of Darwinism
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 18 July 2010
The Struggle for Existence
In his little book, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, Karl Kautsky, the German Marxist, often called a revisionist by doctrinaire Marxists and Trotskyites, has a perceptive chaper, “The Ethic of Darwinism”, in which he anticipates Emile Durkheim and recent discoveries of evolutionary psychology in deriving human ethics from a moral instinct different from Kant’s “look on man as an end and not simply as a means”, which Kautsky disparages as neglecting the social nature of human beings, and putting all the onus on the individual though society has an essential role in the making of every one of us.
Kant, like Plato, had divided mankind into two parts, a natural and a supernatural, an animal and an angelic. Yet already by the time Kant was dying, science was bringing forward new discoveries, which increasingly filled the gap between humanity and animals, eventually showing that what was considered angelic in people also appeared among some animals, and so was not at all distinctive between us and them!
Even so, the materialist ethics of the nineteenth century ignored the science and based itself on that which the eighteenth century had taught. Feuerbach founded morality on the desire for happiness. Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, used the distinction between moral or altruistic feelings, and the egoistical, both of which are rooted in human nature.
It was not until Darwin that any decided advance was made. He gave examples in his book on The Descent of Man, that altruism was not a human peculiarity but also found among other species of animals, and that the causes of it are the same. Darwin had torn down one of the final barriers supposedly separating human beings from animals.
The organic world, in contrast to the inorganic, has the striking peculiarity of adaptation to end. Our features and characteristics are arranged and endowed to serve an end, albeit not one predetermined, but one they face by being born into the world as it is. Yet the world itself also has no aim. The end is that individuals have to survive, and preferably, thrive in the world. So, each creature’s parts are arranged and fitted out to serve the creature by enabling it to find a suitable place for it in the world as a whole. In short, the creature, once born, has to specialize itself to fit somewhere in Nature. Of course, all its predecessors have faced the same task and have succeeded, otherwise the individual could not have been born at all. So, purpose—finding a suitable niche in the world—and specialization—Nature selecting those that are most fit for purpose—arise together. Kautsky calls specialization, division of labor, because any creature must change to fit, and each of its characteristics must similarly change to assist the organism to fit:
The essence of the organism is the division of labor just as much as adaptation to end. One is the condition of the other.K Kautsky
The progressive division of labor distinguishes organisms from inorganic classifications, like crystals. Crystals are distinct individuals with a distinct form, which grow under the requisite conditions—when they have material available necessary for their formation—but, barring faults, are quite symmetrical and similarly structured throughout. The simplest organism, though is a tiny vesicle much less structured than the crystal, yet structured in such a way as to be able to respond to its circumstances by its division of labor.
The division of labor is one which is suitable for its purpose—it is useful to the individual, rendering its existence possible, and even ameliorates it. It therefore seems wonderful, inviting the notion that it was deliberately designed, but it would be more wonderful if these organisms, these species, maintained themselves and procreated with specializations—division of labor—that was not suitable for the purpose, which rendered their existence impossible.
What is the work which the division of labor—the organs of the organism—has to accomplish? It is the struggle for life, not merely the struggle with other organisms of the same kind, but the struggle to fit in with Nature. Nature is in continual movement and is always changing her forms, hence only those organisms will be able to maintain a suitable and successful place in Nature for any period of time that are able to develop organs which successfully cope with the changing external circumstances that threaten the individual’s place or niche. Most successful will be those whose features are best adapted to their end, best adapted to the external world, to avoid its dangers and to find sources of food. The uninterrupted process of adaptation, and the selection of the fittest, by means of the struggle for existence produce an increasing division of labor—continuous specializations. The constant process of rendering the organic world more perfectly adapted to Nature is thus the result of the struggle for existence in it.
