16th of March, 1938. Two uniformed
men are walking through Vienna. They knock on a door and ask the
housekeeper to let them in. Noting the telltale swastika on their
clothes, she refuses to let them in – her employer has Jewish
roots. The arguments grows louder, but then a voice is heard above:
”Watch out!” Pedestrians quickly disperse, and the body of a
scholar of Novalis, obese cabaret actor and dilettante historian hits
ground. Egon Friedell has died.
This story, told in a preface for
Friedell's magnum opus, the three-part cultural history of modern
age, awoke my interest to the book itself in my youth. Friedell is
not viewed as particularly reliable source these days, but his style
is memorable. He was an enthusiastic admirer of such great
philosophers like Leibniz, Hegel and especially Kant, and it was
Friedell who particularly made me fall in love with classical German
philosophy.
This is the stuff that stories are made
of. Without his grim death, I might never have read Friedell's books,
thus, I might never had dedicated myself to German idealism and this
blog might have never existed. The events have a distinct end which
makes sense of everything leading to it and in a sense even justifies
all the grim details. Such a chain of events makes one ask whether it
might have been planned all along.
Such considerations drive teleological
explanations, which purport to explain what happens through what
derived of it. Of course, one might always suggest that such
explanations reflect more our expectations than anything in the
world, but the criticism can be argued against through the very same
means – if we believe that there are purposeful events, then we
will probably see them everywhere, but if we believe that there are
no purposeful events, then we will describe apparent purposeful
events as mere coincidences, even if they would really be purposeful.
It is apparent that at least human
behaviour involves purposiveness, and thus it becomes as no surprise
that I chose to begin this text with a reference to Friedell - I had a distinct purpose in my mind, when I did this. As it
happens, Friedell was also my first source on Christian Wolff, whom
Friedell ridicules as a philosopher obsessed with teleology: night exists so that we can sleep and fish, but Moon exists so that it wouldn't be too dark even at night. So far
I had not yet found any corroboration of Friedell's characterization, but the
current book,Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Absichten der
natürlichen Dingen, is
especially a work dedicated to teleology.
Nowadays
it is thought a sound scientific methodology to avoid teleological
explanations and idea of natural purpose, and therefore a whole book
dedicated to teleology will probably appear ridiculous. Yet, teleological
explanations might not be completely unscientific. Witness, for
instance, Aristotle's Physics,
which contains a reference to an end as one sort of cause. What
Aristotle means is that when things are left to their own devices,
they tend to move toward certain stable condition – for instance, a
rock falls to the ground, where it will rest. Thing in a stable
condition might not be completely inactive, in so far as their
activities are stable: Aristotelian examples of such stable actions
include recurring movement of stars and ongoing processes of living
organisms. All in all, Aristotelian teleology might involve then
nothing else, but a supposition of the existence of such stable
conditions of things.
Wolffian teleology
cannot be reinterpreted in a similar manner, because the supposed end
of e.g. metals lies not in their own nature, but in their various
uses in human culture. Instead, Wolffian teleology is essentially a
technological undertaking – Wolff describes how we can use metals
to produce kitchenware, weapons, scientific instruments and so on.
This is nothing but applied science, we could say.
What
goes beyond applied science is the assumption that things in general are
useful for technological purposes – this in an attitude justified
by Wolff's metaphysical theory of gracious, wise and powerful God.
What appeared particularly unconvincing to Friedell in this attitude
was the idea that humans especially are the central beings whom all
other things should serve – even all the stars in the sky exist
only to help navigation.
This apparent
anthropocentricity is explained by a metaphysical assumption of Wolff
– every object contains in a sense the whole world in itself, in
other words, an individual is so closely interconnected with the
world around it that neither could exist without the other. Thus, in
a sense we could take any object of the world as its central or most
essential object. For instance, we could view Earth as the most important
place in the whole universe, but for equally good reasons also
Jupiter or an arbitrary planet in the Andromeda galaxy fit the bill.
In other words all things are both means and final purposes.
This principle of a
reciprocal purposefulness allows Wolff to enlarge our knowledge
beyond what we can immediately experience. If all heavenly objects
and their occupants are final purposes, these objects must have the
necessary means for fulfilling the purposes of the occupants – they
must have oceans, an atmosphere etc. This is a place where Wolff
clearly breaks the limits of the acceptable use of teleology, and as
the moon landings have shown, there are heavenly objects that are
very inimical to life.
(Well, unless the stories of moon landings weren't just clever government tricks meant to confuse
people. We might passingly note how all conspiracy theories
resemble a sort of negative teleology – the conspiracy theorist
believes that all negative events are the result of an evil person
with almost divine capacities. No wonder one favorite Moriarty of at
least Christian conspiracy theorists is the Devil, who is apparently
out there to make us all atheists.)
Wolff does also
admit a more substantial centrality in teleology. Inorganic objects
exist only as tools for organic objects, and furthermore, irrational
organisms exist only for the sake of rational beings – human beings
are at least the most essential entities on Earth. The most crucial
question is undoubtedly then what these rational entities are
supposed to do. According to Wolff, the main aim of the rational
entities is to witness the existence of God and particularly his
goodness, wisdom and power – he has the will to create the best
possible world, he knows what it's like and then just creates such a
world. Like a small child, the omnipotent God requires an audience to praise his
achievements, we might ironically say.
So much for teleology, next time we
shall see whether Wolff's philosophy can hold on against a thorough
attack.
