Three Rival Versions of Teleological Inquiry

The idea of teleology sits uneasily with the contemporary reductionist science that has been so successful in finding mechanisms in nature and inspiring technological progress. The final cause, the purpose or end (telos), is one of Aristotle’s four causes, along with the material, formal, and efficient causes. In Aristotle’s example, the bronze from which a statue is made is the material cause, its shape or likeness is the formal cause, and the sculptor is the efficient cause. For telos, he turns to medicine as an example with the end of medicine being health. With the rise of early modern mechanistic physical science, teleology was supposedly banished from scientific explanation. In reality, try as they might, biologists have not been able to get rid of talk of purposes. Such teleological explanations are just too natural a way to talk about living organisms and their organs: hearts manifestly have the purpose of pumping blood. Yet the problem is how to situate teleological explanation in relation to the powerful reductionism that has so successfully driven modern biology.

Faced with this conundrum, modern intellectual programs in biology can pervert the idea of teleology, even as they try to interpret it. Three examples of these problematic interpretations will help to illustrate the true nature of teleology. A first erroneous vision, inspired by cybernetics, continues the modern quest to collapse organism and machine. It envisions organisms as similar to computers driven by homeostatic mechanisms and computer-like programs into behavior that appears teleological. A second failure to correctly interpret teleology can err by collapsing purpose into the individual, making survival the goal of all action. As Robert Spaemann argues, this is an inversion of teleology, one that fails to recognize external ends.[1] In reaction to these reductive approaches, other scholars turn to a vitalistic will to power, seeing life as struggling to impose its will on the world, but in terms of purposes that are not governed by nature or an internal rationality, a logos that controls the telos. All of these understandings misinterpret teleology, but these misfires can help us to get closer to a true understanding of teleology. Moreover, correcting these mistakes is critical because misunderstandings of biology tend to be applied to humans, and they spill over into our moral and social worlds.

This last point leads to an important caveat. We need not reject these theoretical standpoints insofar as they serve as useful tools for the day-to-day bench biologist. Thinking of the biochemical mechanism in terms of a thermostat may be helpful at points, and referring a behavior to its survival function is crucial for evolutionary biologists. The danger comes when these metaphors cease being useful heuristics in certain circumstances and become all-encompassing theories of life as in cybernetics or evolutionary psychology. The risk is that these heuristics will spill out from the bench and into the office of social policy-makers.

Cybernetic Vision of Life

A first error attempts to continue the early modern understanding of life as a machine. In this vision, Aristotelian teleology is translated into the engineering language of feedback loops and programs. Though this school of thought had many streams, one can group them all under the heading of cybernetics and teleonomy. Cybernetics sprang from the mind of the brilliant polymath Norbert Wiener.[2] Like most scientists and engineers, he was enlisted in the massive World War II efforts at technology development that gave us radars, computers, and the atomic bomb. As part of this program, he was tasked with developing an automated system for the control of anti-aircraft artillery.[3] His insight was to model the pilot-gun interaction as a system in which the gun used changing feedback on movements of the aircraft to keep it within its sights. When the plane moved out of its target zone, the gun would move. He saw this interaction in terms of a large feedback loop, which allowed Wiener to describe certain behaviors of the system like overcorrection.

This wartime experience with feedback loops led him to investigate these phenomena more broadly. The simplest and most common example of a feedback loop is the thermostat. It has two basic parts: a sensor and a switch. When the sensor records that temperature drops below a set point, it triggers the furnace to turn on. When the sensor records that the temperature rises above its set range, it again triggers the furnace to turn off. This latter shift is negative feedback, overproduction of heat leading to the cessation of the mechanism governing heat.