Development need not always proceed at the same rate. From time to time, an organism in its own way can arrive at the highest possible degree of adaptation to the existing conditions—it is in the most complete harmony with its surroundings. So long as these conditions endure, development will effectively cease, and the form which has been arrived at will become a fixed species which procreates itself unchanged. Today, we know that change can occur nevertheless, such as by genetic drift, but that will be small and slow in large populations. Further significant development requires the surroundings to undergo considerable change, when the environment is subject to changes which disturb the balance of the adapted species within it.
Such changes do take place from time to time, either single, sudden and violent, or numerous, minor and unnoticed, the sum total of which either way brings on new situations. Examples are alterations in the ocean currents, in the surface of the earth, maybe in the position of the planet or the sun in the universe, which bring about climatic changes, transform thick forests into deserts of sand, cover tropical landscapes with icebergs and vice versa. These alterations make new adaptations to the changed conditions necessary, they produce migrations which likewise bring the organisms into new surroundings, and produce fresh struggles for life between the old inhabitants and the new incomers, exterminate the badly adapted and the unadaptable individuals and types, and create new divisions of labor, new specialisms, new functions and new organs, or transform the old.
It is not always the highest developed organisms which best assert themselves by this new adaptation. Highly developed organs, which are specially adapted for a particular method of life, are for another far less useful than organs which are less developed, and in that particular method of life less effective, but more many sided and more easily adaptable. So, more highly developed kinds of animals and plants die out, sometimes in mass extinctions when massive environmental change has happened, and lower kinds take over the farther development of new higher organisms.
Self Movement And Intelligence
The organisms divided themselves into two great groups—those which developed the organs of self motion, and those which lacked it, animals and plants. The power of self movement is a mighty adaptation in the struggle for life. By it, the organism can follow its food, can escape danger, can bring its young into places secure from dangers and best provided with food.
Yet, self motion necessarily implies intelligence, and vice versa. One without the other is absolutely useless in the struggle for life. Only in combination do they become useful. Self movement has to be combined with the ability to recognize the world in which one moves. What use would legs be if some animal could not recognize its enemies and where its food was? For a plant intelligence of any kind could not help it. If a blade of grass could see, hear, or smell an approaching cow, it could not stop being eaten.
So, self movement and intelligence necessarily go together. Neither alone can serve any practical purpose. There is no self movement without intelligence, and no intelligence without self movement. These faculties invariably come up together and develop themselves jointly, and together they serve the same ends, the securing and alleviation of the individual existence.
Some humans might demur. Recognizing things in themselves may seem important to philosophers, but, for our existence, it is of no consequence whatever we understand by the “thing in itself”, in Kant’s expression. Yet, for every being endowed with power of movement, it is important to distinguish between things, and to recognize their relations to one another. The sharper one’s ability in this degree of intelligence, the better it will serve practical living. For the existence of the singing bird, it does not matter what the things may be in themselves which appear to it as a berry, a hawk, or a thunder cloud. But distinguishing berries, hawks, and clouds from other things in its surroundings is indispensable for it to live, because it lets it find food, escape the enemy, and reach shelter. The intelligence of an animal then must be the ability of distinguishing in space.
And equally indispensable it is for it to recognize the sequence of the things in time, and their necessary sequence as cause and effect. To continue with the example of a bird, it is not sufficient that it should know how to distinguish berries, hawks, and thunder clouds from the other things in space, it must also know that the enjoyment of the berries has the effect of satisfying its hunger, that the appearance of the hawk will have the effect that the first small bird which it can grasp will serve it as food, and that the rising thunder clouds produce storm, rain, and hail as results. Even the least developed animal develops some notion of causality from its ability to distinguish things in sequence, necessitated for self movement to be useful to it. Even a the worm somehow recognizes that when the earth gently trembles, danger threatens and evasive action might be required. Thus if intelligence is to be of use to the animal in its movements, it must be show it distinctions in time and space as well as the causal connections.
