Herbert Spencer: Biography And Work

Briton Herbert Spencer was one of the greatest thinkers of his time. Philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and naturopath, he was the most prominent figure in philosophical evolutionism and positivism in his time. Therefore, it is not surprising that the sources of many of his ideas come from Lamarck and Darwin.

Herbert Spencer applied evolutionary laws 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 others.

These ideas would have a profound effect on the West during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. This is reflected, especially, in the success of his work. Spencer was an author who attracted the attention of countless thinkers from very diverse areas.

Some authors lent themselves to debate, were inspired by his ideas, or cited him as an influence. Names like: Émile Durkheim, George Edward Moore or Thomas Hill Green have been frequently associated with the figure of Spencer. Without a doubt, a very prolific author, although not without controversy.

Herbert Spencer Biography

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, he did not learn to read until he was 7 years old. In his teens, he studied science, but never stood out as a great student.

Completely self-taught, he trained as an engineer  and worked in the railway sector between 1837 and 1846. During all these years, he continued his studies on his own and published some books on science and politics. Years later, in 1848, he got a job as an editor at The Economist magazine .

This change marked the end of his career as an engineer and the beginning of his work as a writer and philosopher. In 1851, he published his first book Social Statics Economist ,  in which he predicted that humanity would adapt to living in society without needing a state.

Spencer used to frequent meetings and gatherings attended by various contemporary thinkers. As a result of these meetings there was his first contact with some positivist authors. From this contact emerged  Principles of Psychology  in 1855, a publication in which he defended that the human mind was governed by natural laws and that they could be explained through physiology and biology.

Years later, he published  System of Synthetic Philosophy. With this work, he tried to show that the principles of evolution applied to philosophy, psychology and sociology alike. It was a gigantic work, comprised of more than 10 volumes, and it took him 20 years to complete. Herbert Spencer was a prolific writer throughout his life.

Philosophical works seldom find their way into big sales. Perhaps, they can achieve it with the passage of time, but it is strange to find treaties among the first positions.

The usual thing is that the biggest sales in the publishing world are linked to literature. However, Herbert Spencer stood out as a thinker whose influence was immense, selling more than a million copies of his work in life. He was even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902.

Herbert Spencer and psychology

Herbert Spencer wrote his work before Darwin. Therefore, he integrated associationism and physiology with the Lamarckian theory of evolution. In this way, Spencer was decades ahead of adaptive psychology. He conceptualized development as the process by which the connections between ideas accurately reflected the connections between dominant events in the environment.

The connections would be established by the old principles of contiguity and contingency. Therefore, the development of the mind would represent an adaptive adjustment to the conditions of the environment. The British author conceptualized the brain as an organized record of experiences. On the other hand, he believed that instincts were well-learned associative habits.

He defended, in turn, that the mental processes that the different species can carry out are reduced to the number of associations that the brain of a particular animal can carry out. That is to say, for Spencer,  the differences between the mental capacities of the different species would be quantitative.

Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism

In a very controversial way, Spencer argued that social groups have different capacities to dominate nature and establish their primacy. In this way, the rich would be more fit than the poor. Since some would be at the top of society, while others would be at the bottom.

For Spencer, society functioned similarly to a biological being. Thus, he justified the dominance of the superior peoples and races,  advocating the disappearance of the weakest. In this way, imperialist policies and racism had, from this moment, on theoretical support.

Ultimately,  the strongest had to prevail in the struggle for survival, whose objective should be to prevent the degradation and degeneration of society. Otherwise, if the weak or less capable outnumbered the better gifted (physically and intellectually), the country was in danger of declining.

Reflections on the life and work of Herbert Spencer

In conclusion, Spencer defended a positivist, biologist, and evolutionary view of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. He attached fundamental importance to learning and the physical and psychological adaptability of the human being. On the contrary, her work was misinterpreted by many people who saw her as a scientific substrate for their racist and supremacist ideas.

That an author’s work is misinterpreted and adapted is not unique to Spencer, but has occurred throughout our history. Something similar happened to Machiavelli or even to Nietzsche, whose work was interpreted from the perspective of Nazism and anti-Semitism; when, in fact, your Übermensch has nothing to do with these ideas. It is not easy to talk about the superiority of one over the other without generating controversy.

In addition, both philosophical and literary works must be treated with a certain perspective. That is, we must know in what time and context they were conceived in order to understand a little more the author’s thinking. Controversies and reflections aside, there is no doubt that Herbert Spencer managed to stand out as a great multidisciplinary thinker in his time and for bringing together different theories that generated a great impact.