Relation to the world· Nature and the livingdifficulty
Explaining nature
How should natural phenomena be explained: by mechanisms, by purposes, or by a vital impulse?
Depending on whether we see blind causes, ends being pursued, or a life unfolding, nature becomes a mechanism with no purpose or a world reaching toward something. Behind the method of explanation, what is decided is the presence or absence of meaning in the living world.
Mechanism
11Nature is fully explained by material causes and laws of motion, like an immense machine. Living beings themselves are complex mechanisms, with no need to invoke purposes or mysterious forces.
Explore this position →Humeexplicit
Every idea must derive from an impression: so Hume asks which impression yields the necessary connection between a cause and its effect, and finds none. In objects, experience gives only succession and constant conjunction; never the bond that would oblige one to follow the other. Necessity is therefore not in things: it is a habit (custom) of the mind, an expectation projected by repetition. Hence the problem of : if nothing lets us perceive the causal link, no inference from past to future is rationally grounded. It is this analysis, by undermining causation as objective necessity, that would rouse from his dogmatic slumber. and vital force, answering to no impression, fall with it.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. VII (of the idea of necessary connexion) · A Treatise of Human Nature, I, part III, sect. 6 and 14
Lucretiusexplicit
Nature pursues no end and was ordered by no design: things come to be through the merely mechanical encounter of atoms over infinite time, in which every possible combination has formed and only those able to endure have lasted. Hence a famous reversal of finalism: no bodily member was made for our use; the order is the reverse, the organ exists first and the use comes after. To seek a purpose in the eye, the hand or the stars is therefore an illusion, and mocks those who believe the world made for men. This is a thoroughgoing , where only the swerve of the introduces play without reintroducing any end.
On the Nature of Things, IV, 823-857 (nothing in the body was made in order to serve) · On the Nature of Things, V, 156-234 (the world was not made for men)
Spinozaexplicit
Spinoza explicitly rejects as a human illusion: Nature acts toward no end, everything following from it by the sole necessity of efficient causes. This is a thoroughgoing mechanism, where the idea of a providential design is mere prejudice.
Ethics, I, appendix (the critique of final causes) · Ethics, I, props. 16 and 29 (all follows necessarily from the divine nature)
Descartesexplicit
Material nature is fully explained by the laws of motion and the shape of parts: the bodies of living beings, and animals themselves, are machines, devoid of soul. Descartes banishes the search for final causes from physics, reserving them to God, hence a residual share of theological finalism.
Discourse on Method, V · Principles of Philosophy, I, art. 28 and II
Nāgārjunaexplicit
How is a thing produced? The work opens on this problem and attacks it through its four possible branches: a thing can arise neither from itself (it would already be there), nor from another endowed with (two separate essences could not condition one another), nor from both, nor without a cause. If real causation presupposes terms with inherent existence, it is incoherent. The original step is not to abolish causation but to identify it with emptiness: precisely because things arise in dependence, they have no inherent existence. and are then two names for one fact, with no agent and no design, which excludes finalism.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. I (the examination of conditions)
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Epicurusexplicit
The world results from the merely mechanical encounter of atoms in the void, without any final cause or design: nature was not made for men, and it is an error to seek a purpose in organs or stars. explicitly mocks the finalist illusion. This is a thoroughgoing , tempered only by the chance of the .
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, IV, 823-857 (against the purposiveness of organs) · Letter to Herodotus, 76-77 (celestial phenomena without divine intervention)
Epicureanismexplicit
Epicurean physics explains every phenomenon by the motion, collision and aggregation of atoms in the void, with no final cause: nature acts toward no end, and our organs were not created for a use, rather their existence made use possible. This explicit rejection of teleology places the school firmly on the side of mechanism.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book IV, ll. 823-857 · Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 38-44
Empiricisminferable
Empiricism accompanies the rising mechanistic science and distrusts Aristotelian final causes, which Bacon ranks among the idols that sterilise inquiry. Hume goes further, analysing causal connection itself as a custom of the mind projected onto the regular conjunction of phenomena, which rules out any intrinsic finalism.
