THE DILEMMA OF TELEOLOGY

L. Clucas

Leben ist Bruckenschlagen
Uber Strome, die vergehn
- Gottfried Benn

From the time when the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman ancestors of Western society began to reflect on the human condition, and to record those reflections for posterity, there was a recurring conviction that human existence had a divine purpose. By divine purpose I mean an over-arching, metaphysical goal or principle which gave order and purpose to the universe and humanity's place in it. For the ancient Hebrews, this was the result of the Creation and the series of divine dispensations and covenants which followed. For the Greeks it was the bond between the polis, or city-state and the tutelary deities that presided over its destiny, or it involved the organic bond between humanity and the physical universe, itself divine. This could be experienced in the mystery cults, such as that held every four years at Eleusis near Athens, or, for the intellectual elite, in the contemplative experience of philosophy. For the Romans their Republic, later empire, possessed a particularly historical providential destiny that gave a far-reaching, divinely appointed purpose to their leadership of the world they knew. The individual, as Dart of that society, could look beyond the obscurity and mortality and most likely the poverty in which he lived toward that triumphant political perspective. Not all Ancients were convinced, however. Some, such as Polybius and Plutarch, thought history was governed by chance, tyche¹. Yet we know that even by the end of the
century, A.D., this confidence in the adequacy of a secular mission in life was already waning, and giving way to a longing for individual and collective apotheosis that was to be fulfilled ultimately in Christianity.

The transition involved here testifies, among other things, to a desire for reassurance and security through a world-view in which humanity is given an even more central ethical and spiritual importance in the cosmos. Christianity made Mankind the central focus of a transcendent drama, of redemption and salvation, and the medieval period was, to a very great extent, characterized by faith in this vision. Since the eighteenth century Enlightenment it has become common to reject or ignore faith in favor of the autonomy of reason, and yet I am not sure that this is what the modern-day heirs of the Enlightenment always do. For secular philosophies of history and rationalistic philosophies of life are so often based on a few cardinal articles of faith that seem to represent the secular equivalent of religion, even if they do not concern themselves with the other world. Now, people have accused Marxism of this, because of its utopian teleology, and the Hegelian essentialist metaphysics underlying a lot of Marxism is well known. But is there any less secular "justification by faith" in, say, the western liberal philosophies? How can their principles and implicit teleology be proved? Can we demonstrate, in a scientific manner, that secular humanism corresponds better to what many, perhaps most people today hold to be the real world, bounded by nature, mortality, and the limits of human ability. However, it is in the very essence of modern secular values to attribute degrees of relativity to any set of value statements or absolute presuppositions. This would not mean that, if we are secular humanists, we regard all values and all absolute presuppositions as equally relative. And whether we can prove them or not, there are some values that we do not choose to negotiate, for very good reasons. Nevertheless, even if we leave the transcendent teleogies of revealed religion behind, we still find ourselves thinking teleologically -- that life has a higher purpose, a purpose that may be restricted to the confines of the actual world, but hovers beyond us over the horizon. It may be we see it in the paradise of a Communism at its ultimate stage of achievement, or in the pluralistic progress of liberal democracy or some other social philosophy, or in a more personal self-realization, fulfillment, and happiness. I think we experience this in our daily lives. It is embodied in the very language. We speak of "looking forward" to this or that event in the future. We feel as if we were on life's highway, traveling towards some ultimate goal that is superior to extinction. The secularized assumptions of Western Christianity play a very important role in the affirmation of this outlook. Francis Bacon and others in the seventeenth century transferred the teleology of Christianity to a worldly context². Paradise could, or should, be achieved in this world with the aid of applied science. It was to be a materialist paradise. But Bacon did not question the absolute presupposition of a teleological orientation. Christian or not, he was far too western to suffer from such a doubt. Teleology as a historical outlook does not seem to have been a universal criterion for great achievement, however. Even some rather sophisticated non-western societies such as China and Japan did not have such a teleological mentality, yet created not only viable and long lasting but brilliant societies.

