Aristotle Redivivus
Aristotle Lives On
During and after the Scientific Revolution, the personification of nature that is at the heart of the Aristotelian philosophy had a nasty way of reappearing in the most orthodox of machine-metaphor-influenced places. Take Galileo’s Two Dialogues, surely the poster child of the new mechanistic approach to nature. Yet consider: “it is as though we have been led by the hand to the investigation of naturally accelerated motion by consideration of the custom and procedure of nature herself in all her other works, in the performance of which she habitually employs the first, simplest, and easiest means. And indeed, no one of judgment believes that swimming or flying can be accomplished in a simpler or easier way than that which fish and birds employ by natural instinct.”1 If this isn’t a teleological picture, with nature doing what is of value—doing things by the simplest means—it is hard to know what is.
Even more than mechanics, optics was riddled with final-cause thinking. Fermat’s “principle of least time” explains Snell’s “law of refraction,” the connection between the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction. Since light going from a less dense to a denser medium is bent toward the normal, it is not going from beginning to end by the shortest distance. But assuming that light travels less quickly in a more dense than less dense medium, one can show that it does travel in the shortest time (because by being refracted, it minimizes the distance it has to go in the denser medium). What is this principle but an appeal to simplicity and value? In order to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, it takes this route over all others. The purpose of taking this route is to be as quick as possible. Deliciously, even Descartes is into this kind of reasoning. “While Nature has several ways to arrive at an effect, she always infallibly follows the shortest.”2
Is this genuinely neo-Aristotelian? No one back then was asking quite the questions we are asking now. Commenting on these issues, the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) worried: “I know the distaste that many mathematicians have for final causes applied to physics, a distaste that I share up to some point. I admit, it is risky to introduce such elements; their use is dangerous, as shown by the errors made by Fermat and Leibniz in following them.” However, he consoled himself that in the end, God puts everything to rights!
One cannot doubt that everything is governed by a supreme Being who has imposed forces on material objects, forces that show his power, just as he has fated those objects to execute actions that demonstrate his wisdom. The harmony between these two attributes is so perfect, that undoubtedly all the effects of Nature could be derived from each one taken separately. A blind and deterministic mechanics follows the plans of a perfectly clear and free Intellect. If our spirits were sufficiently vast, we would also see the causes of all physical effects, either by studying the properties of material bodies or by studying what would be most suitable for them to do.3
Is this Platonic, Aristotelian, or, perhaps most accurately, an Aristotelian picture that has behind it a Designer God rather than an indifferent Unmoved Mover? If this last is the option, then one can see how the Designer God could get ever-more remote with only the picture remaining. What is important is that the picture not only remained right through the heyday of mechanism but flourished! And as the eighteenth century went on, more and more serious thinkers felt the case was building. You should remember that this is just the time when people like Benjamin Franklin were pushing the science of electricity forward, suggesting that it is forces or invisible fluids at issue here, and others were showing that life itself (obviously) involves not just fluids but electrical discharges, as are needed for the functioning of muscles. Even physics was being co-opted into this movement, for the Jesuit Roger Boscovich argued—in a move endorsed by Kant in his Metaphysical Foundations of Science—that matter itself can be reduced to opposing forces, those pushing out and those pulling in. It pushes out as you try to penetrate it, but at the same time it pulls back in, or it would simply diffuse throughout the universe: “repelling force belongs to the essence of matter as much as attractive force does—the two can’t be separated in the concept of matter.”4
Self-Organization
