Unpopular opinion: the universe is teleological

I don’t think I have ever met an analytical philosopher who endorses the long-outmoded idea that teleology is found in nature. There is a strong precedent for this, in that the principal cause of the overwhelming success of natural science (which perhaps embodies a key lesson about what is verifiable in experience) is its abandonment of Aristotelian notions like substance and final cause, in favour of examining what turned out to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world: patterns of physical interaction now described by laws of physics and other fields. In philosophical terminology, these patterns are the real relations known as extrinsic formal specification.

A strange attractor has a kind of destiny to it, but where does this come from?

You can imagine my enjoyment, then, when I discovered Ralph Austin Powell, a thinker who understands better than most the real and experiential bases upon which empirical discoveries rest, and yet who endorses the idea that teleology is found in nature. I’ll briefly skirt the common misnomer that final cause is always extrinsic to substances (e.g. the idea that God is the final cause of the world, or that architects design buildings) – what is of interest here are final causes intrinsic to substances, since extrinsic final causes are either obviously present (as in the case of an architect designing a building) or generally held to be beyond the bounds of experimentally verifiable experience (as in the case of whether humanity exists to love God and to enjoy him forever).

What follows is a summary, in seven steps, of Powell’s argument in “From semiotic of scientific mechanism to semiotic of teleology in nature“, Semiotics 1986.

Step 1: Science models causal systems, not the intrinsic nature of things
“[T]he biologist speaks of “gene pools” and ‘*homeostatic systems” which are specific causal relational systems but which do not determine the intrinsic nature of life. The physicist speaks of the duality of particle and wave which are causal relational systems whose duality excludes any determination of the intrinsic nature of matter.”

Step 2. Causal systems are directly and immediately experienceable effects of bodies
“Scientific Mechanism is a direct immediate experience of real specific systems of causal relations, whose species is specified by bodies in actual relation. The relation’s specification is an extrinsic effect of the bodies in relation, just as the causal relation itself is a connection between individual bodies, not itself an individual body.”

Step 3. Natural science’s overwhelming success is due to it modelling solely systems of extrinsic formal specification, not the intrinsic natures of bodies
“In agreement with modern philosophy after Kant, it seems to me that the success of modern natural science was basically due to an epistemological discovery. For me that discovery was that causal relational systems specified by action and passion are the sole nonchance mind independent realities which can be directly and immediately experienced. Natural science primarily intends to discover specified causal systems without concern for the intrinsic nature of bodies in relation. It has vastly simplified the main object of its methods.”

Step 4. Causal systems impart attributes to bodies in a system
“Since causal relations have no intrinsic nature (being totally relational to something else) their coming and going neither adds nor subtracts anything intrinsic to the bodies which they affect. Still the coming of a causal relation adds a new dimension to the body’s reality since a causal relation is something real. For example, when the measuring weights on a scale bring the scale to equilibrium with the body being weighed, the causal relation of equilibrium is a new reality in the measuring weights. This new dimension is somehow distinct from the measuring weights since it adds something which lacks intrinsic nature, being totally relational. Yet while the causal relation is present it is not only inseparable from the measuring weights, it is not even a distinct physical part of them, since it lacks an intrinsic nature that could add a new physical part.”

Step 5. Causal relations between bodies permits us knowledge of some of their intrinsic attributes
“Now pure relativity cannot exist except as specified by the intrinsic nature of some body. Hence, the proved existence of the extrinsic specificity of some causal relation necessarily proves the intrinsic nature of some body whence that extrinsic specification derives.”

“[T]he individual bodies extrinsically specify the causal relation only because of their intrinsic specification. Hence the extrinsic specification of causal relations always reveals indirectly the intrinsic species of the bodies which are their extrinsic specifying causes.”

