Teleology Revived? Cooperation and the Ends of Nature

Introduction

The rise of modern natural science and philosophy is often narrated in terms of the demise of teleological accounts of causation. Final causes are deemed transempirical and idly metaphysical by certain philosophers. ¹ However, the question of teleology in philosophy, the natural sciences, psychology and the social sciences is far from decided. It seems that descriptions of the natural world are littered with references to purposes and goals which cannot easily be reduced to mechanical causes or erased from our speech about human beings or nature. ² Indeed, the new suggestion that, alongside ‘mutation’ and ‘selection’, cooperation may even be a third principle of evolution implies a degree of orientation towards certain shared goals beyond the mere survival of the individual. ³ The realisation that separate evolutionary strands converge on similar solutions to particular problems of adaptation also raises the possibility of an orientation of life towards certain ends. ⁴ In this essay I will address some of the issues surrounding the current interest in teleology which I hope will be found relevant with respect to cooperation and altruism. I will begin by considering one of the central concerns in recent discussions of teleology, namely a reconsideration of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology. I will suggest that this distinction is linked to a dualism between mind (which exhibits intention and therefore orientation to certain ends) and matter (which is subject only to efficient causes). The classical view of teleology to be found in Aristotle remains central to many discussions of final causation, so I will clarify the key issues in Aristotle’s view of causation, drawing connections with contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind. This leads away from considerations only of individual natural entities towards a relational understanding of teleology and evolution. This is where we will find some crossover with the notions of cooperation, altruism and reciprocity as raised in recent research in mathematical biology and the deployment of game theory.

The Problem of Teleology

I would like to begin, however, with some definitions. ‘Intrinsic teleology’ refers to a goal-orientated behaviour which belongs to something by virtue of what it is. ⁵ Examples would be the migration of birds or the development of an acorn into an oak. ‘Extrinsic teleology’ refers to an entity which is essentially inert or passive and which has a teleological orientation imposed from without. Such teleology has an extrinsic source. Typically, human artefacts—chairs, cars and the like—exhibit extrinsic teleology. As such, extrinsic teleology can also refer to functionalism; an entity’s goal lies beyond itself because it is a means to an end. A car, for example, is not an end in itself, but rather has transport as its goal. With these distinctions in mind, we can now examine some of the characteristic problems associated with teleological accounts of natural causation.

The early modern natural philosophers who dethroned Aristotelian teleology were content to account for human behaviour, and maybe the behaviour of higher mammals, in terms of final causes. This is simply because teleology implies intention, and human beings deliberate and plan in order to achieve certain goals. This kind of teleological account does not succumb to the charge of backwards causation because it is the desire within human intentional action, not the as yet unrealised goal, which is causally relevant. Such deliberation towards a goal is a feature of mind. Nature, on the other hand, does not deliberate. For those writing post-Newton, nature is fundamentally material, and matter is inert. Whatever order and goal-orientation we find in nature is not internal or intrinsic to nature; it is imposed from without. In other words, it is the design of nature which suggests teleological ordering is external, being imposed by God through the decree of laws of nature. It is variants of this kind of teleological argument, some of them now highly sophisticated in their references to irreducible complexity, that are rightly dismissed by scientists, theologians and philosophers. This is teleology understood in terms of ‘design’ and which, for Aristotle, belongs to the realm of human artefacts. Nature is not an artefact and, for Aristotle, art only imitates nature. In modernity, nature came to be understood as imitating art, for example in the rise of mechanical cosmologies which were viewed as a kind of natural theology to prove the existence of the designer God. As such cosmologies became increasingly discredited, the fate of teleology in the minds of scientists and many philosophers was sealed. Its pseudo-theological, anthropomorphic and transempirical overtones could not be avoided.

