The Briton Herbert Spencer was one of the greatest thinkers of his time, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist and naturist, he was the most prominent figure of philosophical evolutionism and positivism in his day, so it is not surprising that the sources of many of his ideas come from Lamarck and Darwin.
Herbert Spencer applied the laws of evolution to philosophy and society; however, these Darwinian applications justified the dominance of some peoples over others, as well as the supremacy of one human race over another.
- These ideas went deep into the West during the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
- Which is mainly reflected in the success of his work.
- Spencer was an author who caught the attention of countless thinkers from many different fields.
Some authors have devoted the the discussion, been inspired by their ideas or cited it as an influence, names such as Emile Durkheim, George Edward Moore or Thomas Hill Green have often been associated with Spencer’s figure. Undoubtedly a very prolific, if highly controversial, author.
Herbert Spencer was born into a humble family in 1820 in Derby, England, and died in 1903 in Brighton, England. Although he went to school early, he didn’t learn to read until he was seven. teenager, studied science, but never stood out as a great student.
In a totally self-taught way, he obtained the title of engineer and worked in the railway sector between 1837 and 1846, during all these years he continued his studies on his own and published books on science and politics. Years later, in 1848, he got a job as editor at The Economist magazine.
This change marked the end of his engineering career and the beginning of his work as a writer and philosopher. In 1851 he published his first book, The Social Statics Economist, in which he predicted that humanity would adapt to living in society without the need for a state.
Spencer used to attend meetings and talks attended by several contemporary thinkers, after these meetings his first contact with positivist authors took place, from this contact he wrote Principles of Psychology in 1855, a publication in which he argued that the human mind was governed. by natural laws that could be explained by physiology and biology.
Years later he published the Synthetic Philosophy System, with this work he intended to demonstrate that the principles of evolution applied to both philosophy, psychology and sociology, was a gigantic work, composed of more than 10 volumes, and lasted a long time. 20 years.
It is not common for philosophical works to achieve great sales, they can reach them over time, but it is strange to find them in the first places, because the greatest sales in the publishing world are usually related to literature.
However, Herbert Spencer distinguished himself as a thinker whose influence was immense, selling even more than a million copies of his books during his lifetime and was even nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.
Herbert Spencer wrote his work before Darwin; as a result, he integrated associationism and physiology with the theory of Lamarckian evolution. In this way, Spencer anticipated the psychology of adaptation for several decades. He conceptualized development as the process by which the connections between ideas accurately reflected. connections between the dominant events of the environment.
Connections would be made because of the old principles of proximity and contingency. Therefore, the development of the mind would represent an adaptive adjustment to environmental conditions. The British author conceptualized the brain as an organized record of experiments. On the other hand, he believed that instincts were well-learned associative habits.
He argued, in turn, that the mental processes that different species can carry out are reduced to the number of associations that a particular animal’s brain can make, that is, for Spencer, the differences between the mental abilities of different species would be quantitative.
In a highly controversial way, Spencer argued that social groups have different skills to dominate nature and establish their primacy, so the rich would be more capable than the poor, as some would be on the cusp of society, while others would be at the bottom.
For Spencer, society functioned in the same way as a biological being, so it justified the dominance of peoples and higher races, defending the disappearance of the weakest, in this way imperialist policies and racism have, from that moment on, theoretical support.
In short, the strongest must prevail in the struggle for survival, the aim of which must be to prevent the degradation and degeneration of society; otherwise, if the weak or the less capable outweigh, the country risks degrading.
In conclusion, Spencer defended a positivist, biologist and evolutionary vision of philosophy, psychology and sociology, which has given fundamental importance to the learning and physical and psychological adaptability of human beings; on the other hand, his work was misunderstood by many people, who saw it as a scientific substrate for his racist and supremacist ideas.
That an author’s work is misinterpreted and adapted is not unique to Spencer, but it has been throughout our history, something similar happened with Machiavelli or even Nietzsche, whose work was interpreted from the point of view of Nazism and anti-Semitism when in fact, his?It has nothing to do with these ideas. It’s not easy to talk about controversial issues without generating controversy.
In addition, philosophical and literary works must be treated with some perspective, that is, it is necessary to know when and in what context they were designed to understand the author’s thinking a little more. that Herbert Spencer managed to stand out as a great multidisciplinary thinker in his day and by combining different theories that generated great impact.