This is not Cartesian res extensa, at least not what we thought was meant by Cartesian res extensa, a sentiment endorsed by Spinoza. He spoke in a monistic fashion of Deus sive Natura. Somehow, the whole of nature is divine and living: “Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived.”5 Perspectives like this found increasing support as the eighteenth century drew to an end and, in reaction to mechanism (and related phenomena like the Industrial Revolution), there was the growth of the philosophy and school—Romanticism—that made feeling, emotion, and life absolutely central.6 One who was deeply influenced by Spinoza was the major philosophical successor to Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph [von] Schelling (1775–1854). He saw that attempts to divide knowledge into subjective and objective are as doomed to failure as attempts to separate the animate from the inanimate. He quoted approvingly from Spinoza’s masterwork, the Ethics, “that whatsoever can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through the other.”7 At the same time, there was the influence of Plato—as a teenager, Schelling penned a sixty-page essay on the Timaeus—and so the world in any sense must be essentially organic, with final cause an essential part of it. “Even in mere organized matter there is life, but a life of a more restricted kind. This idea is so old, and has hitherto persisted so constantly in the most varied forms, right up to the present day—(already in the most ancient times it was believed that the whole world was pervaded by an animating principle, called the world-soul, and the later period of Leibniz gave every plant its soul)—that one may very well surmise from the beginning that there must be some reason latent in the human mind itself for this natural belief.”8 There is indeed a reason for this belief. “The sheer wonder which surrounds the problem of the origin of organic bodies, therefore, is due to the fact that in these things necessity and contingency are most intimately united. Necessity, because their very existence is purposive, not only their form (as in the work of art), contingency, because this purposiveness is nevertheless actual only for an intuiting and reflective being.”9
“Their very existence is purposive”! Schelling highlights an earlier term that is very popular in some circles today. Apparently, because of the notion of purpose, “the human mind was very early led to the idea of a self [-]organizing matter, and because organization is conceivable only in relation to a mind, to an original union of mind and matter in these things. It saw itself compelled to seek the reason for these things, on the one hand in Nature itself, and on the other, in a principle exalted above Nature; and hence it very soon fell into thinking of mind and Nature as one.”10 Self-organization! The world is something that produces itself, has its developing powers inside, as an unfurling organism is driven by forces within rather than without. “Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature. Here then, in the absolute identity of Mind in us and Nature outside us, the problem of the possibility of a Nature external to us must be resolved. The final goal of our further research is, therefore, this idea of Nature; if we succeed in attaining this, we can also be certain to have dealt satisfactorily with that Problem.”11
There is more we could say about this vision, which, translated into science, became known as Naturphilosophie or “Nature Philosophy”—for instance, about the work and influence of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He devoted many of his formidable powers to the study of nature—taking on mechanism full front, especially in his attack on the Newtonian theory of light—and in the biological world, explicitly endorsing an organic model that owed much to Greek thought. But seizing on the Aristotelian notion of self-organization, jump a century and move to Scotland, and consider the work of the morphologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, first published in 1917.12 Significantly, championed by Gould, himself then working up to a sustained attack on Darwinism,13 Thompson had little time for natural selection or for the whole tradition that it represented. He always looked back beyond the Enlightenment and the two thousand years leading up to it, finding his true spiritual home back in ancient Athens. Like Aristotle particularly, he was ever committed to a world that was more than just dead matter, a world that in some sense was living with the consequent absolute value that that implied.
The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between its headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology, and all of them the physicist can more or less easily read and adequately solve: solving them by reference to their antecedent phenomena, in the material system of mechanical forces to which they belong, and to which we interpret them as being due. They have also, doubtless, their immanent teleological significance; but it is on another plane of thought from the physicist’s that we contemplate their intrinsic harmony and perfection, and “see that they are good.”14
Thompson adds at once, “Nor is it otherwise with the material forms of living things.”