Wiener’s brilliance was to see these feedback mechanisms in living organisms. At base, he described an organism as a set of sensory receptors linked to internal motor mechanisms and internal biochemical mechanisms. In this, he drew on the biomedical research of Walter Cannon, who, in his groundbreaking 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body, synthesized many long years of research on homeostasis. Cannon’s work illustrated the complex mechanisms through which organisms maintain physiological values like temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and so forth. He was part of a group of doctors driven to study the phenomenon of shock by their experiences in World War I of wounded soldiers dying even after their bleeding had been staunched.[4] Through a series of experiments, primarily on dogs and rabbits whose autonomic nervous system had been detached from hormonal effectors, Cannon showed how the body senses shifts in physiological values and responded through neural and hormonal mechanisms. Most importantly, he illustrated how these feedback loops could go haywire in unusual circumstances.

Wiener’s insight was the analogy he drew between these physiological mechanisms and feedback loops like the thermostat. Just as with the thermostat, the organism senses when a value has exceeded or decreased below some threshold and responds to restore the value to within the threshold.[5] “These mechanisms constitute what is known as homeostasis, and are negative feedback mechanisms of a type that we may find exemplified in mechanical automata. It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone for our personal identity.”[6] Generally, cybernetics functions by this leap from a useful metaphor (biological systems can have feedback loops like automatic systems) to grander statements (homeostatic patterns define personal identity). Through such organism/machine analogies, Wiener believed he could develop a universal science of purposeful behavior. Purpose, or teleology, in his understanding, is the quest to maintain a stable range of some value. Teleology becomes at heart a mechanism of stabilization.

In terms of a research program, cybernetics was extremely productive. It continued to be useful in describing homeostatic feedback loops, but also extended to and inspired other projects, such as regulation in molecular biology. Take, for example, Jacque Monod and Francois Jacob’s Nobel prize-winning experiments on the lac operon in E. coli bacteria.[7] In this classic textbook case, Jacob and Monod discovered that the production of the enzymes that process lactose is driven by the levels of lactose within the cell. When there is no lactose, the lacI gene represses production of the enzymes. Lactose, when at high levels, binds to the repressor, causing it to release from the DNA and allowing transcription. Levels of lactose control production of the protein that processes it, a feedback loop.

Wiener even translated external behavior into cybernetic terms. In an example that we will see Hans Jonas criticizing below, the guided torpedo uses magnetic feedback to adjust its course toward a ship.[8] Similarly, predators use sensory feedback to guide themselves to prey. Moreover, hunting behavior is driven by the need to relieve the internal stimulus of hunger. A wolf becomes the same as a guided torpedo, both guided by feedback loops. Teleology is redefined by cyberneticists as “purpose controlled by feedback.”[9]

Yet, it should be obvious that such simplistic feedback loops could not govern more complex behaviors like migration or social dynamics. That is where another concept from cybernetics and its intellectual sibling, information theory, enters the picture. In another analogy with machines, complex behaviors are seen as mediated by something like a computer program. Organismic structure and behavior were envisioned as information passed on through genetic material, DNA.

The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, one of the fathers of the modern synthesis between genetics and Darwinian evolution, coined the term teleonomy to describe goal-directed behavior: “A teleonomic process or behavior is one which owes its goal-directedness to the operation of a program.”[10] Genetics provides programs, like computer programs, that drive behavior of the newly envisioned animal machines. These are “coded or prearranged information that controls a process (or behavior) leading toward a given end.”[11] Mayr is not as focused on stability as classic cyberneticists, wanting to distinguish programs that are directed toward external goals, the feedback loops that execute the program, and adaptive systems seeking stability. Wiener, I think, may be the more consistent thinker though, since the animal follows the program, which is generally effected through homeostatic mechanisms, without having any true desire for the end, merely seeking to stabilize its internal milieu. Even so, by envisioning animals in terms of computer programs, Mayr thinks he can escape the conceptual confusions he sees in teleology. Teleonomy differs fundamentally from teleology, primarily because it lacks the implications of intentional purposiveness.

