L'idée de paix perpétuelle au risque de la sélection naturelle et sa vertu comme tâche de l'humanité
(2012)
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- Hunyadi, Mark
- Abstract
- (en) In order to defend Darwinism against the socio-political ideologies tarnishing its image, Patrick Tort, using an immanent reading of Darwin’s anthropology, is now presenting this naturalist as the genealogist par excellence of universalist morality and the theorist of the peace of the state of civilization. As a result, Darwin competed with the philosophers of universal morality and of the social contract hypothesis as a path to perpetual peace. Natural selection, accused of promoting a state of war that eliminates the weak, is held up as an engine that, paradoxically, brings about the passage from the state of war to the state of universal peace. This would be possible thanks to the gradual selection of social feelings, the effect of which tends to cancel the removal of the selection and to take on universal dimensions. Tort calls this phenomenon "the reversive effect of evolution". Thus, by resorting to the explanation by selection, universal perpetual peace, regarded by Kant as what collective actors who have become reasonable would ultimately want to focus on after a long history of wars they were waging against each other, – due to the antagonism of their own liberties –, is from the outset attributed to an opportunistic natural law acting without design. The regulating effect of the idea of perpetual and universal peace is lost. So, one has the effort to overcome this risk and to make the Kantian intuition compatible with the theory of natural selection. On the one hand, this is accomplished on the basis of the Neural Darwinism of Edelman claiming, as the name suggests, its continuity with Darwin. His ambition is to account for the occurrence of mental faculties in humans endowed with freedom and intentionality, able to use heuristic fictions in social organization. His hypothesis provides an opportunity to rethink peace as a task for humanity in harmony with the theory of selection. On the other hand, the study of the limitations of the explanation by selection in biology, a holistic point of view, reveals the need to be complemented by an individualistic and developmental perspective as in "the Evo-devo Super synthesis." In fact, a developmental version of the concept of reversive effect of evolution can be found in the political anthropology of Kant, where universal antagonism produces against itself the practical reason giving way to the transition from the state of natural war to the state of peace. His horizon is cosmopolitan peace, a political concept of humanity. Otherwise, ascribing the realization of cosmopolitan peace to the melioristic action of natural selection, in its strict sense, might plunge humanity into a wait-and-see attitude and passivity, whereas ascribing it to the goodwill of humanity is to empower it, to mobilize minds in the seeking the conditions to bring it about.
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Citations
Kasereka Kibanda, W. (2012). L’idée de paix perpétuelle au risque de la sélection naturelle et sa vertu comme tâche de l’humanité. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/61666