Finally, intelligence must also possess the power to gather experiences and to make comparisons. The singing bird has two ways open to him to find out what food is the best, where it is to be found, what enemies are dangerous to it, and how to escape them, first, his own experience, and second, the observation of other and older already experienced birds. No one is a born master at any skill. The greater someone’s experience, and the better organized they are in the struggle for life, the more fitted they are to survive it. That, though, requires memory, and the capacity to compare earlier and later impressions, to permit the essential and the unessential to be separated.
All these qualities of the intellectual powers are developed among animals, even if not in so high a degree as in humans. What is often objectively inseparable from unconscious actions, will be uncritically attributed in animals to instinct, but modern research shows that the greater part of human thought is just as unconscious. Much of human free will is not so free. We deliberately practice to make ourselves act involuntarily by simple reflex actions, as in driving a car, playing tennis, or solving mathematical problems. It is far from easy to distinguish conscious actions springing from intelligence, from involuntary and instinctive movements which, even among humans, play a role.
Capacities acquired as skills during an earlier struggle for existence can, however, become available for some other later purpose. Muscles, early humans developed to pursue its prey, or to ward off a foe, are used by modern humans for dancing and playing sports. But only the struggle for life, which developed them, gave them their particular character. Play and dance use muscles, but did not develop them.
That holds good also of intellectual faculties. Each was developed as a necessary supplement to the power of self movement in the struggle for life, to render possible the most suitable movement to the organism for its own preservation in the surrounding world. Yet intelligence is such a flexible and adaptable characteristic, it always had the potential to serve other purposes—like that of pure knowing, without any practical value in the background, without regard for its practical consequences. Nevertheless, our intellect has not developed in the struggle for existence to be a manipulator of pure knowledge, but simply to be a regulator of our movements so as to conform with their purpose.
It is practice, however, which guarantees us the certainty of our knowledge. When our knowledge lets us bring about distinct effects, the production of which lies in our power, the relation of cause and effect ceases to be just chance or appearance, or forms of knowledge. Knowing this relation becomes, through its practice, knowing something real—certain knowledge. The boundaries of our certain knowledge are the boundaries of practice.
That theory and practice are dependent on one another, and only through the mutual permeation of the one by the other can at any time the highest result attainable—sure knowledge—be arrived at, comes from movement and intellectual powers always going together. During the development of human society, the division of labor has led to the natural unity of these two factors being destroyed. Distinct classes emerged, one to whom mainly movement, and the other to whom mainly knowing, fell.
In philosophy, it was reflected in dualism—the creation of two worlds, a higher or intellectual, and a lower or bodily, though the two functions were naturally united in each individual. In our class society, knowledge remains a tool in the struggle for existence, a means to give to our movements, be they movements in nature or society, the most suitable forms and directions.
Self Maintenance and Procreation
Self movement and knowing developed themselves each with the other, and incline to replace more primitive abilities, which are less necessary, such as fruitfulness and of vitality. And as they do diminish, so the importance of self movement and intelligence in the struggle for life increase, necessitating their still greater development.
Of course, self movement and knowledge alone are insufficient for success in the struggle. What use are the strongest muscles, the most agile joints, the sharpest senses, the greatest understanding, in this struggle, if the organism lacks an impulse to use them for self preservation—if the sight of food or the knowledge of danger leaves it indifferent and awakes no related yearning or emotion in it? Essentially, this yearning or emotion is the will to live. Self movement and intellect are unimportant for the existence of the individual without its instinct of self preservation, just as this latter again is useless without both the former. All three are intimately bound up with each other.
The instinct of self preservation is the most primitive of the animal instincts and the most indispensable. Without it no animal species whatever its power of self movement and its intelligence could maintain itself even a short time. It rules the entire life of the animal. The same social development, which ascribes the care of the intellectual faculties to particular classes, and the practical movement to others, and produces in the first an elevation of “spirit” over gross “matter”, goes so far in the process of isolating intellect, that the latter—out of contempt for the “mechanical” practices which serve for the maintenance of life—come to despise life itself.