This analogy of the gene to a computer program was tremendously influential, especially at the popular level. Thus, Richard Dawkins opens The Selfish Gene by describing animals, even humans, as robots driven by conflicting programs encoded in our genes:

Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machine for themselves to live in. . . . Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, . . . communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. . . . Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.[12]

Later evolutionary psychologists started a cottage industry of suggesting that negative social behaviors are due to genetic programs that were adaptive to our hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the savannah, but no longer productive for modern urban life. Thus, contemporary humans have programmed modules to detect cheating, to drive infidelity, to inspire jealousy. Religion becomes a program meant to ensure social order or arises through a hyperactive agency detection device encoded in our genes. In these ways, biologists have continued the early modern vision of animals as machines, but now as cybernetic machines, computers.

There are both scientific and ethical problems with the cybernetic or teleonomic vision. First, we now know that genetics does not work this way. This cybernetic vision embodies a very reductionist understanding of genetics, suggesting a gene for each behavior. However, the genome is far too complicated and has too few genes for that to work.[13] Instead, traits are shaped by incredibly complex networks of genetic regulation. But there are also many influences from outside the genome: epigenetics, development, physical environment, and, in the case of humans, culture. Even if one embraced a neuroreductionist understanding with genes shaping neural circuitry that then programs behaviors, that understanding misses the extreme plasticity and variability of human neurobiology. Homeostasis might describe some physiological pathways and traits well, but those are not the majority of human behaviors. The cybernetic vision just does not work from a biological standpoint.

More broadly, while these analogies might be acceptable as a shorthand in biological research, they become extremely problematic when they escape out of biology and enter into public discourse. The last fifty years saw many commentators blaming social issues on genetic sources, resurrecting eugenic concepts from earlier in the twentieth century. Again and again social and mental problems have been falsely attributed to genetic or neural causes, blinding us to structural, hermeneutic, and cultural issues. Even the idea of homeostasis, with its emphasis on stability, can lead to disturbingly authoritarian suggestions. For example, Walter Cannon exceeds his biological expertise by likening society to a body with homeostatic mechanisms and then arguing that we need to stop population expansion through vigorous controls on births (i.e. eugenics) and immigration.[14] He also argues for central homeostatic planning of the economy. A cybernetic vision engenders a fear of disorder, of things being out of control, and a desire to eliminate unruly elements in order to stabilize the social body.

The Inversion of Teleology

Rather than these social concerns, I would like to focus on a criticism of cybernetics tied to its understanding of teleology, one that introduces a second error but which is closer to the true Aristotelian meaning of teleology. Drawing from the Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann, let us call this second false vision an inversion of teleology. We can see it in the writings of Hans Jonas, who developed his version of it to question whether one could truly call a cybernetic system teleological. His analysis raises the issue of the role of desire, passion, and spontaneity in teleology.

Let us return to the example of the guided torpedo and whether we can call it truly teleological. It seems that way, since it is purpose-driven, aimed at hitting a ship. The problem is that the purpose is not its own. Its teleology is fully implanted into it by its programmers, by an external agency that is the true teleological agent. Jonas argues that if the torpedo was instead a submarine with a pilot, we would say that the purpose of ramming a ship was the pilot’s, not the total submarine/pilot system: “One would no more regard the torpedo plus the sailor . . . as a single purposive entity than one would declare the ax to participate in the purposiveness and the teleological behavior of the lumberjack who swings it.”[15] Thus, all purposes reside in the program. That is why teleonomic models of life tend toward genetic reductionism, since the genes are the program in this vision, the only true holder of purpose. Yet the problem is that the purpose of the programming of a machine is extrinsic to the machine itself.

In contrast, Jonas argues that animal teleology requires spontaneity and self-movement. Jonas refers to the entrance of “the new element of freedom that appears in the organism.”[16] Aristotle would speak similarly of self-movement as a fundamental quality of animals. The soul “is also the cause of the living body as the original cause of local movement,” as well as change of quality and quantity.[17] Living organisms are the agents of their own action.

