Biology and Teleology

Abstract

Almost thirty years ago, in his lectures on The Idea of Nature, Collingwood listed among the characteristics of the modern as distinct from the Renaissance concept of nature, the reintroduction of teleology. Renaissance thinkers, he said, saw nature as a machine; final causes belonged outside it, in its origin or in its use, not within it. Modern thinkers, on the other hand, he believed, were beginning to lean on a new analogy, not between nature and machines, but between nature and historical process. The historical conception of scientifically knowable change or process’, he says, ‘was applied, under the name of evolution, to the natural world’. And this application entailed, among other consequences, a return to teleological thinking about natural events. In some sort of transposition, Aristotle’s recognition of goals in nature, Collingwood argued, is to be, and has been, reinstated. Discussing Aristotle, he writes:

It is widely recognized that a process of becoming is conceivable only if that which is yet unrealized is affecting the process as a goal towards which it is directed, and that mutations in species arise not through the gradual working of the laws of chance but by steps which are somehow directed towards a higher form — that is, a more efficiently and vividly alive form — of life. In this respect, if modern physics is coming closer to Plato as the great mathematician-philosopher of antiquity, modern biology is coming closer to its great biologist-philospher Aristotle.