http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/ is the blog-site of Larry Arnhart, the leading Darwinian conservative. There, you can see, he describes ME as a Gnostic existentialist Heideggerian for not believing that Darwin explains it all about human beings. Arnhart puts St. Augustine, Descartes, Heidegger, and ME in the same camp for believing that alienation—or not being completely at home in this, natural world—is part of the human condition. Although Larry doesn’t make a big deal of it for fear of seeming un-American, Locke—who also distinguishes between nature and human freedom— also belongs in the Gnostic category with me. I agree with Larry that the modern distinctions between nature and freedom or nature or history are unempirical. I also agree that Darwinian sociobiology, in our time, provides for many a needed corrective to asocial individualism or creeping and often creepy libertarianism by reminding us, in effect, that we are hardwired to be parents and children and even friends and citizens. Lockeanism privileges the futile pursuit of hapiness over the real happiness we can enjoy as natural beings. Nonetheless, Darwin doesn’t explain WHO we are by nature, because he can’t properly articulate the longings we have as the only beings with the natural gifts of complex language or speech, even as he can’t really explain why we’re such insistently technological beings freely transforming what we’be been given by nature. The truth is the being with LOGOS and EROS—the self-conscious and relational person—is neither the free individual described by Locke nor the species fodder described by Darwin. There’s a third way, of course, between Darwinian naturalism and Cartesian Gnosticism.