For Jonas, this agency is driven by another aspect of an organism’s existence, emotion, desire, or passion. Jonas traces desire to the nature of living organisms insofar as they depend on the phenomenon of metabolism.[18] In his description, the organism is balanced between freedom and necessity. On the one hand, unlike purely physical, nonliving objects, they have a spontaneity of action. On the other hand, they are ultimately dependent on their surroundings to obtain the resources necessary for their survival. They are not mere programs, but to survive they must go out into the world to get what they need. It is the needful nature of life that gives rise to desire.[19]

A focus on survival, on concern for continued existence, is used by other important voices describing teleology. For example, in his book, What Function Explains, the philosopher of science Peter McLaughlin tries to define teleology. According to him, for a true teleology, like that of an organism, of something that is not merely an instrument whose purposes are given by others, the entity needs to be a self-reproducing system.[20] If it is a system that either tries to maintain its own existence or to produce more of its kind, then one can describe its teleology in those terms. The ends of the organism’s action all refer to system maintenance, to survival as reproduction. And this is largely how evolutionary biologists refer to organisms’ purposeful action and adaptations. They describe behaviors in terms of maximizing fitness in regard to either survival or reproduction. Note that despite the addition of organisms’ desire, Jonas and McLaughlin’s descriptions of teleology share a fundamental similarity with cybernetic visions of teleology. The purpose of an organism in Jonas’ thought also focuses on stability or survival. All that is added is a desire or passion that allows for a spontaneity that cybernetics lacks.

Yet, Robert Spaemann argues that both of these visions ultimately fail to describe true teleology because they close the organism in upon its self-preservation. The organism’s ultimate reference is only itself as it currently exists. He describes such a vision of teleology as an inversion of a proper understanding of ontology and teleology. As described below, true teleology propels the organism into the world after ends in action. Inverted forms of teleology seem to do that; they have the necessity of metabolism that forces the organism into commerce with the world. Yet ultimately, these visions of action are directed to the self. They end in a self-closure.

Spaemann traces this inverted teleology to the origins of modernity in the work of Bernardino Telesio. Faced with early modern challenges to teleology, Telesio attempted to refound it on the survival of the self. “Preservation is therefore the highest good of all things,” says Telesio’s disciple Thomas Campanella.[21] Spinoza and other early modern philosophers took up this teaching. This reconfiguring of teleology upon the self plays out in later misunderstandings of human happiness in terms of the prosperity of the self in consumerism.

Spaemann’s ultimate concern is that this inverted teleology leads to a problematic social and political vision. As in cybernetics, a deficient vision of organisms’ ends and purposes leads to dangerous social programs. The focus on survival in inverted teleology leads, for Spaemann, directly to Thomas Hobbes’ social contract in which citizens so fear for their own lives that they are willing to give up all rights to the governmental Leviathan for protection.

There is a less authoritarian but similar vision that can be found in Jonas in his later book The Imperative of Responsibility. In that work, Jonas fears that nuclear and genetic technology will lead to humanity’s destruction. This inspires him to formulate his famous precautionary principle: “act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the preservation of genuine human life.”[22] Now in one understanding, this principle is merely a salutary call to prudence, to consider the severe consequences of a new technology or policy before implementing it. In a stricter understanding, however, it could stymie all action and technology development.[23] What action or technology might not have dangerous side effects? Under this form, it can immobilize social policy for the end of self-maintenance.

Others would argue that society has already embraced this total focus on safety and survival in what is called biopolitics. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her influential book The Human Condition, and the critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, in the series of books stemming from his Homo Sacer, followed by others, like Aaron Kheriaty, have argued that society in the last two hundred years has turned its focus to what they call bare life. All the means of society are turned toward regulating mere biological survival. To this end, society has arrogated to itself huge powers directed toward eugenics, birth control, etc. It has done this in a way that makes it ignore or even destroy the good life understood in terms of human community, knowledge, and other goods. It leads to a politics of fear dominated by a regulatory focus on what some call safetyism. Personal lives are marked by anxieties over health. These theorists trace these problems to a turn inward, to the focus on bare survival found in the model of inverted teleology. As Aristotle notes, there is a distinction between life and the good life, living and living well. We have become so focused on living that we have lost track of living well.

