Nihilism and Darwinism

Nihilism emerged in an atmosphere that made the liberal reforms of the 1860s not only a possibility but also a reality. It was an ideology that sought no compromise with the social and cultural values built into the autocratic system. It represented a unique combination of materialism, espoused by Büchner and Moleschott, and positivism, a philosophical legacy of Auguste Comte and his followers. Materialism and positivism shared a pure belief in science as the motive force of social and cultural

progress. Both viewed Darwinism as a generally successful effort to enhance the power of science in the unceasing war against mysticism, irrationalism, and supernaturalism.

Dmitrii Pisarev has been widely recognized as the most astute and influential architect of Russian nihilism. Materialism guided him in a consistent, but mainly implicit, war on the idealistic metaphysics of conservative writers, and on the most dedicated and bellicose defenders of autocratic values. A firm allegiance to positivism gave support to his views on the close ties between the growth of secular wisdom and social progress, on scientific regularities in the evolution of human society, and on the historical relativity of human knowledge and institutions. In addition to recounting the blessings of science as a major weapon in the war on the ancien régime, he popularized values that Francis Bacon had posited as the necessary cultural base for the advancement of science. He placed particular emphasis on two values closely related to the cultivation of scientific thought, one encouraging critical thought—the challenge to every intellectual authority—and the other stressing social utility as the only reliable indicator of the value of knowledge.

In 1864 Pisarev published "Progress in the World of Animals and Plants," a long essay presenting a fleeting analysis and enthusiastic endorsement of the basic ideas that made the Origin of Species a scientific work of epochal significance. The dramatic tone of this essay helped establish Pisarev as one of the most respected and influential popularizers of natural science during the early 1860s. The famous neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov noted many years later that Pisarev's popular essay helped attract many young Russians to natural science studies in the institutions of higher education. Pavlov himself was one of those students.^[71]

No other nineteenth-century work, Pisarev thought, surpassed Darwin's classic as a contribution to the triumph of a world view based on secular wisdom. Nor did any work make a more formidable contribution to the scientific foundations of biology. Pisarev did not hesitate to equate the authority of Darwin's law of evolution with the authority of Newton's law of gravitation. Like the law of gravitation, Darwin's "law" is universal, intolerant of exceptions. Unlike the law of gravitation, however, it must consider individualized external conditions to which organisms or species react in their struggle for existence. In comparison with the law of gravitation, the law of evolution is far more complex and it had not been studied so thoroughly.^[72] More than any previous discovery, the law of evolution has shown that the work of nature is not a work of vast complexes of integrated phenomena but one of

accumulative effects of "millions of small forces and causes."^[73] Only persistent, trained, and minute observation can unveil the work of the universal struggle for existence. The inductive method is the most powerful weapon at the disposal of a naturalist.

The inductive method is one cornerstone of Darwin's theory, as Pisarev saw it. The other is historicism—the treatment of living nature as a continually changing phenomenon. Darwin showed that "not only individuals have their lives, but species and genera too; they gradually come into existence and they too are subject to continual variations according to definite laws."^[74] Just as Lyell made the history of the earth the central concern of geology, so Darwin made the history of living forms the central concern of biology.

Pisarev's essay was scarcely more than a detailed and painstaking summary of the Origin of Species; it stayed close not only to the basic principles of the evolutionary theory but also to the treasures of Darwin's minute dissections of supporting data drawn from natural history. In addition to the Origin, he relied heavily on Lyell's geological work and on Karl Vogt's popular Zoological Letters . In the writings of Étienne and Isidore Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire he found both the valuable ideas that contributed to Darwinian thought and erroneous allusions that worked in the opposite direction.

In a way, Pisarev's essay was intended to be a review of Rachinskii's Russian translation of the Origin of Species . Pisarev wanted to do something about two major deficiencies in the translation. In the first place, he thought that the translator's Russian was too academic to appeal to a general reader. In the second place, Rachinskii did not write an introduction to the Russian text. "Progress in the World of Animals and Plants" exemplified a kind of introduction Pisarev would have written: it recounts the basic components of Darwin's evolutionary argument in a language comprehensible and appealing to the lay public.