I am not suggesting that we give up our teleological views because they are based on some undemonstrable premises. How much of the exact sciences themselves are based on undemonstrable premises, as Kurt Godel showed years ago. I am not specifically suggesting that we give up anything. In the world of action, commitment, and responsibility we need a sense of purpose, of goal, telos, as the Greeks called it, meaning “fulfillment, completion, ideal” or "the end of action". It is interesting to note that while the Ancient Greeks and Romans did have a conception of secular progress, they did not pursue it as a practical ideal.³ Teleology, though derived from Greek, is rooted in Hebraic and Christian conceptions. I would like to propose that we become more aware, more conscious, of the difference between statements that are intended to express what is the case and statements which are affirmations of what we think ought to be the case. This distinction is not new. It is well known to analytic philosophers. But it is surely the very crux of the epistemological and existential dilemma of our times and we need to be reminded of its relevance. The historian cannot stay completely outside the matrix of tensions and conflicting aims of his age, yet at the same time he wants to get at objective truth, "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," as Ranke put it. The issue is a modern one. Until the dawn of the Enlightenment even sophisticated minds rarely questioned their own basic assumptions about reality. For us today the philosophical critique inspired by science of the objective validity of assertions has made standards of rational assessment more difficult and more problematic. We are alternately inspired and haunted by Cartesian doubt and Hume's skeptical view of the "secret connexion" between cause and effect, and Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipere. We wonder if we see the world the way we do mainly because of the innate tendencies and disposition of our minds, not because we grasp the truly objective order of the universe as it is in itself, whether we can represent and manipulate that order or not. If we had different minds and different senses, we would probably order and experience the world in a different way.

Given the monstrous role played by some ideologies in our time I think that skepticism and doubt have an important, crucial role to play, not only in science but also in human values and can, indeed they help us to clarify what values we really do wish to defend and to incorporate, in our work as historians. The seductive attraction of ideologies, is that they offer a modern equivalent to the metaphysical shelter provided by religion. Pushed to the final level of fanaticism, this becomes an escape from any authentic responsibility into total dependence on dogma and nihilistic sacrifices performed on the high altar of a manic revelation. Doubt, skepticism, and the working hypothesis make it possible to modify our priorities in keeping with any growth in awareness. Yet I would add that whole regions of modern thought that do not fall into this category can be saved, and should be saved, insofar as they provide us with the hermeneutic apparatus for grasping dimensions of our experience to which we might otherwise be blind. I am thinking, for example, of the Franfurt School and its Neo-Marxist emphasis that all aspects of society are interrelated and marked by a dialectical tension between oppression and freedom. The great holistic traditions of modern continental philosophy should be heeded for the light they cast on the human condition in society. We should always remember that Anglo-American positivism, when made into a dogma itself, assumes a stance of objectivity that is fictitious and, as an overt or implied political stance, risks a shallow sell-out to the status quo.⁴ For how many people is objective reality chiefly what is dictated to them by the facts of political, economic, and social power at any given time? Power that other people have over them. Nietzsche, Marcuse, Habermas, Adorno, Foucault, have all warned us. In our work as historians we must be prepared to consider the relevance and value of modes of analysis we do not accept as a whole. And we must be prepared to recognize the contemporary political implications of even the most seemingly "objective" evaluation of, say, the Third Dynasty of Ur or the origins of the British Parliament. Every interpretative statement, and even the seemingly neutral exposition of sheer facts, contains some premise or judgment about the present, the world in which we live. In the universe of discourse of denotative statements we cannot escape degrees of relativity. This certainly does not mean that all judgments are equally relative or of equal merit.

Today we know that the issue of the environment, the biosphere, is of paramount, even extreme importance. A century from now it is conceivable that the most dramatic problem facing the human race will be something radically different. In the meantime some of the crucial assumptions of our own time may have been refuted or ceased to be relevant as life moves on, always preoccupied with its immediate urgencies. The goals of our own time, which we tend to project both into the immediate and into the distant future, may in many cases be discarded. That is why it is ultimately pointless to expect overly complete explanations. They will not last anyway. But when translated into programs of action they may also be dangerous. Philosophies should be relied on to raise questions, to post alternatives, and to suggest solutions, but not total solutions, especially in public policy. The totalitarian solution in our day has, on the whole, been disappointing when it has not been horrifying. It has usually only been imposed on societies reeling in chaos. Friedrich Hayek warned Britain and the West on this issue in the 1940's in his famous critique of central planning, The Road to Serfdom. (Were his warnings really aimed against Stalinist collectivism?)⁵ Yet there is, on the other hand, no reason why such reservations should make us into complacent liberals of the old school who imagine that history and progress take care of themselves. And no one can say for sure which social system will eventually bring a better society. There are too many variables and the future is ultimately unpredictable.

How do things happen? Why do they happen? If there is no a priori goal for history is there any moral purpose in it? Perhaps there is and there isn't. That is, there is, insofar as we decide or will there to be a goal, a philosophical and existential end; yet there isn't, insofar as this end could be seen as an underlying, necessary cause. This is only another way of saying that goals are defined and set, consciously or unconsciously, rationally or irrationally, by human beings. They are then a matter of human choice and responsibility. What people think and do is mainly of interest to other people. Are we afraid to live in a cosmos in which so many things are left up to us? I'm afraid we have no choice. But I am certainly not suggesting that we are capable of becoming totally autonomous creatures, for it has become more obvious than ever that however much we are in fact on our own we are also embedded in a substratum of irrational drives, both individual and social, and therefore the assumption of responsibility is as much a hoped for ideal as an achieved reality. There is no reason to assume that there is an orderly, linear and progressive process at work in this substratum any more than in the growth of a public institution such as Parliament (contrary to what Maitland held).⁶ It would be folly to imagine that one could generalize from a hypothetical individual or biological teleology to an overall historical one. To a great extent the dilemma of modern man is that he can neither fully nor adequately assume responsibility for himself, yet needs to do so more than ever before just to assure the survival of the race. There may be a biological teleology at work - still at work - that embraces the human species.⁷ If so, I would venture to say that it operates on a very broad scale indeed, and cannot be used easily to interpret the problems of recorded history.