Ecstatic Teleology

This analysis leads to my third position on teleology, which I draw in part from Spaemann and in part from the medical doctor Kurt Goldstein and from the philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem. I take this to be the true understanding of teleology as drawn from the ancient philosophies of Aristotle and the Stoics and applied to contemporary knowledge. Following Aristotle, Spaemann describes teleology as an essentially ecstatic phenomenon, as something that draws the organism out of its current state. Spaemann describes the structure of teleology in terms of three axioms derived from Aquinas. First, “Every being exists for the sake of its proper operation.” Second “A thing’s operation is its ultimate perfection.” Third:

Every agent acts for the sake of its end. The existing thing has its “for the sake of which” in an activity that corresponds to it and is inscribed from the outset in its being. This activity is a second, potentialized reality with respect to the factual existence of the active subject. The activity . . . occurs for the sake of a goal, in the active achievement of which the essence of the existing thing finds its fulfillment. For rational beings, this final goal and at the same time the highest form of its activity is the contemplatio Dei. . . . [M]an therefore fulfills his essence precisely by the fact that his mere existence . . . transcends itself in the direction of what is other than himself as his final cause.[24]

All organisms are drawn out of themselves as they currently exist, transcend themselves, in seeking the end of their perfection in action. This transcendence is the essence of teleology.

In his classic book, The Organism, neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein described something like this model of teleology. Goldstein was a German Jewish physician who treated soldiers with traumatic brain injuries after World War I, so he was working in a similar milieu to Walter Cannon, responding to the major traumas introduced by modern warfare.[25] He drew on Gestalt psychology to challenge dominant neurological paradigms of the time that tried to explain injuries based on models of localized reflexes or localized brain functions.[26] Instead of examining behavior in terms of discrete programs or mechanisms, he tried to understand pathological behavior as attempts by the whole organism to compensate for injuries in order to enact some capacity.[27] For example, someone who loses part of their visual field will reorient that field around a new center of best vision, causing a transformation in all their behavior.[28] As he describes, “the organism tends to modify itself, in spite of the defect, in such a way that those performances most important for it are possible.”[29] Seemingly localized aberrations are attempts by the whole organism to enact a potentiality. He viewed his patients in terms of an organism as a whole with ends. Their injuries were not just the result of defects to parts but caused a total restructuring of behavior.

His experiences with his patients and his reading of the literature on animal experiments led him to postulate that the basic goal, the basic teleology, of organisms is to actualize their capacities. “We can say that an organism is governed by the tendency to actualize, as much as possible, its individual capacities, its ‘nature,’ in the world. . . . This tendency to actualize its nature, to actualize ‘itself,’ is the basic drive, the only drive by which the life of the organism is determined.”[30] In contrast to cybernetics or inverted teleologists, he repeatedly claims that only sick animals focus on their own survival: “The tendency to maintain the existent state is characteristic for sick people and is a sign of anomalous life, of decay of life. The tendency of normal life is toward activity and progress.”[31] Healthy animals are turned toward the world. The behaviors hailed by the cybernetic and inverted forms of teleology are more pathological than teleological.

The French philosopher of biology and resistance fighter, Georges Canguilhem, similarly argued for the organism’s fundamental directionality outward into the world. Canguilhem’s most important work, The Normal and the Pathological, argued against theorists who attempted to define health and disease in terms of statistical norms. In the statistical understanding of health, a healthy animal would be one whose physiological markers fell within some range that was normal for the species. Thus, a healthy human would be one with a blood pressure below 120 over 80 and a heartrate between 60 and 100 beats per minute, etc. This vision of health was compatible with cybernetic goals to keep physiological markers within a defined range through homeostatic mechanisms.