Thompson was totally committed to function, to purpose—he is not denying the first part of the Design argument, about the design-like nature of organisms—but he was as totally committed to the idea that ends, values, emerge spontaneously from the physicochemical workings of the world, without need of natural selection, which later he saw as having only the negative end of removing inadequate or failing forms. This neo-Aristotelian thinking comes through clearly in his discussion of the forms of jellyfish. A Darwinian would at once look for function and why selection might have favored one form rather than another. Thompson equally looked for function but saw it all as a matter of the physics of denser fluids in less dense fluids. “To let a drop of ink fall into water is a simple and most beautiful experiment. The effect is more violent than in the former case. The descending drop turns into a complete vortex-ring; it expands and attenuates; it waves about, and the descending loops again turn into incipient vortices.”15 Continuing, that “instead of letting our drop rise or fall freely, we may use a hanging drop, which, while it sinks, remains suspended to the surface. Thus it cannot form a complete annulus, but only a partial vortex suspended by a thread or column—just as in Overbeck’s jet experiments; and the figure so produced, in either case, is closely analogous to that of a medusa or jellyfish, with its bell or ‘umbrella,’ and its clapper or ‘manubrium’ as well.”16
Function, purpose, final cause, values: “When, after attempting to comprehend the exquisite adaptation of the swallow or the albatross to the navigation of the air, we try to pass beyond the empirical study and contemplation of such perfection of mechanical fitness, and to ask how such fitness came to be, then indeed we may be excused if we stand wrapt in wonderment, and if our minds be occupied and even satisfied with the conception of a final cause.”17 Just not from natural selection, but as he basically admitted, somehow from the very workings of nature itself. “And yet all the while, with no loss of wonderment nor lack of reverence, do we find ourselves constrained to believe that somehow or other, in dynamical principles and natural law, there lie hidden the steps and stages of physical causation by which the material structure was so shapen to its ends.”18
Due in no small part to the coming of computers, there is now a whole school that works in Thompson’s tradition, trying to show how features Darwinians ascribe to selection are truly the result of mathematics and nature’s unguided laws. Perhaps a function of the hostility to the perceived blind ruthlessness of Darwinian selection, there is often—as in the case of Gould—some ambiguity as to whether the claim is (as it was for Thompson) that ends are being served by physical law unaided, or if the very urge for ends is itself being denied or downgraded. Is the first part of the Design argument being accepted or rejected? The slogan of this school—“order for free”—suggests that there is something to do with purposes, something of value, but whether this something is a utilitarian end or just an elegant pattern is often left hanging.19
Phyllotaxis, something picked up by Thompson, has been a favorite topic. In many plants—sunflowers are the paradigmatic example—the seeds are packed in a very distinctive manner, showing different curves and spirals. One can readily show that the pattern is susceptible to mathematical analysis and somewhat remarkably is found to be determined by Fibonacci sequences. These are mathematical formulae made famous by the Da Vinci Code, where each number in a sequence is the sum of the numbers preceding it. Thus, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Evolutionists have long known about this, and Asa Gray seized on it as an example of selection in action,20 distributing seeds and other plant parts to their advantage—for instance, in dispersal. Those in the Thompson tradition argue that it is simply a mathematical artifact of the way in which seeds and plant parts are produced, from the center out, and no more—or less—should be read into this. Obviously they think it but the tip of a very large iceberg. The late Brian Goodwin, a lifelong maverick, Canadian-born morphologist, was practically Pythagorean in his numerological enthusiasms. The vulgar fraction series formed by dividing successive members of the Fibonacci series homes in on 0.618, which in turn is what the ancient Greeks called the “golden mean,” the figure arrived at by dividing the sides of a rectangle such that removing a square from the rectangle leaves one with a smaller but identical rectangle. As it happens, you can get the golden mean out of circles also, if you divide up the perimeter properly. This gives you a major angle of 137.5 degrees, which (and if you are not yet convinced you will be now!) is just the angle on the genetic spiral that divides successive leaves or parts. “So plants with spiral phyllotaxis tend to locate successive leaves at an angle that divides the circle of the meristem in the proportions of the Golden Section. Plants seem to know a lot about harmonious properties and architectural principles.”21 (The meristem is the growing tip of the plant.)
And at this point, perhaps expectedly, values make their appearance. Goodwin has nothing but contempt for a philosophy that attempts to take meaning and value out of existence. Everything is interconnected, in an essentially harmonious fashion, with shared values. Darwinism is “an extreme reductionism that makes it impossible for us to understand concepts such as health. Health refers to wholes, the dynamics of whole organisms. We currently experience crises of health, of the environment, of the community. I think they are all related. They are not caused by biology by any means, but biology contributes to these crises by failing to give us adequate conceptual understanding of life and wholes, of ecosystems, of the biosphere, and it’s all because of genetic reductionism.”22 We have got to escape the Darwinian metaphors of “competition and conflict and survival,” replacing them with metaphors stressing organisms as “cooperative as they are competitive.” We must turn from “nature red in tooth and claw, with fierce competition and the survivors coming away with the spoils.” We need a new perspective where the “whole metaphor of evolution, instead of being one of competition, conflict and survival, becomes one of creativity and transformation.”
