From Aristotle's Teleology to Darwin's Genealogy

The Stamp of Inutility

M. Solinas, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Byrt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349495856
  9781137445766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137445773
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia antica e classica

From Aristotle to Darwin, from ancient teleology to contemporary genealogies, this book offers an overview of the birth and then persistence of Aristotle's framework into modernity, until its radical overthrow by the evolutionary revolution.

Part I

The Aristotelian Teleological Tradition

1

The Original Framework

1 Consistency

The original framework conceived by Aristotle in constructing the edifice of the life sciences is quite coherent, despite the wealth of suggestions, perspectives, analyses, definitions, conceptual shifts, methods of classification, principles and assumptions that fill the vast amount of literature dedicated to them. There is a consistency deriving in the first place from the theoretical centrality attributed to teleology and to the search for final causes. This perspective emerges from the brilliant and celebrated passage in which, in the first book of Parts of Animals, Aristotle resolutely defends the dignity in studying every living thing, even the most humble of plants and animals, precisely because in such scientific activity the purposefulness present in the works of nature is discovered, and consequently, the realm of Beauty is revealed.

Of the works of Nature there are, we hold, two kinds: those which are brought into being and perish and those which are free from these processes throughout all ages. The latter are of the highest worth and are divine, but our opportunities for the study of them are somewhat scanty, since there is but little evidence available to our senses to enable us to consider them and all the things that we long to know about.

We have better means of information, however, concerning the things that perish, that is to say, plants and animals, because we live among them; and anyone who will but take enough trouble can learn much concerning every one of their kinds.

Yet each of the two groups has its attractiveness.[...] [I]t now remains to speak of animals, and their Nature. So far as in us lies, we will not leave out any one of them, be it never so mean; for though there are animals which have no attractiveness for the senses, yet for the eye of science, for the student who is naturally of a philosophic spirit and can discern the causes of things, Nature which fashioned them provides joys which cannot be measured. If we study mere likeness of these things and take pleasure in so doing, because then we are contemplating the painter’s or the carver’s Art which fashioned them, and yet fail to delight much more in studying the works of Nature themselves, though we have the ability to discern the actual causes – that would be a strange absurdity indeed.

Wherefore we must not betake ourselves to the consideration of the meaner animals with a bad grace, as though we were children; since in all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous. There is a story which tells how some visitors once wished to meet Heraclitus, and when they entered and saw him in the kitchen, warming himself at the stove, they hesitated; but Heraclitus said, ‘Come in; don’t be afraid; there are gods even here.’ In like manner, we ought not to hesitate nor to be abashed, but boldly to enter upon our researches concerning animals of every sort and kind, knowing that in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking.

I add ‘Beauty,’ because in the works of Nature purpose and not accident is predominant; and the purpose or end for the sake of which those works have been constructed or formed has its place among what is beautiful.¹

Proceeding from the realm of Beauty, in the effective development of his research into living things, the priority attributed to the end to which organisms have been constructed comes to be translated into a somewhat negatively nuanced motto, which would leave its mark on the entire course of modern natural history: natura nihil frustra facit (nature does nothing in vain). This is a principle that is continually reiterated and made use of: Aristotle mentions it dozens of times, often varying its form, but not its substance. Nature never does anything in vain, does nothing useless, does nothing superfluous and does nothing by chance or without an aim but always wisely and to an end.² It is a purpose that ultimately coincides with the well-being of the organisms themselves and with their preservation. More precisely, every mechanism of nature is designed to generate, devise, produce, predispose, prepare and distribute parts, organs and faculties that will be useful for organisms. Utility, and also the lack of extravagance or superfluousness, therefore becomes the controlling factor in the analysis of the mechanisms of living nature.

This idea, which is also expressed in an image of domestic economy, quite faithfully reflects the way in which many close examinations elaborated in the corpus were developed: ‘Like a good housekeeper, Nature is not accustomed to throw anything away if something useful can be made out of it.’³ Utility reigns supreme.

Given the centrality of teleology, and proceeding from the perspective of clarifying the cornerstones which would then form the basis of modern natural history, I will immediately show the two other pillars on which the Aristotelian edifice of the life sciences were constructed. They are the marginalization of a systematic recourse to randomness and the correlated essentialist concept of the fixity and immutability of species over time, safeguarded on the dual planes of epistemology and ontology. While sketching the main points, I will concentrate on the basic concept of Peripatetic physiological anatomy. I will demonstrate that nature, which never does anything randomly, but wisely shapes organs with the aim of guaranteeing organisms a certain vital function and not vice versa, thus ensures the preservation of the species. It also achieves a perfect and solid correspondence both between organs and functions and between species and the environment. The fixity of species over time, complementing the immutability of the environment, and more generally the cosmos, is at the same time also guaranteed by a functionalist perspective: the wisdom of nature is such that it has always ensured, and will always ensure, a perfect adaptation to every living being, forestalling in this way any possibility that any species could become extinct.