In contrast, Canguilhem sought to define health in terms of the organism’s ability to act into the world. He defined health as the ability to order the world about one: “Being healthy means being . . . normative in this and other eventual situations. What characterizes health is the possibility of transcending the norm, . . . the possibility of . . . instituting new norms in new situations.”[32] Rather than health referring to a normal curve of statistics, it should refer to the organism’s ability to impose norms and order on its surrounding milieu. Even when injured, the animal can still impose norms, even if its capacities may be diminished in this regard. In contrast, pathology is evident in the organism’s inability to order the world and withdrawal into itself to preserve survival. Thus, the teleological ideal found in the homeostatic, cybernetic vision is really a sign of illness, of an inability to engage the world. Canguilhem’s understanding of health has become extremely important for disability studies because it means that even people with severe disabilities can be considered healthy in their own way insofar as they continue to be able to actualize some of their capacities and impose norms of a sort in their milieu.

Donna Haraway, scholar of science and technology studies, also notes the importance of animal activity in her Companion Species Manifesto. Writing against those who would see dog agility training as an oppressive imposition on animals, she describes how it allows the animals to fulfill their capacities. Discussing the trainer Vicki Hearne, she says, “Hearne asked what companion ‘animal happiness’ might be. Her answer: the capacity for satisfaction that comes from striving, from work, from fulfillment of possibility. That sort of happiness comes from bringing out what is within.”[33] Haraway suggests the dog’s telos is realized in its relationship with its trainer as it actualizes its potentialities.

As these examples suggest, many authors agree with Spaemann in seeing teleology in terms of the organism’s joyful realization of its capacities. When seen in this way, it becomes clear why a focus on stability and survival is an inversion of the proper meaning of teleology. This inverted teleology describes organisms turning inward to maintain stasis. However, this is primarily the behavior of pathological organisms, not healthy ones. Healthy organisms turn outward into the world seeking fulfillment in ends sought or in the good of activity itself. Teleology is a mode of transcending the self rather than merely surviving in stability.

Here is where this vision of teleology intersects with Christian understandings of happiness. Both seek transcendence from the self, fulfillment by going out from the self into the world. Humans go beyond the self but precisely through the capacities belonging to a creature of our nature. We realize ourselves through encounter with the other. For humans, this transcendence ultimately aims at God. But we achieve, or rather are gifted, with this relationship with God by enacting our everyday duties through service to others. A proper grasp of teleology does not see ends merely as possessions but engages others through action, a realization of the self by actualizing potentialities.

Further Errors in Teleology

This ecstatic teleology must be distinguished from seemingly similar ideas that could be considered as implications of it. First, some people assume that if you accept teleology in the concrete living organism then you also have to assume a readable teleology as implicitly legible in cosmic or evolutionary phenomena. However, there is no necessary tie between organismic teleology and cosmic teleology through some kind of force or predetermined course of evolution. Some scholars do assume cosmic teleology. For example, Henri Bergson sees evolution as driven by an élan vital that realizes its aspects in different branches of the tree of life. The most obvious Catholic exemplar of such an approach, viewing the history of life as a process from dull matter, to increasingly complicated forms of life, to finally a rational noosphere that overwhelms the cosmos with intellect is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Such scholars view life as having an inherent force ordered toward evolution of a certain sort. A second strategy employed by scholars like Simon Conway-Morris describes almost necessary pathways of convergent evolution that seem to preprogram the evolutionary process. For such scholars, a cosmic teleology seems to lie in some immanent guiding force or semi-mechanistic constraint by which one could deduce higher beings from lower. This is not a necessary connection though. It is reasonable to see the organism or tool as being a paradigmatic substance, and thus primarily describe teleology in terms of organisms.

A second way this truer concept of teleology can go wrong is when it collapses into pure arbitrary self-will, an aimless expressive individualism. We can see this in some thinkers who attempt a mistaken development of Nietzsche’s will to power. Nietzsche’s own thought has much to suggest itself and would be a worthwhile source for teleologists to engage. Yet, his will to power, especially in later thinkers, can become a force driving an individual to assert himself in any way possible. It can become a blind drive for power or pleasure or experience, utterly normless, other than its need for expression. In its worst forms, themselves twisted misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s thought, this will to power can become fascism or another political system that glorifies violence and power for its own sake. Many online voices glorify assertion for its own sake to overcome what they see as modern passivity, to unleash animal spirits.