This is not a man—or school—that has turned his back on purpose. It is all a question of which purposes and how to get them.
Vital Forces
With Goodwin, we are moving from the individual organism and its purposes to the group and beyond to history and its purposes. Along with the Aristotelian approach to the individual, there was also an Aristotelian approach to history, or perhaps more accurately, since Aristotle himself was not into this kind of inquiry, an Aristotle-inspired approach to history. We find this in Lamarck.23 The mechanism given his name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, was always secondary for him. Primary was a kind of upward force, from the spontaneously generated to our species, not in a treelike-branching fashion made famous by Darwin but in parallel lines of ascent, going through the same stages, some having started earlier than others.24 Hence (say), were lions to go extinct, more would be on their way, later. He wrote of a “life force,” “le pouvoir de la vie.” This seems to lead to complexity, and then “Lamarckism” tones things up adaptively.
In Germany we find similar thinking, although often idealistic rather than materialistic. Thus Hegel: “Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages, one arising necessarily from the other and being a proximate truth of the stage from which it results; but it is not generated naturally out of the other, but only in the inner Idea which constitutes the ground of Nature.”25 This sort of thinking crossed the Channel and, through the medium of the poet Samuel Coleridge, who virtually plagiarized the writings of Schelling, had a huge influence on Herbert Spencer, the evolutionist who, in respects, had even more effect on the general public than did Darwin.26 Spencer saw organic evolution as being but one facet of the overall upward progress that characterizes the whole world process: from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, or in his words, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous:
Now we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.27
Nothing escapes this law. Humans are more complex or heterogeneous than other animals; Europeans are more complex or heterogeneous than savages; and (hardly a surprise) the English language is more complex or heterogeneous than the languages of other speakers.
Eclectically grabbing bits and pieces from everywhere, Spencer propounded his theory of “dynamic equilibrium.”28 Societies are like organisms.29 Every now and then they get disturbed and then they strive to reachieve equilibrium, but at a higher, more differentiated level. It is not quite obvious why this happens, but that causes have a natural tendency to produce multiple effects and hence complexity is important. Whatever the case may be, it is a better state to which we are ever pointed, and this is why morality is essentially a function of aiding the processes of evolution. “Ethics has for its subject-matter, that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages of its evolution.”30 Continuing: “And there has followed the corollary that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid.”31 Although like many Victorians of his age, Spencer was very critical of conventional religion and inclined to think of himself as an agnostic, he would talk of the Unknowable almost as if it were an entity rather than a confession of ignorance: “the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.” All of this—especially the built-in upward progress—inclines one to think that for Spencer there is more than brute fact and perhaps at the least some kind of objective principle of ordering, a kind of principle of purpose to the order of history.
Moving back to the Continent, there were the so-called vitalists. From Germany, the embryologist Hans Driesch (1908), who supposed the notion of an entelechy, is best known.32 From France, we have already met the philosopher Henri Bergson, who supposed the notion of an élan vital. Much influenced by Herbert Spencer, in Creative Evolution—the very title is suggestive—Bergson made it clear that all of life is bound together, and the course of history is not random but pointed to the emergence of humankind. “Where, then, does the vital principle of the individual begin or end? Gradually we shall be carried further and further back, up to the individual’s remotest ancestors: we shall find him solidary with each of them, solidary with that little mass of protoplasmic jelly which is probably at the root of the genealogical tree of life.” Continuing:
In this sense each individual may be said to remain united with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds. So it is of no use to try to restrict finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace. This life common to all the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with the collective whole of all others.33
Although I suggested earlier that the élan vital has an ontological presence—it is a physical thing in some sense, alien to Aristotle—overall with Bergson you don’t get much more Aristotelian than that. Expectedly, like most philosophers, Bergson is pretty keen on having his cake and eating it too. On the one hand, he repudiates mechanism. Darwinism gets short shrift. On the other hand, he does not want the whole of life predetermined by an outside plan, allowing no room within for choice or creativity. That said, humans had better come out on top! Fortunately, they do: “not only does consciousness appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, among conscious beings themselves, man comes to occupy a privileged place. Between him and the animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind.”34 We can put matters more strongly: “in the last analysis, man might be considered the reason for the existence of the entire organization of life on our planet.”35
In the second decade of the twentieth century, Bergson was immensely popular. I note with some ironic amusement, given how Richard Dawkins has so enthusiastically endorsed the idea, that Julian Huxley was an ardent Bergsonian and his introduction of arms races was intended to give a mechanistic, Darwinian backing to the French philosopher’s overall vision. His friendship with the Huxleys (Julian and Aldous) was probably the conduit that informed D. H. Lawrence, and the reason why his two great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, are Bergsonian through and through. As I said, there are masses of rather silly talk about the power of blood—“A little flicker of rage ran through his blood. It was as if she were rousing him, goading him.”—and so on and so forth. Silly, until one realizes that this is a metaphor for the élan vital. Listen, at the end of the second book, to the reflections of the hero Rupert Birkin.
