History and Teleology in Darwin and Marx: Introducing the Debate

Abstract

This more synthesizing chapter proposes to introduce the debate about the extent to which a teleological worldview is present in the thought of two authors as different as Darwin and Marx. With the understanding that a teleological worldview asserts that the course of natural and social history moves toward a determined finality, this chapter undertakes a movement in two directions. At first, passages from the works of these two authors are discussed that seem to indeed confirm a finalist worldview in their thinking. In a second moment—and always based on close readings of passages from Darwin and Marx—the chapter raises the hypothesis that the authors themselves have elaborated, each in his own way, concepts that allow them to vigorously supersede the limits of the aforementioned finalist vision. Thus, it becomes possible to understand History as a process that has its own logic, yes, but not a telos, not a previously defined end. I argue that this is the richest aspect of the work of the two thinkers, to be salvaged and further developed in our twenty-first century.

The first part of this chapter takes up some of the arguments presented in the previous chapter, Philosophical Consequences of Darwin’s Polemic with Religious Thought, and includes new material related to the category of teleology in Marx and his reception of Darwin’s work.