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Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose

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Abstract

The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.

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Notes

  1. Wiener thought the vitalism-mechanism stalemate had been overcome by cybernetics: “Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism; but as have seen, this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of view which has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new mechanism is fully as mechanistic as the old … the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions” (Wiener 1948, p. 44); cf. “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day” (ibid., p. 132). In other words, cybernetics is a new kind of mechanisms that accommodates what vitalism had attempted to explain: the reality of self-organizing systems and the emergence of teleology.

  2. “Cybernetics: A Critique” first published in 1952, all page numbers refer to the reprinted edition in Phenomenon of Life (2001).

  3. For recent explications of Jonas’s bio-philosophy, see Coyne (2016), Pommier (2017), and Hverven and Netland (2021).

  4. This section is primarily based upon Moreno and Mossio (2015), Montévil and Mossio (2015), and Mossio and Bich (2017). For reasons of space, I omit from consideration how the OA builds upon but differs from the closely related autopoiesis approach developed by Maturana and Varela. A comprehensive discussion of the OA would also need to discuss its deep roots in Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

  5. Amongst their predecessors they cite not only Kant but also Rashevsky, Rosen, Kauffman, Pattee, Juarrero, Ganti, and Piaget.

  6. It would be a further question as to why exactly, on the organizational approach, distinguishes self-determining systems (organisms) and self-organizing systems (autocatalytic networks, dissipative structures), since it is not entirely clear how adding additional constraints is sufficient explanation.

  7. For a recent defense of the Kantian credentials behind the organizational approach with regard to teleology, see Gambarotto and Nahas (2022); for a recent treatment of Hegel’s philosophy of nature and the OA, see Corti (2022).

  8. I understand that this claim is contentious, but see Zammito (2006).

  9. This is not to deny that there is no empirically detectable mechanism that can foresee what traits will be adaptive when the environment changes and then cause those traits to come; it is to question whether the supposition of metaphysical materialism, specifically Epicureanism, influenced the attribution of more importance to chance than what was required by the ontological commitments of empirical theory.

  10. For a comprehensive assessment of why selection must assume teleology and cannot explain it, see Walsh (2015); see also Piccinini (2020), pp. 71–81.

  11. See Moss (2004) for the shift from ontogenetic teleology to phylogenetic teleology correlated with the rise of mechanistic science.

  12. See Mossio and Bich (2017) for a more detailed comparison of the organizational and evolutionary approaches to naturalizing teleology.

  13. For recent work on the return of the organism in philosophy of biology, see Nicholson (2014) and Walsh (2015).

  14. For a defense of Jonas in response to Villalobos and Ward, see Hverven and Ward (2021); for an argument that enactivists should reject Jonas’s phenomenology but still use Merleau-Ponty, see Kee (2021).

  15. For a similar assessment of the contemporary significance of Jonas’s bio-philosophy, see Gambarotto (2020).

  16. Arguably the organizational approach at best specifies the kind of nonlinear or circular causality that grounds teleology, but not how teleology itself emerges from non-teleological systems. It is here that I think Deacon’s (2012) distinctions between homeodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics should be considered an advance upon the organizational approach. See Garcia-Valdecasas (2021) for a contrast between the OA and teleodynamics.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Luca Corti, Andrea Gambarotto, Joseph Jebari, and Auguste Nahas for extensive comments on previous drafts. I am grateful to the two anonymous commentators for their detailed feedback that has vastly improved this paper. Finally, I would also like to thank the guest editors for this special issue of Topoi for encouraging the submission of this paper

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Sachs, C. Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose. Topoi 42, 781–791 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09851-9

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