However, ascribing teleological orientation to human intentionality—in other words, to mind—presents a particular problem for it renders ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ anomalous in the face of an otherwise inert and non-teleological material universe. This is, of course, the problem presented by Cartesian dualism. It seems to imply that our organic experience, which is irreducibly intentional and therefore teleological, does not disclose anything fundamental about nature itself. In turn, this is allied to the modern division between nature and culture and, more fundamentally, between subject and object. The early twentieth-century phenomenologist and erstwhile pupil of Heidegger, Hans Jonas, puts it this way:

It then seems to issue in monistic alternatives: either to take the presence of a purposive inwardness in one part of the physical order, viz., in man, as a valid testimony to the nature of that wider reality that lets it emerge, and to accept what it reveals in itself as part of the general evidence; or to extend the prerogatives of mechanical matter to the very heart of the seemingly heterogeneous class of phenomena and oust teleology even from the ‘nature of man’, whence it had tainted the ‘nature of the universe’—that is, to alienate man from himself and deny genuineness to the self-experience of life. ⁶

Can we find a way between these ‘monistic alternatives’? Can we avoid a distinct dualism between life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, mind and matter, and somehow see the latter as orientated teleologically to the former? I would like to explore this possibility initially with reference to Aristotle’s classical account of teleological causation, beginning first with the formal cause.

Teleology Revisited

When Aristotle refers to the form or model as a cause, he means the ‘what it is to be something’. ⁷ In other words, the form is that which makes something a ‘this’ rather than a ‘that’, and it indicates that, for Aristotle, nature is not merely composed of matter in different discrete arrangements. A form also identifies an individual whole or unity within a wider system. Crucially, ‘form’ is not something super-added to the material nature of any individual. It is not an extra kind of efficient cause. When it comes to that which we label the final cause, Aristotle uses the phrase ‘the cause for the sake of which’. ⁸ Within this ‘cause for the sake of which’, Aristotle makes an important distinction between the goal as the aim of an action (‘that of which’) and the goal as the beneficiary (‘that for which’). ⁹ Let us take the example of medicine. The aim of the art of medicine is health. The beneficiary of the art of medicine (‘that for which’) is the patient. The builder who constructs a house has the house as his aim or goal. At the same time, there is another end, namely the person who will benefit from the shelter which the house provides.

The link between the final cause—the ‘cause for the sake of which’—and form is made very explicit by Aristotle: ‘the form is the final cause’. ¹⁰ The crucial aspect of form for Aristotle is that it is not some distant, separated ideal, a view which he ascribes to the Platonists. In other words, form is not wholly external to a being’s nature. Crucially, it is something that is already possessed potentially rather than actually. So the acorn becomes an oak and not a birch because it has within itself the form of oak tree in its potential aspect. The acorn received that form from the tree from which it dropped.

Through form it seems that natural entities are always already orientated in specific directions and towards specific ends. There is an intrinsic receptivity within natural entities towards the actualisation of their form. We might say metaphorically that the acorn intends to become an oak, or a cygnet a swan, or a rock intends its appropriate low place. It is this notion of ‘intention’ when ascribed to non-human creatures which raises the spectre of anthropomorphism or what is sometimes pejoratively referred to as ‘vitalism’. The ascription of a vital force or Henri Bergson’s élan vital is regarded as yet another metaphysical accretion—the postulating of a mysterious impetus which explains nothing. However, there is a notion of appetition—orexis—in Aristotle which indicates an intrinsic orientation of inanimate and animate natural entities towards the fulfilment of their formal natures. In the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle asks, ‘how can one suppose that things not possessing life can have appetition?’ ¹¹ Aristotle argues that all things tend towards their particular good: the eye desires sight, the body health. These examples—of sight and health—clearly pertain to animate, living substances even if the eye is not itself animate. Is there any sense for Aristotle that all things, animate and inanimate, have an intrinsic appetition towards particular goals? While it is of course true that Aristotle distinguishes between the animate and the inanimate, life and the lifeless, often through the claim that self-motion indicates life, nevertheless it is the case that he has no concept of absolute inert and indifferent matter in anything like the Newtonian sense of the term. Matter is always en-formed in the sense of being in potency to some things and not to others, and therefore orientated to certain ends and not others. If Aristotle does have a notion of ‘vital force’ which extends as well to the inanimate as it does to the animate, that force is not something super-added to material nature. It is intrinsic to any matter-form compound.

