헉슬리의 "진화와 윤리": 시대의 초상 = Huxley`s "Evolution and Ethics": A Portrait of the Age

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Thomas Henry Huxley`s Romanes`s Lecture, "Evolution and Ethics," has been read as a document advocating the autonomy of ethics from the evolutionary science of man. As a matter of fact, in "Evolution and Ethics," Huxley argued that the ethics, the engine of social progress, meant resolute fight against the cosmic evolutionary process; and it appeared that he was also warning not to exercise evolutionary idea on ethical issues. Yet in his lecture, especially in his "Prolegomena" added to his lecture, he also insisted that the human ethics itself must be the product of evolution. This seemingly contradictory arguments caused considerable confusion among his posterities in general, and historians of ideas in particular. During the Nineteenth-Century England, both conservatives and radicals actively used biological theories, especially evolutionary ideas, as scientific principle bolstering their respective ideologies. Huxley himself made it clear that his "Evolution and Ethics" which he dubbed an "egg dance," was an outrightly political document. Nevertheless, historians have paid little attention to Huxley`s public and private motivation in his "Evolution and Ethics." This essay tries to explicate the society in which Huxley was living as well as his personal motivation delivering the lecture. His "Evolution and Ethics" turns out to be a vibrant document picturing complex and skewed ways an evolutionary idea has been read, interpreted, and used. Most posterities saw his "Evolution and Ethics" as a proclamation of the disassociation between evolution and ethics. But close reading of his lecture, and recent reconstruction of his biographical resource demonstrate that through this lecture, Huxley was trying to repudiate Spencerian individualism and Wallacean socialism, both ideologies he considered as threat to the late 19th century British society.