If humanity ran into a CUL DE SAC and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits.36
Since Princeton University Press is a family-friendly organization, I will not go into the details of how Lawrence thinks this is to be achieved. I will simply say that Rupert’s girlfriend, Ursula, has what might be described as a “multipurpose” body.
Julian Huxley was a lifelong enthusiast for Bergsonian vitalism. Even in his magisterial overview of neo-Darwinism, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis,37 he admitted a fondness for the Bergsonian vision. In France, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, probably in the first part of the twentieth century the country’s best paleontologist, was likewise an enthusiast, linking Bergson’s creative evolution with a Lamarckian upward progress to the so-called noosphere (the realm of human culture) with the Omega Point at the end, something that Teilhard (a Jesuit) identified with Jesus Christ.38 Although an atheist, Huxley was the president of the British Teilhard de Chardin society. (Dobzhansky was the president of the American society.) Not that this brought Huxley much relief or relaxation. Reviewing Teilhard’s masterwork, The Phenomenon of Man (1959), future Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar wrote of “a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense”; “a feeble argument, abominably expressed”; “the illusion of content”; and “alarming apocalyptic seizures.”39 And that was just the first paragraph. The real object of his scorn was Huxley, who had written a friendly introduction. Directly against Teilhard was Gould who, disliking intensely the thoroughly progressivist nature of the Phenomenon of Man, accused the priest of having coordinated the Piltdown Hoax—a charge that was received with the contempt that it merited.40
Alfred North Whitehead
One of the more interesting figures on the intellectual scene of the early twentieth century was Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). He started life in England as a mathematician, with (his student) Bertrand Russell writing Principia Mathematica, a heroic attempt to show that mathematics is the deductive consequence of logic.41 Late in life, he crossed the Atlantic and became professor of philosophy at Harvard, the joke being that when he entered the classroom, it was probably the first time in his life that he had ever attended a philosophy lecture. He set about formulating a metaphysical system, the very opposite from what one might expect from one with a grounding in mathematics. Whitehead’s thinking, known aptly as “process philosophy,” is deeply organic and developmental. In lectures given in 1925, he bemoaned the nature of materialistic evolution, arguing that it “is reduced to the role of being a word for another description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter.” Hence: “There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive.” We seek a more creative, more dynamic process, explaining “the evolution of complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms.” Given this: “The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity—a substantial activity—expressing itself in individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism. The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters of external objects, emerging for its own sake.” Concluding, and making explicit our interests, “in the process of analyzing the character of nature in itself, we find that the emergence of organisms depends on a selective activity which is akin to purpose.”42
It hardly needs remarking that none of this has anything to do with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. There is clearly some affinity with some of the Bergson-like philosophies of creative evolution of the day—positions like that of Samuel Alexander, which saw levels of existence and new entities or wholes “emerging” at ever-higher levels.43 But, truly, in seeking roots, one does better to go back to influences Whitehead notes, particularly Romanticism—“a protest on behalf of an organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact.”44 In support, poets like Shelley (“Mont Blanc”) are quoted:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
Poets like Wordsworth and Shelley “express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.”45 Interpreting this gnomic judgment is left as an exercise for the reader.
Well known is the fact that Whitehead had far greater influence on American theology than American philosophy. In the hands of followers like Charles Hartshorne, process theology stressed the notion of “kenosis,” that God (through Jesus) relinquished powers of divinity, and now is an evolving God involved in the world, laboring alongside his creation humankind. The poet Pattiann Rogers expresses some of these thoughts in “The Possible Suffering of God during Creation.” Especially, there is the fear that it might not be worth the effort.