6. Bodies’ intrinsic relativity, implied by causal relations, is their teleological order
“Now the intrinsic specificity of a body whereby it either extrinsically specifies a causal relation as agent to patient or as patient to agent is its teleological order. For it constitutes the intrinsic relativity of one thing to another.” [That is, a body has an attribute because it is a “being towards” another, that is, it only has a nature in this respect in virtue of its relativity to another entity; as such, it is not absolute or merely a thing “in itself;” rather it has a telos defined by the relation.*]

7. Teleology is in nature
“[From (3) and (6),] intrinsic relativity is the fundamental philosophical meaning of teleological order in nature. Hence the proved existence of a mechanism anywhere in nature proves also the existence of a teleological order because of the intrinsic relativity of the bodies involved.”

* This remark makes the claim that at least some attributes of physical entities are relational and not absolute; for a theory that all physical entities are constituted entirely relatively – that is, in Powell’s terms both intrinsically and extrinsically, and to go further still, intended as a reduction of the Aristotelian notion of substance – see this paper. To apply Powell’s view to the theory in the paper would establish that physical entities are teleological “all the way down” and not just at their edges.

A juicy footnote on a pair of categories more fundamental than Aristotle’s

The reader should advert here to the entirely experiential claim Poinsot is making for his affirmation of relation as among the furnishings of the physical world. Note too that he is saying that the modes of being classified as “accidents” in the Aristotelian scheme of “categories” (see below, Book I, Question 1, note 10) are not what sense attains, as opposed to “substance,” but are analyzed out of what sense directly attains: “cognitio externa propter sui imperfectionem et materialitatem non potest seipsam attingere neque accidentia, quae in se sunt, sed obiecta corporeo modo sibi applicata” (Phil. nat. 4. p. q. 6. art. 4., Reiser ed. HI. 195b21-25). “External sense cognition, on account of its imperfection and materiality, can attain neither itself nor [even] the accidents that are independent of sensation, but only objects as here and now physically acting upon the sense.” There are thus for Poinsot two levels at work in Aristotle’s categorial scheme: the effects of the diverse “accidental” characteristics of bodies which are directly given in experience without any distinction from the individuals (“substances”) possessing those characteristics, and in which direct experience is given the contrast between two different sorts of relativity; and a second level on which we distinguish by a further analysis between the characteristics directly given in experience and the individuals as such possessing those characteristics. It is only on this second level of analysis, once removed from the directly givens of experience, that we can speak of a contrast between “substance” and “accidents.” See further (inter alia) ibid.: 116a26-117b20, esp. 117a24-27.

The importance of this for the doctrine of signs is considerable, for it means that semiotic analysis begins at a point prior to the classical ontology of “substance” and “accident” (cf . Poinsot, Phil. nat. 1. p. q. 1. art. 3., Reiser ed. II. 20al-33b8; discussion in Powell 1983: 28-29), with the immediately experienced contrast of subjective and intersubjective elements of experience, wherein “substance” is only implied. We do not experience the distinction of substance from accidents, whence substance is not known by experience as a distinct reality; but we do directly experience relations secundum dici and secundum esse, whence substance and the scheme of accidents are alike derived by further analysis. Hence the two “categories” fundamental to the doctrine of signs the starting point of the Treatise (Book I, Question 1, 117/18-23) include all reality that can be directly experienced in what will be called ‘accidents’ once substance has been rationally, i.e., analytically, further distinguished among the secundum dici relatives. What is decisive here is that this way of conceptualizing the matter affords in effect and in principle an alternative categorial scheme to Aristotle’s own, equally comprehensive of all reality, but more fundamental, being unlike Aristotle’s scheme, wherein the most basic reality, substance, is not directly experienced or experienceable as such, but only as characterized thus and so (i.e., in its accidents) entirely reducible to what can be directly experienced, namely, the contrast between what is and what is not purely relative, the relative secundum esse (order among elements or units making up a system) and the relative secundum did (the elements or units ordered).

– Poinsot, J., Tractatus de Signis, (1632), Deely, J (ed), University of California Press. 1985: pp. 86-87.

