Our little Kinsmen—after Rain
In plenty may be seen,
A Pink and Pulpy multitude
The tepid Ground upon.
A needless life, it seemed to me
Until a little Bird
As to a Hospitality
Advanced and breakfasted -
As I of He, so God of Me
I pondered, may have judged,
And left the little Angle Worm
With Modesties enlarged.
— EMILY DICKINSON,
WRITTEN ABOUT 1864
“A NEEDLESS LIFE.” A life without worth. A life without purpose, until the poet saw that the worm was breakfast for the little bird. This notion of “purpose”—understanding or doing something in the light of the ends that it serves—is interesting and complex. We don’t generally use this kind of thinking—function talk, making reference to what Aristotelians called “final causes” and what, since the Enlightenment, has been dubbed “teleological” thinking—in the physical world, the world of planets and pendulums, of protons and plate tectonics. No one would ask about the purpose of the meteorite that smashed into the earth some sixty-six million years ago, creating such a hostile atmosphere that that was the end of the dinosaurs. It just happened. There was no purpose to it.
In this meteorite case, obviously we are talking about organisms—the unfortunate dinosaurs. We are not talking about the organisms in their own right but rather as what happened to them as the consequence of certain physical events. The impact first brought on a huge rise in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels and massive heating, and then this was followed by a kind of nuclear winter as the dust in the air blocked the sunlight and caused extreme cold. The knock-on effect was to destroy the earth’s vegetation, and hence the wretched brutes starved to death.1 But when we turn to the world of organisms in its own right—wanting to understand how living beings work—we ask about purpose all of the time, as when, for example (to stay with dinosaurs), we ask a question like: What is the purpose of those funny, pointed, finlike appendages (“plates”) all down the back of the stegosaurus? We see such use also in the human world as when, for example, we ask a student: Why are you taking a course in calculus rather than in Elizabethan poetry? In the meteor case, at a causal level, we are interested in and only in the prior causes. How did the impact bring on a rise in the carbon dioxide level and so forth? We are not asking about how the dinosaur deaths brought on the impact. In the cases of organisms and humans, we are interested not so much in the prior causes behind the things or actions—presumably in the stegosaurus case these involve certain physiological processes and in the student case probably filling in one set of spaces in a computerized questionnaire rather than others—but in the hoped-for results, the goals. For the stegosaurus, it is thought that the purpose is temperature control—radiating heat when the brute is too hot and soaking up the sun’s rays when the brute is too cool.2 For the student, the goal is to get into medical school and lead a fulfilling life rather than end up as an adjunct humanities professor in some part of the world hitherto unknown to civilization.
What makes the whole situation complex and interesting is that, in some real sense, purpose-questions make reference to the future. Note that it is not just a matter of the future being involved. In the physical sciences we think a lot about the future. I am sure that there are today many earth scientists, hunched over their computers, building models about the effects of impacts. But it is prior causes alone—what are often known as “efficient causes”—to which appeal is made. As one might say, it is turtles all of the way down. Which physical events brought on which physical events and in what fashion, and what are the likelihoods of it all happening again? Likewise, in the case of normal causal processes like physiological development or computer form filling, it is all a matter of efficient causes. But here’s the rub! If the dinosaurs died, if the stegosaurus has the weird appendages, if the student has the admission form, you know that the factors bringing all of this about must have occurred—either in the past or at most at the same time as the event or object being studied. In the purpose case, the intended future may never occur. The stegosaurus might get swept away by a flood before it can use its plates; the student might change his or her mind and become something socially valuable, like a stockbroker or banker. What then is going on and why do we keep using purpose-type understanding? Why do we still seek final causes? How can the possibly nonexistent be a determining factor?
Let us, you say, get away from all of this. Let us stick with efficient causes. After all, that is what happens in the physical sciences. In the 1970s, the English inventor James Lovelock and the American cell biologist Lynn Margulis—both in their own rights very distinguished scientists—proposed the Gaia hypothesis, the claim that Planet Earth is an organism and because of this maintains homeostasis in the face of external changes and disruptions.3 From the heart of their own community, loud was the cry of “pseudoscience,” in main part because the hypothesis was (with good reason) judged teleological.4 The Gaia enthusiasts argued that the earth behaves as it does—absorbing salt from the oceans, for instance—in order to remain stable and capable of sustaining living beings. Such thinking for the keepers of the sacred flame of proper thinking—the Richard Dawkinses of the world—was nigh heretical, to be banished to the outer circles of the universe, the phantom zone, out of sight and forgotten forever.5 Had not the great Francis Bacon likened final causes to Vestal Virgins, decorative but sterile?
You naive fool, comes the response. Physicists and wannabes may strut and fret their hour upon the stage, but then they are heard no more. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued forcibly in his Critique of the Power of Judgment,6 in the world of organisms, not to mention that of humans, you may try and try to get away from purpose-filled talk, but you are never, ever going to succeed. Like taxes and death, it is one of those things that humans are stuck with, a lover that you fear to parade in public and yet you cannot live without. And not only is the reason for that the spur to an interesting question, but it opens a cascade of other interesting questions. You can cheat on your taxes. Ultimately, for all that Antonius Block did his best in the Seventh Seal, you can never cheat on death. Which raises the biggest purpose-laden questions of them all: Why are we here? Where are we going? What is the purpose of it all? Can I now make any difference to the future? Or are we like the little worm in Emily Dickinson’s chilly poem? We may have a purpose in the cosmic scheme of things, but it is not necessarily one directed to our personal well-being or happiness.
I am an evolutionist. I do not think that this necessarily implies that the present is better than the past—this, indeed, is one of the questions we shall be asking. I do think that the present can be understood only by knowledge of the past. Hence, my approach in this short monograph is that of the historian of ideas. I want to dig back to the origins of purpose thinking and then move through history to the present. As you can well imagine, there is a huge literature on the people I discuss. As in physics, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, to every claim about Plato and Aristotle and the others, there is an equal and opposite counterclaim. That is how we scholars make our livings. I have just cowritten a book with a good friend where we offer completely different interpretations of the work of Charles Darwin, me seeing him entirely in the British tradition and my cowriter seeing him as a German Romantic in everything but his language of birth.7 Fortunately, in the tradition of my great predecessors, notably Arthur Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, I tell a tale here not for the sake of history itself but for the sake of philosophy. For the sake of a problem today. Thus, I can be cavalier with the voluminous material, picking out (not idiosyncratically) claims and judgments pertinent to my end. Why do we use purpose talk? Could we eliminate it? Should we eliminate it? Is it a burdensome relic of the past, like the appendix, as it was long taken to be, or does it have yet a vital place in our thinking, like the brain itself? As always in the Western context when asking such questions as these, we are directed back to two sources: Athens and Jerusalem. In our terms, to the start of philosophy and to the start of religion. The early Christian writer Tertullian (155–240), who made this distinction, warned against Athens. This, as we shall see, is one of the things with which we shall wrestle. For now, take the two sources and, with this as our guide, let us begin our tale.