Maybe he wakes periodically at night,
Wiping away the tears he doesn’t know
He has cried in his sleep, not having had time yet to tell
Himself precisely how it is he must mourn, not having had
time yet
To elicit from his creation its invention
Of his own solace.46
Obviously the God of process theology is far from the God of Saint Augustine. His very being commits just about every heresy in the book. For all this, Hartshorne thought of him as a Platonic God, somewhat akin to the world soul—“the world is God’s body.” This sounds much like pantheism, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, and—process people are into this—he invented his own fancy term, “panentheism.” Whitehead rather nastily dissociated himself from this view: “In the Timaeus the doctrine [of the world soul] can be read as an allegory. In that case it was Plato’s most unfortunate essay in mythology. The World-Soul, as an emanation, has been the parent of puerile metaphysics.”47 God is not part of the world. He cannot be creator, in the sense of designer, because in a sense that is still going on. Given the organic metaphor, we do perhaps have more of an Aristotelian flavor of an ongoing process, a force or power of creation. He spoke of God’s “primordial nature,” being “the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality,” and of “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire.”48 Perhaps we should not read too much into this. Whitehead does not give the impression of a man with the history of philosophy in his bones, as it were. His God is a long way from the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover.
American Evolutionism
Whitehead is a one-off. The English cuckoo in the American nest. Heathcliff in the Earnshaw family. Except, really, he is less of a disturbance and more a figure who went his own way, with his own following, not overwhelmingly in the philosophical world. Apparently, he has followers in the business administration orbit.49 So really, it is no great surprise that the kind of developmental philosophy promoted by people like him, and Bergson a little earlier, resonated more broadly in American culture. Discreet about but very appreciative of Bergson was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, the American population geneticist Sewall Wright.50 Mention has been made already of his picture, the “shifting balance theory of evolution,” one that sees creativity in small populations brought on by genetic drift, and subsequent amalgamation of these populations and selection working to finalize things in the greater whole. Wright—who thought himself a panpsychic monist, using this in the sense of one who sees everything as in some sense living and conscious—appreciated the progressivism of Bergson and read this also into his own world picture. He saw organisms as sitting on an “adaptive landscape” with peaks and valleys, and with an ever-higher movement from one peak to another. “The present discussion has dealt with the problem of evolution as one depending wholly on mechanism and chance. In recent years, there has been some tendency to revert to more or less mystical conceptions revolving around such phrases as ‘emergent evolution’ and ‘creative evolution.’ The writer must confess to a certain sympathy with such viewpoints philosophically.”51
More influential on Wright—although only confirming the neo-Aristotelian trend in his work—was Herbert Spencer. We should perhaps be primed for this, for if you look at the discussion of progress by Julian Huxley, it is at least as much Spencerian as Bergsonian. Remember, to requote: “it comes to pass that the continuous change which is passing that through the organic world appears as a succession of phases of equilibrium, each one on a higher average plane of independence than the one before, and each inevitably calling up and giving place to one still higher.”52 You don’t get much more Spencerian than that, although perhaps the Bergsonian influence shows through (not in a contradictory manner) in Huxley’s belief that the essential mark of progress is being independent of one’s surroundings.