Even so, such disdain has never as yet been able to overcome the instinct of self preservation, to paralyze the “practice” which serves for the maintenance of life. A suicide might be philosophically grounded, yet, in every practical act of the denial of life, illness or desperate social circumstances are truly the cause, not the philosophical theory. Reasoning alone cannot overcome the instinct of self preservation.
So too, must natural selection develop through the struggle for life an outspoken impulse to reproduce, and ever more strengthen it. Only those species of organisms most active and therefore most successful in the struggle for existence, leave progeny behind them.
To the degree to which self movement and intellectual powers grow, the number of descendents, which the individual produces, as well as its vitality, have a tendency to diminish. Yet the greater the division of labor, the more complicated the organism, the longer the period required for it to reach maturity. Then the care of the progeny becomes the mother’s essential function. As the impulse for reproduction, so is it with the love for the young. Especially in the animal world, from a certain stage of development on, maternal love develops as an indispensable means to perpetuate the species.
These impulses have nothing to do with the impulse towards individual self preservation. They often come into conflict with it, and can be strong enough as to overcome it. Under otherwise equal conditions, those individuals and species have the best prospect of reproducing themselves and handing on their qualities in whom the impulse of self maintenance cannot diminish the impulse to reproduce and protect the progeny.
The Social Instinct
While the mother will nourish her young for a limited time, eventually the young have to separate from the mother and its siblings. It can be brought about by diverse causes. The most obvious and perhaps the most effective, is the lack of sustenance. Each locality can only yield a certain quantity of food. If a species of animal multiplies beyond the limits of their food supply, the superfluous ones must either emigrate or starve. The organisms living in one place can not go above a certain number.
For some species of animals, a life of isolation, or at most living in pairs for breeding, and for awhile as a family group, affords an advantage in the struggle for existence. The cat species lie in wait for their prey and take it with an unexpected spring. This method of killing food would be more difficult or impossible if cats lived in herds. The first cat to spring on a victim would alert all the game to the others. The cat hunts more successfully alone. For wolves, which do not come unexpectedly on their prey, but pursue it, gathering in packs affords an advantage. One wolf presses its prey to another, which blocks its escape. They hunt coöperatively. Again there are animals that choose isolation because thereby they are less conspicuous and can easily escape a foe.
The herbivora herd together, because being defenceless, their numbers become a tool in the struggle for life. The union of many weak forces in common action can produce a new and greater force. The stronger animals fight, not only for themselves, but also for the good of the whole herd. When the more experienced look out for their own safety, or find feeding grounds for themselves, they do it also for the rest. So, it becomes possible for a division of labor among the united individuals, which increases their strength and their safety. A society of united animals is forming. It is impossible to watch the neighborhood with the most complete attention, and at the same time to feed peacefully. Naturally during sleep all observation of all kind comes to an end. But in society each watcher suffices to render the others safe during sleep or while eating.
Through the division of labor, the union of individuals becomes a body with different organs to coöperate to a given end, the maintenance of the collective body—the community. It becomes an organism. The individuals which form the society can entrust others among their members with different functions, which reflect the society’s uniform will and thereby generates coördinated movements in the society.
Such a coherent group is a type of organism, but one in which individuals can separate themselves from one society and join another, or indeed, be rejected by one society, and possibly by all! That is impossible for a cell. For it, separation from the whole is death. Indeed, when a rejected person cannot find another tribe to accept them, it is almost certainly death for them too. They cannot compete for resources with the societies around that dominate.
Like any single organism, though, the social community will survive so much the better, in the struggle for existence, the more united its movements, the stronger its binding forces, the greater the harmony of the parts. Its unity, harmony, and coherence can only arise from the actions and will of its members.
