Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 39

BEYOND NIHILISM

tion of their will to power but new means
of fighting, exploiting and tyrannizing one
another."23
Aron, then, recognized that there is a dark
side to science, one that emerges when the
techniques and assumptions of the natural
sciences are directly applied to the control
of human beings. Aron was particularly
disturbed-outraged, really-by those
political philosophies that took as their point
of departure the biologically inspired idea
that man is essentially an animal of prey. The
social biologies of Spengler and Nietzsche
were particularly offensive to Aron: he saw a
clear link between the notion that men and
women were "beasts"-the fundamental
principle animating "biological philosophies
of human destiny"-and the brutalities of
National Socialism. Because they believed
that human beings were engaged in a
struggle of all against all, National Socialists would not abide human weakness. Not
only were the incurably ill put to death in
Nazi Germany and "terminated like useless
animals," but defeated populations were
either enslaved or exterminated as well. At
the heart of this barbarity, Aron reminded
his readers, was a thoroughgoing naturalism.
By accepting naturalism's single-minded
devotion to the principle that chance and
necessity govern the universe, Aron argued,
"one achieves a transmutation of values:
man necessarily recognizes and accepts his
animality and now exists only to do battle
with other individuals and peoples, impatient to demonstrate by force of arms his title
to superiority."24
Aron's rejection of social biology must not
obscure the fact that he believed biology
to be helpful in explaining some facets of
human behavior. In his monumental treatise on international relations, for example,
Aron considered the biological evidence for
the existence of an innate tendency among

human beings for warfare and considered
the evidence to be substantial: "Whether
spontaneous or the result of learning, combative behavior, to the observer, often seems
adaptive." Although he would not subscribe
wholeheartedly to the notion that frustration leads to aggression, Aron wrote-rather
drily-that it nevertheless seemed reasonable to believe that "the frustrated individual
is somehow irritable." Nevertheless, the
central point for Aron is that combativeness
can be modified by experience and can even
be learned or forgotten. For that reason, he
declared, "the difficulty of peace has more to
do with man's humanity than his animality."
Indeed,
the mouse who has received a beating
yields to the stronger and the hierarchy
of domination is stable. The wolf that
bares its throat is spared by its victor.
Man is a being capable of preferring
revolt to humiliation and his own truth
to life itself. The hierarchy of masters
and slaves will never be stable. Tomorrow the masters will no longer have need
of servants and they will have the power
to exterminate.25

This, incidentally, was a point of central
significance for Niebuhr. "Every biological
fact and every animal impulse, however
obvious its relation to the world below man,
is altered because of its incorporation into
the human psyche." Niebuhr believed that
at the very core of the human personality
is the capacity for self-transcendence. This
means that human beings can freely alter the
conditions of their own existence, a capacity
that resists purely mechanical or material
explanations. In underscoring the shortcomings of a naturalistic social science, Niebuhr
held up Freudian analysis as an example,
arguing that Freudian psychotherapy begins
39
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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