This understanding of dynamic substantial form orientated towards certain ends can shed light on the notion of internal and external teleology. It seems that, in the case of so-called animate substances, they realise their end or goal of their own power. For example, unless hindered, the boy will turn into a man and the acorn into an oak. The ascription of causality to the telos in each case—the man and the oak tree—would, in Kantian terms, be a merely heuristic device. The teleology involved is intrinsic or internal in the sense that the drive towards the goal is already latent within the living organism. To take another example, namely that of a sculptor fashioning a block of marble, the goal appears to be external in the mind of the sculptor. The marble is purely passive or inert. The fashioning of the sculpture belongs to the sculptor as efficient cause and any sense of teleological orientation is ‘borrowed’ from the intentional action of the sculptor. However, is the block of marble contributing only the material cause? Is the form of the marble, even in its unfashioned state, not also contributing at least in the sense of being orientated towards certain ends and not others? The sculptor could not fashion the marble into a tree or a pen, but he can fashion it into a statue or a plinth. Why? Because the form ‘marble’ is not purely potential, but is orientated towards certain ends and not others. The goal, therefore, is not entirely external in the sculptor’s intention, lying outside the material object being fashioned, but is also held in a potential form within the matter-form compound.

So there is a sense in which, even concerning human artefacts, there is an element of intrinsic purposiveness: the object in question provides not only the material cause, but also the formal cause which is dynamically orientated towards certain ends rather than others. And we must remember that the form is the final cause. As Aristotle would say, there will always be a striving for the good. This does not mean, however, that the orexis in en-formed matter takes the form of a super-added efficient cause, which is the way in which vitalism (or Ernst Mayr’s teleonomic behaviour) is often understood. It remains a formal cause which is at once also the final cause. Moreover, the use of the term orexis even with respect to inanimate entities is quite deliberate for Aristotle. The language is not used carelessly nor merely metaphorically as if it were just a convenient, but in the end false, way of talking. It is used to imply that intentionality which is exhibited in human goal-orientated action, and which is attributed exclusively to mind in early modern philosophy, is an instance of a more general natural teleology which runs in different but related ways throughout nature, even though human intentionality takes that teleological orientation to a wholly new pitch. Finally, it can be seen that the loss of the concept of form in early modern thought in effect precipitated the demise of teleology. Why? Because without the final cause being allied to the formal cause—or to what something is intrinsically—the final cause can only appear to be external and, in a sense, arbitrary. This is why, in the end, modern teleological arguments for God’s existence are less than compelling, because they tend to rely on extrinsic teleology.

The Aristotelian emphasis on the final cause allied to the formal cause has striking affinities with more recent developments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology. In the early 1970s the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela first proposed the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ to define the self-organisation of an autonomous organism, for example a living cell. An autopoietic system is one in which the various recursive processes depend on each other for their realisation as a network in such a way that they constitute the system’s unity. As the Canadian philosopher Evan Thompson puts it, ‘What is so startling about this self-production, from the standpoint of classical linear mechanics, is that a self-perpetuating whole emerges out of local processes while subsuming those processes so that they no longer have a merely local and independent identity.’ ¹² What autopoiesis seems to suggest—in a way reminiscent of Aristotelian form—is that an organism or biological system is not simply the aggregation of its material parts. This establishes the difference between an organism and a machine because

A machine is a purpose, but one in which the material parts are logically independent of and temporally antecedent to the whole they determine. In an organism, however, the parts are not logically independent of and temporally antecedent to the whole. They are determined by their presence in the whole and have properties they would not have independently of the whole. ¹³

In other words, reciprocity lies at the heart of the organism and, just as with Aristotelian form, we can speak of organisms as ‘wholes’.

However, autopoiesis was originally conceived as a mechanistic and non-teleological definition of life, particularly because the notion of teleology used by Maturana and Varela was ‘extrinsic’ or ‘functionalist’. This functional teleology, they argued, was superfluous to the definition of an organism. However, recent research has given more precise definition to the difference between an organism as teleologically structured and a machine. This has, in turn, opened up the possibility once again that autopoiesis marks the teleological nature of an organism. In particular, the concept of autopoiesis was originally criticised because it conceived of organisms in highly self-referential terms. Little attention was paid to the way in which any external relations may also constitute an organism’s nature. In other words, insofar as the teleology of an organism could be identified, it was radically intrinsic. More recently philosophers have pointed to the way in which the boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic purposiveness can be rendered more delicate through the dual concepts of both identity and sense-making. ¹⁴ Autopoiesis identifies the unity of the organism and its identity through change. It also provides the means of ‘making sense of the world so as to remain viable’. ¹⁵ Sense-making refers to the way in which an organism makes sense of its environment in terms of its intrinsic identity. We can talk of sense-making as normative insofar as an organism ‘seeks’ to improve the conditions for its own self-production. So Varela, who revised his anti-teleological stance towards the end of his career, suggested that sense-making is ‘intentionality’ in its most basic and original biological form. ¹⁶