Motivating drives or impulses vary across various species, but a succession of impulses are needed for the growth of a society:
- Altruism is perhaps the prime one, self sacrifice for the whole
- Bravery in the defence of common interests
- Fidelity to the community
- Submission to the will of society
- Obedience
- Discipline
- Truthfulness to society whose security is endangered, or whose energies are wasted, when it is misled
- Appreciation or ambition, sensibility to the praise (and blame) of society.
These social impulses are judged among the highest virtues—they sum up the entire human moral code. Yet, they are what we find expressed already among other social animal, many of them plainly. Maybe they lack the love of justice—the desire for equality. Indeed, the lofty moral law—that no one should be merely a means to an end—which the Kantians look on as the most wonderful achievement of Kant’s genius, as the moral programme of the modern era, and the entire future of humanity, is, in the animal world, commonplace. What appeared to a Kant as the creation of a higher world of spirit, is a product of our own material world and the animals that move about in it.
The moral law is an animal impulse or instinct. Thence comes its mysterious nature, this still voice within us which has no connexion with any external stimulus. Certainly a mysterious thing, but not more mysterious than sexual love, maternal love, the instinct of self preservation, the being of the organism itself, and so many other things, which only belong to the world of phenomena, and which no one looks on as products of a supersensuous world.
The moral law is the universal instinct, equal to the instincts of self preservation and reproduction. From it therefore springs its power which we obey without thought, our rapid decisions such as whether an action is good or bad, virtuous or vicious. From it springs the determination of our moral judgment, and the difficulty we have explaining it when invited to analyze its grounds. The moral law and moral judgement, as well as the feeling of duty and conscience, comes not from our organs of knowing, but from our instincts. Moral philosophers are simply cataloguing and justifying our natural moral impulses as social animals.
In many kinds of animals, the social impulses attain such a strength, that they become stronger than all the rest. Should the former come in conflict with the latter, they do so with the strength of the group and of one’s individual duty to it and other members of it. Any inclination in the individual otherwise, to revert to a selfish morality, and the social instinct intervenes as the voice of conscience and of repentance. Public opinion, praise and blame are also influential factors, but their effect assumes in advance the social instinct of ambition, the need for social appreciation.
We have no reason to assume that conscience is confined to man. We would find it difficult to find even in men, if everyone did not feel its effect on himself. And investigators have indeed posited in animals a kind of conscience. Thus Darwin says in his book, The Descent of Man:
Besides Love and Sympathy the animals show other qualities connected with the social instincts, which we should call moral in men. And I agree with Agassiz that dogs have something very like a conscience. Dogs certainly have a certain power of self control, and this does not appear to be altogether a consequence of fear. As Braubach remarks, a dog will restrain itself from stealing food in the absence of its master.
One of the most peculiar phenomena is that social animals, when united in greater numbers, also feel stronger social impulses. For example, we humans find an entirely different spirit in a well filled meeting than in a sparse one—the bigger crowd alone has an inspiring effect on the speaker. And in the crowd individuals are not only more brave—that could be explained through the greater support which each believes he will get from his fellows—they are also more unselfish, more self sacrificing, more enthusiastic, but often less critical and more credulous.
The moral law in us can lead our intellect astray like any other impulse. In itself, it is neither a product of wisdom nor does it produce wisdom. The moral law is of the same nature as the instinct for reproduction. Nothing is more ridiculous, than when the former is put on a pedestal, and the latter is turned away with loathing and contempt. But no less false is it to infer that humanity can and ought to follow all its instincts without check. That any one should follow all their instincts without restraint is simply impossible, if only because they restrain one another.
If the moral law is accepted as a social impulse, which like all instincts is brought out in us by the struggle for life, the supersensuous world has lost a buttress of support in human thinking. Darwinism was the first to make an end to the division of man into a natural and animal on the one hand, and a supernatural and heavenly, on the other, which this had invited, and had for long gone unquestioned.
- Adapted and abridged from Karl Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (1907), Chapter 4: “The Ethics of Darwinism”
