Bringing Telos Back

Abstract

We moderns think we know important truths about the universe and its workings that our classical predecessors, no matter how brilliant, did not. In many respects, our confidence is warranted. We know the velocity with which our planet is revolving around the star that spawned it, and the speed with which it is rotating on its axis; we know the velocity with which the arm of the galaxy in which our solar system is located is turning around the center of the galaxy; we know the red shift that allows us to calculate how fast our galaxy and the rest of the universe are now pushing apart, some thirteen billion or so years after the great expansion, or “Big Bang,” that got our universe going. We have a picture of our corner of the universe that is not only beautiful—the green and blue ball of Earth; the middle-aged yellow Sun that will one day grow old, swell up into a red giant, and then die; the billions and billions of stars in the great twin spiral nebulae of the Milky Way nebulae and its neighbor, Andromeda—but that accords with verifiable empirical truths in a way our ancestors’ pictures did not. Further, we now know enough about how evolution works in a variety of organisms both to appreciate Aristotle’s perspicacity in the first quote, in which he anticipates the essence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and to suggest to him that he may well have radically overstated the case against favorable variations arising by chance.

A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity?… Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did.

—Aristotle, Physics, Book II

It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature.

—Aristotle, Physics, Book II