Bacon, Novum Organum, I, aphorisms 38-51 (the idols, against final causes) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section VII
Kantexplicit
Causality is an a priori category of the understanding that structures every phenomenon by mechanical law: known nature is a chain of cause and effect. The third Critique adds purposiveness, but Kant declares it merely regulative, a principle for judging living things rather than a mechanism of the world, hence a minority finalist weight.
Critique of Pure Reason, Second Analogy of Experience · Critique of the Power of Judgment, §§61-68
Rationalisminferable
If reason can know the real a priori, it is because the real is rational through and through: nothing exists or happens without a reason that makes it intelligible, on pain of leaving brute facts opaque to thought. This postulate, which raises into the , governs the whole of rationalism and divides it from the of , for whom causality is only a habit of associating impressions, not a necessary connection. Physical nature is read mechanistically, through figures and motions in and through necessary laws in , but finality returns at the metaphysical level, with subordinating the mechanism of bodies to ends willed by God.
Leibniz, Monadology, §§ 31-32 · Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, part II
The Enlightenmentexplicit
The Newtonian universe lends itself to a mechanist reading: a system of bodies in motion governed by laws, without ends or souls. draws the extreme consequence with « man a machine », and the materialism of reduces everything to matter and motion. The century is not mechanist without remainder: and the naturalists grant matter a sensibility and activity of its own, the sketch of a vitalism, while a deist finalism persists that reads in the order of the world the mark of a great clockmaker.
La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) · d'Holbach, The System of Nature · Diderot, D'Alembert's Dream
Finalism
12A natural phenomenon is fully understood only by grasping what it occurs for: the organ has a function, the organism tends toward its completed form. Nature is ordered by ends, not merely pushed by causes.
Explore this position →Aristotelianismexplicit
The starting point is the observation of living things: an acorn becomes an oak and not a beech, an organ develops for a function, signs that an end orients the process. To treat this regularity as a mere accident of matter, as Democritus' mechanism does, explains nothing; beyond matter one needs the , the that-for-the-sake-of-which a thing exists. Finalism is thus not projected onto nature but read within it, and it is the internal natures of beings, not an external craftsman, that carry them toward their end.
Aristotle, Physics, II, 3 and 8 · Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 3
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Thomas inherits 's four and the primacy of the final cause: every agent acts for the sake of an end, and it is this orientation that makes nature intelligible. But he radicalizes finalism by referring it to God: the order of ends observable in the world, which culminates in the fifth way, presupposes an intelligence directing the beings devoid of knowledge toward their goal, as the arrow is directed by the archer. Nature is therefore not a blind mechanism but a willed order, in which each thing tends by its form toward the perfection that belongs to it.
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3 (the fifth way); q. 44, a. 4
Aristotleexplicit
Why does a thing come to be? Aristotle finds incomplete any answer that invokes only matter or the collision of bodies, as the Presocratic physicists did: four are needed (material, formal, efficient, final), and it is the final cause that orders them. His decisive argument comes from living things, where observation reveals organs made for a function: the acorn becomes an oak, the eye serves for seeing. He extends this oriented regularity to all of nature, which does nothing in vain: the end is no conscious plan but the immanent term toward which a process tends by its very form.
Physics, II.3 and II.8 · Metaphysics, I.3
Leibnizexplicit
Since the monads are without windows, no substance really acts on another: the coordination of soul and body, like that of all substances among themselves, can come neither from direct influence nor from God's repeated assistance (occasionalism), but from a pre-established harmony set up at creation, like two clocks tuned in advance. Hence the rehabilitation of the set aside by mechanistic science: the realm of efficient causes (bodies) and that of final causes (souls, ends) coincide without mingling. Everything is explained mechanically in the detail of phenomena, yet the ultimate reason for their arrangement is final, inscribed in the divine choice of the best. Finalism thus takes metaphysical precedence without abolishing mechanism.
Discourse on Metaphysics, §19-22 (the usefulness of final causes in physics) · Monadology, §79 (souls act by the laws of final causes, bodies by those of efficient causes)
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Plotinusinferable
is not a mechanical production but a derivation oriented toward the good: each begets the lower one because the perfect, by superabundance, cannot but radiate, and all that proceeds from it is drawn by the return toward its principle. Causality is therefore fundamentally final, suspended from the Good as its end, the opposite of a universe of blind collisions. Nature itself produces by contemplating, like a sleep of the soul that imitates the intelligible.