In a more technologically directed manner, this will to power can appear in transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement that seeks to unleash human potentiality by overcoming the human, by becoming the post or transhuman. Different writers will paint their own contrasting pictures of this overcoming: whether it be the merging of human and machine, uploading our minds to AI, humans replaced by AI, living forever in perpetually regenerated bodies, or merely enhancing current mental and physical capacities. This optimistic picture belies the transhumanists’ lack of a goal. They merely want more at whatever cost.[34] They mistake teleology’s transcendence for transcending the human as such.

In a milder form, even the philosopher Hannah Arendt can fall into a semi-vitalist mode. She contrasts a mistaken focus on bare life with other modes of human existence, such as world-building craftspeople or contemplation. Her preferred mode of human existence though is the active life of politics. She describes the field of politics not as a joint defense of the common good, but as a field of self-assertion.

It is also true that man’s capacity to act, and especially to act in concert, is extremely useful for purposes of self-defense or of pursuit of interests; but if nothing more were at stake here than to use action as a means to an end, it is obvious that the same end could be much more easily attained in mute violence. . . . In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.[35]

This public disclosure requires glory and power, power to keep the public sphere in existence.[36] So again, human life loses a goal-directedness and becomes a form of self-assertion. It is because of these reactions that many people shy away from describing teleology in terms of active transcendence in favor of stability and survival.

These responses based in power are mistaken in at least two ways. First, they fail to see the end-directedness of living organisms but instead make them the play of blind forces or desires. They are mechanistic in the form of embracing unbridled energy emerging out of the individual. However, teleology must by governed by a logos, by reason. The end, the telos, is always a rational proportionate end governed by a logos. The end can therefore not be arbitrary, the result of random choice of will or a blind desire. Instead, an organism’s ends are always specified by the organism’s nature, by the needs and potentialities of the sort of organism it is. That is why Goldstein could describe the organism enacting its potentialities; the capacities are determinate for certain sorts of end. Not absolutely specified of course, but they aim at things of a certain sort.

That is where the vitalistic will to power goes wrong. It is not governed by a logos, failing to recognize an order of nature. Instead, it succumbs to the arbitrary will. Similarly, transhumanist technological visions are not governed by a view of human nature aside from something to be overcome. There is no end being sought other than more. The danger is that this quest is irrational and nihilistic insofar as it is not governed by a rational logos towards a set end or set of values.

Max Scheler gives a slightly different response to these fears in his book, Ressentiment. He takes seriously Nietzsche’s critique of modern society as nihilistic and life-denying. He accepts that society has become suspicious of assertion, vitality, and power, any kind of transcendence. This is Nietzsche’s description of ressentiment, a form of political life focused on bare survival that is envious of any form of assertion. It is a sickness that eats away at modern society in Scheler’s view. Yet rather than embracing a disordered self-assertion advocated by Nietzsche’s will to power or the tech industry executive’s transhumanism, Scheler argues that the human drive to enact the self in creative ways overflows in goodness toward others. Because we are social creatures, persons ordered to relationships, our transcendence comes through a beneficent directedness toward others. Fascism is a defensive action of ressentiment. Transhumanism or Arendt’s politics of self-assertion lacks this element of beneficence toward others. What Scheler and twentieth-century Catholic thought after him realized is that we truly transcend ourselves and enact our nature, social and as made to the image of God, through creative acts of self-gift to others. As Gaudium et spes teaches, “man . . . cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (§24).

In conclusion, teleology is frequently misunderstood. The primary way this is done in modernity is through mechanistic visions that only focus on the end of survival or stability. These conflict with a more accurate understanding of teleology as ecstatic, extending out from the organism in action. These actions are not a disordered self-assertion. Instead, they are rationally governed by the nature of the sort of organism in question. These discussions of teleology are not merely dry philosophical speculation because our visions of life spill out into social philosophies and thus social institutions. It is therefore critical that we get teleology correct.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was presented at the Organs and Origins Conference co-sponsored by the College of Science and the Science & Religion Initiative of the McGrath Institute, both at the University of Notre Dame.

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