Finally, we shall see that this rigorously teleological framework did, however, pose problems to Aristotle himself, primarily because he identified and discussed obviously useless parts and organs, as in the conspicuous case of the wings of birds ‘not adapted to flight’. To confront this difficulty, he had recourse to both the level of necessity and the classical concept by which nature, adopting a compensatory criterion of distribution, concedes a single means of defence to each species, thus guaranteeing the overall equilibrium of the system. This is a criterion that is shown to be pseudo-egalitarian when one considers the hierarchism of living forms, at the apex of which humankind stands supreme. And it will be in continuing an analysis of the tensions generated by the teleological-functionalist approach that I will finally seek to show how Aristotle, in tackling the problems of parts and organs that are not only obviously useless but in his opinion also actually damaging, such as the antlers of deer, may have placed within his own analytical framework some questions subsequently proving to be inimical to the integrity of his postulates. That same acute, profound and uninhibited capacity for observation and the collecting of empirical data which contributed in such a decisive way to the extraordinary Peripatetic naturalistic edifice on the one hand clashes with, and on the other is absorbed and neutralized by, the relative consistency of that teleological, essentialist and fixist framework whose basic theoretical principles held sway up to the turn of the nineteenth century just when, from a different perspective, the question of inutility was being put forward again.

2 To the margins

Aristotle’s criticism of Empedocles’ historic concept of living beings – which later aroused the interest and admiration of Darwin – also took into consideration the theory of generation that it presupposed:

For the things which come-to-be naturally all come-to-be, either always or generally, in a particular way, and exceptions or violations of the invariable or general rule are the results of chance and luck. What, then, is the reason why man always or generally comes-to-be from man, and why wheat (and not an olive) comes-to-be from wheat? Or does bone come-to-be, if the elements are put together in a certain manner? For, according to Empedocles, nothing comes-to-be by their coming together by chance but by their coming together in a certain proportion. What, then, is the cause of this? [ ... ]. No: the cause is the substance of each thing and not merely, as he says ‘a mingling and separation of things mingled’; and chance, not proportion, is the name applied to these happenings: for it is possible for things to be mixed by chance. The cause, then, of things which exist naturally is that they are in such-and-such a condition, and this is what constitutes the nature of each thing, about which he says nothing. There is nothing ‘About the Nature of Things’ in his treatise. And yet it is this which is the excellence and the good of each thing, whereas he gives all the credit to the mixing process.⁴

Given the decisive priority of the beauty and the good of the substance of each thing, randomness was thus not banished: in fact, a decisive role in certain specific generative processes is attributed to it. Such a possibility having been recognized, it is, however, immediately marginalized and undermined on both the analytical and theoretical levels. It is marginalized in the sense that Aristotle adopts the general principle by which ‘chance and lucky events are the contrary of that which always or normally is or comes to pass’.⁵ More specifically, within the realm of living things, he employs the notion of randomness to explain the deformations of maimed organisms, thus transposing his general principle to the specific principle by which ‘nature does nothing in vain, and omits nothing essential, except in maimed or imperfect animals’.⁶ Maimings and imperfections are thus interpreted as the outcome of accidental – that is, potentially infinite – causes. In more detail, in the course of the realization of a finite datum (telos), events exist, potentially unknown to us, which break up the linearity of the causal chain, thus precluding the full and ‘correct’ realization of the intended process. These events are therefore ‘exceptional’ in the sense of being irregular, sporadic deviations which do not always nor generally occur⁷ and which within the ambit of reproductive processes give life to maimed and imperfect organisms or ‘monsters’.

Such marginalization of randomness, accomplished by means of the frequency of accidental deviations, is accompanied by the radical undermining of its theoretical-systematic basis, as emerges from the analysis of particular individual differences. Aristotle indeed also attributes processes of a random nature to certain slight differences observed in single organisms of the same genus: ‘We must now study the “conditions” in respect of which the parts of animals differ. I mean such conditions of the parts as the following: blue and dark colour of the eyes, high and deep pitch of the voice, and differences of colour and of hair or feathers. Some of these conditions are found throughout certain classes of animals; some occur irregularly, and a striking instance of this is afforded by the human species’.⁸ Given this fundamental distinction between the characteristics belonging to a genus and those inscribed within them randomly, Aristotle can neutralize the capacity of the latter:

When we come to consider these conditions and all others like them, we must not suppose that the same sort of cause is operative as before, for there are certain conditions which are not characteristics belonging to Nature in general, nor peculiarities proper to this or that particular class of animal; and whatever the quality of such conditions may be, in no instance is either existence or its formation ‘for the sake of something’. Thus, the existence and the formation of an eye is ‘for the sake of something’, but its being blue is not – unless this condition is a peculiarity proper to the particular class of animal.⁹

Thus, such accidental characteristics, certainly attributable to random processes, are removed from the definition of the class and, in this way, undermined at source, while at the same time the primary function attributed to the essence, as well as to necessity, comes speculatively into play: ‘And further, in some cases this condition has nothing to do with the logos of the animal’s being; instead of that, we are to assume that these things come-to-be by necessity, and so, their causes must be referred back to the matter and to the source which initiated their movement.’¹⁰

3 Fixed in time

The abovementioned theoretical centrality, conferred on the level of essences, species and genera with regard to the individual, rests in turn, although indirectly, on the presupposed basis of the fixity and immobility of the species. Here, too, we can again refer to the criticism directed against the systematic recourse to randomness:

So Empedocles was wrong when he said that many of the characteristics which animals have are due to some accident in the process of their formation [ ... ]: he was unaware (a) that the seed which gives rise to the animal must to begin with have the appropriate specific character; and (b) that the producing agent was pre-existent: it was chronologically earlier as well as logically earlier: in other words, men are begotten by men, and therefore the process of the child’s formation is what it is because its parent was a man. Similarly too with those that appear to be formed spontaneously [ ... ].

So the best way of putting the matter would be to say that because the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  The Aristotelian Teleological Tradition
• Part II  The Evolutionary Revolution
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index