In this development of the concept of autopoiesis, which has very strong resonances with the philosophy of biology articulated by Hans Jonas, we find one way of overcoming the dualism between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology which has coloured the debate at least since Kant. In Varela’s and Thompson’s analysis of the autopoietic organism, we find both an intrinsic teleology of self-making, but also an extrinsic orientation towards an organism’s environment—‘sense-making’—which is normative in structure, being analysable in terms of Aristotle’s distinction between potency and act. We also find the notion of ‘intention’, so crucial to human teleology and mind, writ into the structure and function of even the most basic biological entity, albeit by analogy. Where does this meet the new concepts of cooperation, altruism and reciprocity? It is an obvious but perhaps worthwhile comment that the application of game theory to evolution, and the associated concept of cooperation, seeks to understand biological individuals (whether they be cells or bats) in terms of their external dialectical relations. Even in the most basic Prisoner’s Dilemma or the snowdrift game, we conceive of evolution not in terms of selfishness alone, but also in terms of other-regarding behaviour which can present a cost to the individual. We are also applying a method first conceived to understand human intentional decision-making, game theory, to the non-human material world and finding that such ‘intentionality’ is, in some way, however attenuated, a principle of evolving life. Where these various strands coincide is in their denial that evolution can be adequately understood simply at the level of the individual and its behaviour, and also that any account of the goal-orientated nature of life cannot be bound to a fundamental dualism of intrinsic and extrinsic teleology, opting for one or the other. The notion of cooperation can be applied both to autopoietic systems and to the relations of individual organisms to others and the wider environment. Where this becomes theologically interesting is not simply in the normative structure of teleology, but also in the arena of the doctrine of creation where we might once again be able to talk of creation as a ‘whole’ which is genuinely other-regarding, namely, orientated towards an ultimate transcendent purpose which is most perfectly its own end.

Conclusion

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 provoked a controversy which was not initially focused on the authority of the book of Genesis but was concerned with humanity’s relation to wider nature. Modern thought rested on a fundamental distinction between crude nature, on the one hand, and the realm of human culture and freedom on the other. ¹⁷ Darwin reconnected humanity with the realm of instinctive, base nature in a way that disturbed many. ¹⁸ Yet, because of Darwin’s work, humanity was once again able to assert its fundamental separation from nature because, in understanding our origins and in principle being able to circumvent the outcomes of evolution or manipulate its future course, humanity once again rose above the realm of nature. Against the background of the modern separation of nature and culture, and mind and matter, the intentional teleology which belongs to humanity and its artefacts is profoundly unnatural, belonging to culture rather than nature. Insofar as teleology belongs to the natural, it is understood as a mere projection onto an essentially material realm of efficient causes. However, a more subtle rendering of final causation which rejects any dualism between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology and, crucially, rejects any teleology which is understood purely in terms of ‘design’, can help to subvert the modern dualism of nature and culture: teleology belongs to both realms, but in different though analogically related ways. The teleology which we see in the intentionality of mind has analogues in nature, not least through the behaviour we describe as ‘cooperative’. So the experience of cooperation in the sphere of human behaviour can be applied to an appropriate normative analysis of natural kinds in a way that renders the boundary between culture and nature much more delicate. This is not to say that we simply read human ethics ‘off’ nature; this was never the force of the natural law tradition. Nevertheless, it does seem that the kind of teleology allied to dynamic substantial form or ‘natural kinds’ can be met with our apparently natural capacity to make sense of the realm of nature in such a way that it can be described as rational and good, and in being rational and good then also being orientated towards certain normative ends beyond mere reproductive success.