In the case of Wright, thanks to his father (who was one of his teachers), Spencer was an early influence and stayed with him. The very title of Wright’s theory bringing in “balance” shows the trend of his thinking, and it was there throughout. Think of what happens. A population gets a shock or disruptive force breaking it up. Genetic drift occurs in the parts, making for more variation. The parts rejoin, with this new variation now part of the whole. And in the process, creative additions are made and the whole moves to a higher state. Dynamic evolution in Mendelian terms. “Evolution as a process of cumulative change depends on a proper balance of the conditions, which, at each level of organization—gene, chromosome, cell, individual, local race—make for genetic homogeneity or genetic heterogeneity of the species … The type and rate of evolution in such a system depend on a balance among the evolutionary pressures considered here.”53
Wright had a huge influence on American evolutionary biology. How much the Spencerian influence continued it is hard to say. One, however, who felt the influence either directly from Wright or perhaps in parallel from the men who taught Wright at Harvard in the 1910s—and who were the teachers of his teachers—was Edward O. Wilson. He has always been open in his admiration of Herbert Spencer, thinking him a much-unappreciated thinker. We shall see more of this when we come to the discussion of morality and its foundations. Here it is enough to note that Wilson’s total conviction of the progressive nature of evolution and his total confidence that such a conviction needs little or no backing would fit nicely with someone whose metaphysics started with the belief that nature is not just dead molecules in motion but in some sense alive and directed toward ends—namely, human beings. Wilson has never read Aristotle, but the thread is there.54
We find traces (or more) of it also in other writings, particularly those who think that (in a kind of self-organizing way) nature is going to lead to complexity and hence to humankind. There are hints of this in some of Gould’s later writings—he was often torn between denying progress and denying progress fueled by Darwinian factors. He certainly thought that nature had a natural tendency to complexity.55 This occurs by a kind of random walk. You cannot get more simple than simple, but you can get more complex. A viewpoint endorsed—several times they acknowledge explicitly that they are standing in the tradition of Herbert Spencer—by Duke University colleagues, paleontologist Daniel McShea and philosopher Robert Brandon.56 They promote what they proudly call “biology’s first law.” Named the “zero-force evolutionary law” or ZFEL, its general formulation runs: “In any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase, one that is always present but that may be opposed or augmented by natural selection, other forces, or constraints acting on diversity or complexity.”57 It is something apparently with the status in evolutionary biology of Newton’s first law of motion—a kind of background condition of stability, even though somewhat paradoxically their law suggests perpetual motion.
Although the authors are fairly (let us say) generic on their understandings of complexity and diversity—number of parts, number of kinds—the claims made are grandiose if familiar. A little like Sewall Wright’s balance theory, the natural tendency to complexity—parts tend to be added on—generates new organic variations and hence types, and so one gets a version of order for free. As is usual in these discussions, it is not always obvious whether the claim is that adaptation is created in this way or if adaptation is now irrelevant. Probably more the former: “We raise the possibility that complex adaptive structures arise spontaneously in organisms with excess part types. One could call this self-organization. But it is more accurately described as the consequence of the explosion of combinatorial possibilities that naturally accompanies the interaction of a large diversity of arbitrary part types.”58
As seems customary when philosophers write about intelligent design theory, there is—at least from a Darwinian perspective—a depressing sympathy for the position. There is no outright subscription to a Designer, however: “The creationist intuition, shared by many onlookers to the debate, is that it is difficult to see how the intermediates to these complex structures could have been functional, and therefore how they could have arisen and been maintained by natural selection.”59 And in an equally depressing but familiar manner, they go on to say: “But we point out, there may be another route available as well. If novel part types are delivered in excess, as the ZFEL suggests, then the combinatoric possibilities could be vast, with the result that colloquial complexity could—like pure complexity—be easy. And the role of natural selection could be mainly negative, revealing colloquial complexity by subtraction.”60 Selection is thus downgraded to an eliminative status rather than creative. We are right back to a world where nature itself has its own ends, its own purposes. There is no need of outside help or interference. “The scope we claim for the ZFEL is immodestly large. The claim is that the ZFEL tendency is and has been present in the background, pushing diversity and complexity upwards, in all populations, in all taxa, in all organisms, on all timescales, over the entire history of life, here on Earth and everywhere.”61
Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny
Given that German Romanticism was so indebted to Plato, not surprisingly there was always much interest in showing that the world, the organic world particularly, was one or One, linked throughout by revealing patterns. There was appreciation of function, but—in the footsteps of Aristotle in translating this into the world of organisms—form was prior. Goethe writing on plants made much of the similarities between parts, and the morphologists, like Lorenz Oken, carried this idea into anatomy and also saw similarities—homologies—between different organisms. It was natural that this sort of thinking would be pushed into understanding development, and before Darwin we find people like Louis Agassiz, Swiss ichthyologist (and later Harvard professor), pushing a threefold parallelism: the development of the individual, the development through time of the whole of life, and the relationships between organisms today. The last—the “chain of being”—is a very old idea with roots as far back as Plato’s Republic, although it was Aristotle (in his History of Animals) who developed the idea, putting animals above plants (on grounds of their being able to move and sense) and then graded animals on reproductive modes and possession of blood.62 The Christianized version saw the chain start with the most primitive organisms, work up through humans, on to angels, and then God at the top. Development through time was not necessarily taken in an evolutionary sense—when it was, it was called “phylogeny”—but more of an unfurling of creation through time as revealed, increasingly, by the fossil record. Individual development, “ontogeny,” was of much interest to biologists. Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) was the landmark figure in making much sense of the findings. In the 1860s, Darwin’s follower in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), in fact as much influenced by Romanticism as by anything to be found in the Origin, gave the whole picture an evolutionary interpretation, expounding his well-known (albeit much criticized for its exceptions) “biogenetic law”—“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—meaning that by studying the development of the individual one could discern the history of the group.