On Death

So, young Death, what could you be?
Even my father’s cancered body
brought me no sightless terror at eternity.
I suspect you have no sting.
Perhaps you, old splinter in the heart of love,
never were more than mirage,
though love would need you –
necessary certain death –
as a nail for a cross,
and cross and nail and Christ and
resurrection
are all love –
the ever-dying eternal life of all.

If so, where would you go,
you much-maligned seed of beginnings?
Youngest purveyor of life,
always exactly zero years old –
ever painted Grim Reaper,
thief of loved ones,
skeletal with age and demon-haunted.
You, unknowable ultimate horizon,
ear-whisperer of the infinite terror of endings,
do not impart any evil
except perhaps deluded dread.

You would go to a greater whole
of which you are inseparably part,
for shapes without space,
age without time,
or nails without crosses,
have no significance.
Thus you, youngest innocent death
are as much your own as the terror of
a darkened room:
mere mirage,
as seemingly all-powerful
as its infinite inscrutable blackness
and the child-fantasy it feeds.

You are love’s very vehicle.
Flesh for sacrifice, in dying,
is meaning-embodied matter –
is substance made significant –
surrendered, emptied, dissolute,
but never for itself, nor for nothing;
always for all,
for everything made sign;
spirit, soul, and soil pervaded
by kindest, complete kenosis,
all-originating, all-resurrecting.
Only silliest oldest humanity,
children trembling sightless in their beds,
give shadows a scythe and empty eye sockets
and forget the bedroom’s sturdy walls.

 

Arlyn Culwick

Anarchitects

Somewhere, in a Jo’burg more aesthetically and politically conscious than the one we currently imagine to exist, lurks a radical collective of public space architects…

Confronted with consumerist urban sprawl of pandemic proportions, the Collective plots a dramatic redress of post-Apartheid architectural evils. Tuscan facades, vast cookie-cutter property developments, class-oriented security paranoia, golf-estate-cum-English-manor fantasies: all must go.

The undulating spaces between Sandton and Centurion, known to some as the Filthy North, is a repository for the spoils of a vast consumerist empire. The Powers That Be create an army of middle-class drones, depleted of cultural richness and hungry to display newfound material wealth. By reducing consciousness to nothing more than the generic, populations are suckered into wanting the same thing. This creates mass markets out of thin air, generating superefficient production, yielding endless income from endless consumption. Genius at its most evil, certainly. And so, like semiotic robin hoods, the Collective steals cultural value from the generic and crass, and puts it in the hands of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Aged vernaculars, quirky originals, subtleties, richness, and soul must be liberated from the shackles of late Capitalism.

True to the character of many an anarchist on the fringe, the Collective resolves to use symbolic violence as its method of attack. The objective: communicate their opinions to the public, educate them, scare them into wakefulness. They are provocateurs, performance artists, cultural practitioners, vigilantes for a noble cause. Spaces must be skilfully appropriated, untruthful architectures defamed, and the whole symbology of the Northern Suburbs made a mockery of.

Thus, they come upon a perfect target, an archetype of paranoid, materialist, paper-thin Tuscan fantasy: Dainfern. Dainfern is unique in that its aesthetic repugnance is accompanied by an object of extreme conceptual repugnance: a huge overhead sewage pipe spanning Dainfern valley, visible to all. Nervously known as the ‘Dainfern Aqueduct’, it occasionally smells and spews forth flies, and transports 306 million litres of sewage a day to a nearby sewage plant.

Photo: David Goldblatt. Source: http://www.macba.cat/media/goldblatt/

The potential is almost irresistible, and so the Collective enacts their plot: they plant small explosives along the length of the pipe, alert the press, and trigger them successively. The result is one of perfect symbolic symmetry: tons of sewage rain down on those Tuscan roofs, architectural excreta meeting its human counterpart, forever united in public consciousness, made one in unholy matrimony, which, as we know, no man may put asunder. Tuscany retreats back to Italy where it belongs. Jo’burgers take a stab at inventing a local vernacular. Dainfern lies abandoned, entombed in its own symbol. The world is a little brighter.