Like Darwin, Pisarev fully rejected the three basic components of Lamarck's theory: the direct influence of the environment on the transformation of living forms, the use and disuse of organs as a propelling force of evolution, and the innate drive for progress. Like Darwin and Lyell, he found Cuvier's catastrophe theory a futile effort to resolve a critical paleontological dilemma.^[75] The essay made only scanty references to the contributions of Darwin's precursors. Nor did it make a systematic effort to elaborate the intellectual links between the new theory of organic evolution and contemporary developments in sociology.

Pisarev found Darwin's theory acceptable in its entirety. He treated

the enemies of Darwin's way of thinking as his own enemies. His main intent was not to show how Darwin's theory could be made the pillar of a modern ideology, but simply to give a popular account of its basic arguments—and to create a model for popular reviews of developments in science, a type of prose which, he thought, should occupy the first place in the creative work of literary figures. The essay dealt extensively with three major problems: the universality of organic evolution, the mechanisms of evolution, and the geological, geographical, embryological, and comparative-anatomical evidence supporting the evolutionary idea as Darwin saw it. Pisarev's goal was to give a true recapitulation of Darwin's ideas, avoiding criticism and philosophical elaboration. The essay was written in a lively and limpid style, and the illustrative material, despite its magnitude, was closely tied to the theoretical issues at hand. Preoccupied with the details of Darwin's elaboration of evolutionary principles, he chose to ignore the work of Darwin's early supporters and critics. Curious readers learned about Fritz Müller's embryological support and Kolliker's general criticism from other sources.

Pisarev made sure to let his readers know about the immense proportions of the Darwinian revolution:

A master of vast stores of knowledge, Charles Darwin studied the entire life of nature from so broad a perspective and with so deep a penetration into all its scattered phenomena that he was able to make a discovery that, perhaps, has not been equalled in the history of the natural sciences. His feat was not limited to the discovery of an isolated fact, such as a gland or a vein, or the function of a nerve; he unveiled an entire order of laws, which govern the entire organization and transformation of life on our planet. Making his laws simple and incontrovertible, he built his study on obvious facts, and he made . . . the amateur in the natural sciences wonder why he did not come to these conclusions himself a long time ago. . . .

In nearly all the natural sciences Darwin's ideas have brought about a complete revolution: botany, zoology, anthropology, paleontology, comparative anatomy and physiology, and even experimental psychology, have accepted these discoveries as the guiding principle that promises to unify the numerous observations already made and to open new paths to fruitful discoveries. Darwin's ideas are so far-reaching that at the present time it is impossible to foresee and to enumerate all the consequences of their application to various branches of scientific inquiry. . . .

In [Darwin's] theory the reader will find the rigor of an exact science, the boundless sweep of philosophical generalization, and, finally, the superior and irreplaceable beauty that affects every manifestation of strong and healthy human thought. When the reader has become familiar with Darwin's ideas, even through my feeble and colorless sketch, 1 shall ask him whether we were right or wrong in rejecting metaphysics, ridiculing our poetry, and

expressing complete scorn for our conventional aesthetics. Darwin, Lyell, and thinkers like them are the philosophers, the poets, the aesthericians of our time.^[76]

These statements show clearly that Pisarev was eager not only to give a simple and accurate summary of Darwin's ideas as the most sublime triumph of the modern mind, but also to integrate Darwin's general views into the nihilist world outlook. He argued that science is its own best philosophy and that philosophy is worth its name only insofar as it is anchored in scientific fact and theory. Because he was a great scientist, Darwin was automatically a great philosopher—a masterful synthesizer of the superb achievements of the human intellect. By naming Darwin a great poet, Pisarev merely reaffirmed his strong conviction that the work in science is the most cogent expression of aesthetic quality.