Looking backward, advocates of a teleological scheme might very well hope to see it at least in the development of science. It is an attractive substitute for the spiritual and supernatural teleology of religion or many modern ideologies. Now, one thing is undeniable. In science, one discovery tends to lead to another, and as long as there is adequate motivation, patronage, and material support there is no reason why scientific and technical progress should not expand and evolve indefinitely into the future, depending upon the capacity of a scientific tradition for breakthroughs to overcome inadequate assumptions.⁸ But, whether we survey the actual development of science in the past or imagine its possible
achievements in the future, we cannot extrapolate from this seemingly linear inevitability and see the development of science and rationalism as embodying any necessary historical or ethical progress. The momentum of science depends on people and circumstances. As we now know from fearful experience, science can be used for anything, has no inherently moral properties, and ethically speaking cannot be equated with civilization. Science is concerned mainly "to provide systematic and responsibly supported explanations."⁹ But there is no reason to see the increasingly radical and productive
development of science today as leading us, as a species, toward a more advanced natural state, though this notion might be a tempting one, given human fears for the future and the human love of analogy. But such an optimism about science does raise the question as to the development of science in the past. Was its history the unfolding of an internal, necessary process of discovery in a field, or was it the result of a complex of factors, many of which had little to do with the sphere of science in the strictest sense? If the development of science cannot be sought in any deterministic scheme, then I think this tacit modern refuge for teleology may be viewed an untenable. In any case, if we blast ourselves off the face of the earth there will probably be no further evolution of anything, anyway.

The fact is that western science did not originate in some natural process of predetermined human curiosity about nature, even if the Latin West showed an early aggressive concern with agriculture. There was little that was teleological in it. When the foundations of the modern West were being laid, approximately in the twelfth century, we find a very unusual situation.¹⁰ Parts of the long dormant inheritance of ancient Greek philosophy, especially the Organon of Aristotle, or Aristotle's treatises on logic, had been reactivated at the end of the eleventh century by some churchmen (not laymen!) writing in behalf of the revolutionary new theories of Papal sovereignty. It was in large part the conflict between Papal and royal authority, which began rather suddenly in the 1070's with Pope Gregory VII and the German Emperor Henry IV, which first stimulated waves of fundamental ideological controversy, always changing, that lasted until the end of the Middle Ages. These ideological and political battles were, increasingly, fought with long-lost logical techniques (and sometimes on the battlefield as well). Now, the Organon is a very crucial collection of works on-logic. It contains the most comprehensive ancient discussion of the whole science of reasoning, an essential criterion for science per se. Given the state of intellectual affairs at that time one could not have had any sort of embryonic elements of a pre-modern science without it. But the motive for this did not come out of the sphere of science per se (because there is virtually no science in the period up through the eleventh century), but from the sphere of politics. This more dynamic new situation of course also involved the revival of trade, of commercial and hence urban wealth, especially in northern Italy, and later the rise of the medieval university as the institutional arena where, among other things, the respective claims of secular and clerical authority in, Christian society were debated. It was this matrix of tensions, itself the product of circumstance, which generated more and more sophisticated arguments dealing with the question of authority and power in society, culminating in the brilliant nominalism of William of Olkham in the fourteenth century. These questions raised rather profound epistemological issues, especially by the thirteenth century when the full corpus of Aristotle's Organon had become available. In other words, the efforts of the canon lawyers and Papal ideologists to maintain and extend the claims of the Church helped to stimulate early Scholasticism and eventually led into the high Scholastic debate on the question of the metaphysical foundations of the world and its relation to God. It was not until the West also got hold of Aristotle's works on natural philosophy that the Papacy assumed a more negative attitude toward scientific inquiry; and several times in the thirteenth century the Popes tried to get the public teaching of Aristotle's books on natural philosophy banned at the University of Paris. The bans were not very successful. Here other contingencies, already apparent in the medieval West, came into play again. The polycentric structure of Western society, by that time well developed, prevented any single center or type of authority from attaining universal control And the Church itself had to keep an active hand in public intellectual debate because its power in relation to the various secular jurisdictions was beginning to slip. Finally, the long-term virtual monopoly of the Latin Church on education meant that virtually all the daring thinkers of the time were monks, friars, or priests anyway. It would have been exceedingly difficult for the Papacy suddenly to exclude large numbers of these people from the Church simply because many of them had become interested in uncomfortable questions. Actually, learning in general also received a great boost because of the great need for trained officials at a multiplicity of courts, secular and ecclesiastical, sharing a common culture but differing political aims. In any case, the multiplicity of patronage afforded a degree of protection to the "dissident" which was not, for example, available in the Byzantine Empire, where the tradition of centralized state authority in tandem with the Church, had remained dominant since the two societies split apart at the close of Antiquity. This tended to work as a brake on many tendencies of change whose parallels in the West attained far greater development.