Since all of these thinkers, Haeckel especially, thought in terms of biological progress, there was ever a tendency to see in the kind of momentum that one sees in individual development—from the egg to the hen, from the embryo to the full-grown dog—a kind of analogous momentum in life’s history, as it unfurls progressively to its end. In a parody one might say that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. A modern-day representative of this kind of thinking is the well-known science writer Robert Wright. He wonders if we might see a kind of progress to humankind, akin to the development we see in the individual organism. Drawing attention to the fact that Darwinians (among whom he numbers himself) like Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett agree that the development of the organism is as much a design-like aspect of life as are the adaptations of the adult, Wright hypothesizes:
We understand the physical process by which an egg unfolds into a squirrel. Yet Dennett and Dawkins agree that, in the case of a squirrel, we still need an additional “special kind of explanation”—namely, an explanation for how there came to be squirrel’s eggs that do this sort of remarkable unfolding. Well, I’m making a comparable claim about the first seeds of life on Earth—the original self-replicating material that unfolded into the whole biosphere. I’m saying this unfolding, and the product of this unfolding, have properties that should lead us to suspect there is a “special kind of explanation” for how these seeds came to be here in the first place; I’m suggesting that these seeds, like squirrel’s eggs, may be a product of “design” and have some “purpose.” In other words, I’m suggesting that the word “seed” may be apt in a pretty strict sense.63
Speaking on behalf of Dawkins and Dennett, and for other Darwinians like myself, this simply won’t fly. First, the development of the individual was produced by natural selection, and although individual parts of history may be controlled by selection, as through arms races, there is no suggestion that the process as a sequential and integrated whole is controlled by selection. The history of life on Earth is not the result of many histories in the past that gave rise to the next one and finally to the one that produced us. In any case, the adult organism like the squirrel is an integrated, functioning whole. The world taken as an entity is not. Although I have much sympathy for the Gaia hypothesis—it really does take seriously issues like the threat of global warming—overall, it just doesn’t work. It really isn’t the case, for example, that lagoons trap seawater, evaporate it, and then suck the salt underground to keep the salinity of the sea in a stable state.64 Mount Everest just doesn’t have the relationship with the Canadian prairies that the heart has with the eyes—in the former case, they just are contingently on Planet Earth, whereas in the latter case they are working conjointly to the benefit of the whole organism. And if you take just the biosphere, even though one might get sociality at restricted levels, the struggle for existence sinks all thoughts of overall integration. No progress here I am afraid.
An End with No Purpose
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We have the same philosophical approaches to the same philosophical problems. All that changes is the science in which everything is dressed up. And perhaps the nature of the Unmoved Mover. Although Aristotle did away with the Demiurge, an efficient-cause God, he kept with a final-cause God, seeing that values make little sense without a valuer or valuers. We and all of creation strive to emulate It, because It is good. Neo-Aristotelians (unlike Neoplatonists) tend to make less of the gods or a God, but one senses that in some way they feel that human life in itself is of value and that nature strove to produce it because it was good. Herbert Spencer, never much given to modesty, false or otherwise, would probably have been happy to take on the divine role himself. Others, like Wilson, go more generally to humans as a whole, but ultimately it is we who make it all worthwhile. One doubts that Aristotle, with his keen sense of human fallibility, would have thought this quite enough.