Pisarev viewed Darwin not only as the founder of modern biology and a shining naturalist-philosopher, but also as a most successful expression of the guiding principles of the English intellectual tradition: inductionism, empiricism, skepticism, and utilitarianism. Pisarev's eloquent presentation of Darwin's ideas represented a notable addition to the rapidly swelling literature on English thinkers and philosophical tradition. The educated public was particularly fascinated by Russian translations of the major philosophical studies by or about Francis Bacon, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer, as well as by the scientific works of Lyell, Huxley, Tyndal, and Lubbock. For several decades, the neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov could rely on his memory in citing verbatim long passages from Lewes's Physiology of Common Life, an assemblage of popular arguments in favor of making physiology the backbone of psychological studies. A typical member of the intelligentsia believed that these works expressed unbounded faith in philosophical realism, empirical science, the idea of the perfectibility of human society, and close interdependence of science and democracy. Kuno Fischer's freshly translated monograph on Francis Bacon made a major contribution to the triumph of "philosophical realism" in contemporary Russian thought. It emphasized the role of skepticism and critical thought in the accumulation of scientific knowledge; it provided strong arguments in favor of a full separation of philosophy and theology.^[77]

Advised by D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii and Vladimir Vernadskii, Emanuel Rádi, the noted German historian of biology, offered a pertinent description of the relations of Pisarev and the nihilists to Darwinism:

In Russia Darwinism became a part of the stream of positivism and materialism which began to flood the country in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that time intellectual Russia was under Hegel's influence. A strong reaction against idealism now set in, and natural science was called in to help in its overthrow. . . . Pisarev held that such abstract subjects as philosophy and psychology merely represent empty scholasticism, and that natural science must be presented so simply that ten-year-old children and uneducated peasants can understand it. . . . The works of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel, Wallace, and Romanes were translated, and helped to forward the movement.^[78]

Pisarev was the most dynamic and influential nihilist. Sometimes he was identified as the philosopher of nihilism. His contemporaries knew, however, that the major contributors to the Russian Word, particularly N. V. Sokolov, V. A. Zaitsev, and G. Blagosvetlov—in addition to Pisarev—represented a firmly united philosophical and ideological front backed up by the powerful sway of revolutionary zeal and moral commitment. All this, however, did not mean that the thinking of nihilists was always true to the norm. There were occasional digressions, often of sizable proportions.

One such digression came from Zaitsev. In 1864, in a review of de Quatrefages's book on the unity of mankind,^[79] he argued in a vein that identified him with the sociological-ideological movement subsequently named Social Darwinism. Contrary to the spirit of nihilism and to Pisarev's sharply focused philosophy, Zaitsev committed a gross indiscretion by making racist comments violating both the substance and the spirit of science. His Social Darwinist statements contradicted the scientific spirit and the equalitarian sentiment of nihilist philosophy. They made nihilism appear more reactionary than the most dedicated defenders of autocratic values.

Carrying Darwin's principle of the struggle for existence to what he considered a logical conclusion, Zaitsev asserted that all efforts to emancipate the black people from the colonial yoke and to give them an opportunity to rise on the scale of social and cultural progression were fated to be total failures. The black people, he wrote, belonged to a "lower race," which did not have the innate capability to benefit from the same rights as the members of the white race. In his view, wherever the white and black races belonged to the same political system, the black people should be relegated to a subordinate position. Zaitsev did not repeat his racist arguments. Nor was he particularly apologetic for having made them in the first place.

Only two popular journals—Sovremennik and Iskra —took the trouble to refute Zaitsev's reliance on Darwin's theory to justify a racist position.^[80] Writing in Sovremennik, M. A. Antonovich was particularly annoyed at the blinding rigidity that dominated Zaitsev's effort to apply the evolutionary theory beyond the scope of Darwin's concerns.^[81] Nozhin, a young embryologist and social critic, noted that Zaitsev went against Darwin's theory when he failed to view racial differences as transitory characteristics. Zaitsev was the first and the last Russian writer of note to flirt with Social Darwinism on a large scale.^[82]

The inappropriateness of biological models in the social sciences attracted the attention of Petr Tkachev, whose general orientation, despite its strong Jacobin and Blanquist elements, was close to nihilist thought. He wrote in the mid-1860s that the idea of "organic progress," highly fruitful in its application to the scientific study of both inorganic and organic nature, becomes "moribund and sterile" when it is transplanted to the scientific study of social phenomena.^[83] Tkachev thought that to study "organic progress" meant to rely on organismic analogies (in the Spencerian sense) and organic evolution (in the Darwinian sense). Opposed to the biological foundations of Darwinian sociology, Tkachev made no secret of his unlimited admiration for Darwin's contributions to biology and the scientific world outlook.