Abstract
This chapter investigates two central biological concepts: teleological end-state directedness and agency. Its aim is to point out some key difficulties in how these concepts are understood in contemporary biology and philosophy of biology, and to show how a process-metaphysical approach to organisms can help us overcome these problems. To this purpose, we analyse the understanding of teleology and agency in contemporary biological systems theories. We focus in particular on the concept of mechanism, which plays an important role both in these theories and in modern biology and philosophy of biology. This examination shows that, first of all, mechanistic thinking ultimately reduces teleological explanations to merely a useful way of speaking that has no ontological relevance, and second, that the ability of organisms to autonomously and profoundly transform their material structure exceeds the explanatory power of mechanistic explanations. As an alternative, I propose a process-philosophical understanding of organismic end-state directedness and agency that is based on the central metaphysical and bio-philosophical concepts and ideas introduced by Alfred N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, through breathing and feeding, organisms autonomously control two of their vital boundary conditions.
- 2.
In the words of Walsh: ‘Because there are agents, there are goals, means […] and a special mode of explanation—teleology’ (Walsh, 2018: 172).
- 3.
Whitehead calls the internal relationships that exist between actual occasions ‘prehensions’. They must not be equated with physical forces, because they do not take place in physical space and time. A prehending actual occasion is not present in space because its self-determination is not yet complete. Only a prehended actual occasion whose self-determination is thus complete is in space for a short time before vanishing forever, but during that time it can be prehended by new, self-constituting actual occasions. The self-constituting prehending actual occasion participates in the essence of the prehended object through its prehensions. Although Whitehead calls the prehensions between actual occasions ‘physical prehensions’, they are not physical (if ‘physical’ is taken to mean ‘spatiotemporal’ or ‘according to the laws of physics’). Since the emerging elementary process (actual occasion) is not a spatiotemporally localised entity during its self-constitution, its prehensions are not observable actions mediated by physical forces, particles, or fields that traverse the physical (spatiotemporal) universe. The concept of prehension is a purely metaphysical one in the literary sense of the term ‘metaphysics.’ In Whitehead’s view, all basic concepts of physics (space, time, energy, force, field, elementary particles, causality, etc.) must be based on the metaphysical concept of actual occasion, which contains, among other things, the idea of ​​ prehension. Therefore, in Whiteheadian metaphysics, the concept of prehension logically underlies all kinds of physical entities and events. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, there are not only ‘physical prehensions’, but also prehensions that take place between actual occasions and other real or ideal entities. But what all types of prehensions have in common is that the prehending entity is always an actual occasion.
- 4.
See footnote 3.
- 5.
According to Walsh’s understanding of agency and teleology, which reflects the dominant approach to these issues in contemporary philosophy of biology, ‘if agency is a kind of observable activity and goals are its end states, then the natural, non-psychological status of agency […] is as unimpeachable as that of fluidity and viscosity’ (2018: 173; italics added).
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Koutroufinis, S.A. (2024). Organismic Teleology and Agency Beyond Systems Theories: A Process-Metaphysical Perspective. In: Švorcová, J. (eds) Organismal Agency. Biosemiotics, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53626-7_6
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