Enneads, III, 8 (On Nature, Contemplation and the One) · Enneads, V, 4
George Berkeleyinferable
For Berkeley sensible ideas are utterly inert: an idea can produce nothing, so no body is ever a true cause. The only real causality is that of a will, and we experience it solely in the activity of a mind. The regularity of nature is therefore not a mechanical chain of impacts but the constant order by which God, the one cause, produces our ideas in us: what we take for natural causes are merely the regular signs of effects to come. Nature thus receives a finalist reading, governed by the ends of an ordering mind, against the mechanism of , for whom matter acts by its motion alone.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§25-33 and §§60-66
Hegelinferable
Nature and spirit are not explained by mechanism alone: an immanent teleology is at work in them, not a design imposed from outside, but the end the concept gives itself in realizing itself. The whole precedes and orients the development of its parts.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §204-212 (teleology)
Senecainferable
The whole universe is ordered by a acting toward an end, the good of the whole: nature does nothing at random and fate is the reasoned chain of causes toward that end. This is a providential , where the mechanical necessity of causes serves a rational design.
On Providence, I and V (the purposive order of the world) · Natural Questions, II, 45 (providence and fate)
Stoicismexplicit
The Stoic cosmos is ordered by : fate is the rational chaining of all causes, directed toward the good of the whole. Causality is therefore fundamentally finalist, teleological, even as it unfolds as an unbreakable chain of causes that nothing interrupts.
Cicero, On Fate · Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book II
Marcus Aureliusinferable
Fate is the rational chaining of causes directed toward the good of the whole: causality is fundamentally , providential. The recurring atoms hypothesis nonetheless introduces a share of sheer mechanism, an alternative Marcus holds to be thinkable.
Meditations, IV, 4 · Meditations, IX, 1 · Meditations, IX, 28
Socratesinferable
Disappointed by the natural philosophers who explain everything by material causes, Socrates recounts having hoped from that Mind ordered the world for the best, then finding him invoking only mechanisms. What he demands is explanation by the good, the end for the sake of which it is better that things be as they are: a finalism that turns philosophy away from nature toward value.
Plato, Phaedo, 97b-99d (the disappointment with Anaxagoras)
Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
Against the strict mechanism that sees in nature only rigid, necessary laws, Peirce upholds : chance is an objective reality, and laws are not given in advance but are habits that have formed and grow firmer in the course of an evolution. The cosmos has a history, it grows, and this growth is oriented by a tendency, evolutionary love or agapasm, which tips Peirce toward a finalist kind of explanation, while keeping the creative spontaneity that recalls vitalism. Far from the Cartesian machine, his nature is an organism in the making.
The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892) · Evolutionary Love (1893)
Vitalism
1Life cannot be reduced either to mechanics or to a pre-established plan: it is a creative, unpredictable impulse that invents new forms. Understanding the living requires a different approach from that of the physical sciences.
Explore this position →Romanticismexplicit
To the Enlightenment's universe-machine, Romanticism opposes a living nature: an animate organism, shot through with forces and a soul, not a system of gears without inwardness. 's thinks nature as a subject in becoming, in which spirit gradually awakens to itself. Mechanism is rejected not by a return to theological finalism, but in the name of a life that precedes and overflows its parts.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature · Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveThe choice within the order of causes
A choice is an event in the physical world: does it belong to the same chain of causes as everything else, so that it was in principle predictable?
a choiceFreedom of the will - DescriptiveWhere does the idea of cause come from?
Empiricism would trace every idea back to a sense impression. But when one ball strikes another, we see only two motions in succession, never the force or the necessary link between them: where, then, does the idea of cause come from?
the idea of causeSource of knowledge
After a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant... This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, is the impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion.Hume · Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. VII
Never and nowhere does anything exist that is arisen from itself, from another, from both, or without a cause.Nāgārjuna · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, I, 1
Nature does nothing in vain.Aristotle · Politics, I.2 (1253a)
Nothing was born in the body that we might use it: it is the thing born that creates the use.Lucretius · On the Nature of Things, IV, 833-835