It was not until the Renaissance, when the peak of Papal power had long since passed, that we find true Papal fear and loathing of the new, natural science, especially the astronomy of Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus. But by that time it was too late. For the legitimacy of key aspects of the scientific approach, notably abstract demonstration, had long since been secured, rooted as they had been in the tensions of medieval Western society. It remained for circumstances-'to occur which would kindle the principle of the experimental method and the theory of applied science. By the end of the Reformation the old dimensions of debate, concerned with ecclesiology and theology, but also with the question as to the right order of Christian society, had become somewhat exhausted. A more modern Western society was born in which the critical and rationalistic outlook would now be turned more than ever before to secular and materialistic concerns. But this was not because Westerners were brighter or smarter than the Byzantines or Muslims, whose adaptations of the Ancient Greek intellectual heritage, shared by all three medieval societies, proved to be so different.

My point is to emphasize that there may well be no truly necessary causes in history. Even the dazzlingly impressive achievements of modern science have been, to a great extent, the product of short-term and long term conditions, peculiar to the West, which have always been contingent and unstable. At Ernst Nolte has pointed out, the same thing could be said for Western capitalistic life generally. Neither science, nor intellectual life, nor even economic and productive forces are inherently self-propelled properties of history. There is no assurance that scientific progress, or any other current direction. of Western society, will continue indefinitely into the future. The integrity of science and education has already suffered grave lapses in our own century – notably in Stalin's Russia and in Nazi Germany.¹¹ But let us not forget the Scopes Trial and the ongoing psychosis of the Bible-Belt creationists. There are some people who cannot endure living in a world without an axis of determinism, or without intoxicating revelations, or the assurance of a particular design seen as universally valid. In making these observations I am certainly not launching an attack on Christian Revelation, nor for that matter on any other comprehensive account of reality, I am suggesting that, as historians, we must be aware of relying on over-arching causes, even highly sublimated ones, as principles of explanation or of reassurance in a world in which, more than ever before, we must assume the burden of responsibility of understanding and survival.

NOTES

1. F. W. Walbank, Commentary on Polybius (Oxford, 1957-1979), Vol. 7., 16-26; R. H. Barrow, Plutarch and His Times

(New York, 1979, ch. 10, sec. 7; Lowell Edmonds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides C Cambridge, Mass., 1975)

2. Lisa Jardine, Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge, England, 1974).

3. Robert Nisbet, The Idea of Progress (New York, 1980), 10-46.

4. Theodor Adorno, Aufsatze zur Gesellschafts-theorie und Methodologie (Frankfurt, 1970), 106: "Die empirische

Sozialforschung kommt darum nicht herum, dass alle von ihr untersuchten Gegebenheiten, die subjektiven nicht weniger

als die objektiven Verhaltnisse, durch die Gesellschaft vermittelt sind. Das Gegebene, die Fakten auf welche sie ihren

Methoden nach als auf ihr Letztes stosst, sind selber kein letztes sondern ein Bedingtes." See also by Adorno, Dialektik

der Aufklarung (Frankfurt, 1969) and Jurgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1968).

5. Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chicago, 1944).

6. The Constitutional History of England latest ed., Cambridge, England, 1941. See H. E. Bell, Maitland: A Critical

Examination and Assessment (London, 1965).

7. Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe. A New View of Creation and Evolution (New York, 1983); Ernest Nagel,

Teleology Revisited and Other Essays (New York, 1979), 275-316.

8. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London, 1970) and also by Kuhn, The Essential

Tension, Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, 1977).

9. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York and Burlingame, 1961), 15. The Science of Science, ed. Maurice

Goldsmith and Alan Mackay (London, 1964). The optimism of the famous J. D. Bernal in his classic, The Social Function

of Science (London, 1939) has not been entirely vindicated, to say the least. See Andrew G. van Melsen, Science and

Responsibility (Pittsburgh, 1970)

10. For what follows see Lowell Clucus, The Trial of John Italos (Munich, 1981), Ch. IV.

11. David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-1932 (N.Y., 1961), Chs. 18-19; Gordon Craig, Germany

1866-1945 (N.Y. 1978), Ch. XVIII.