Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Mechanism
Axis: Explaining nature — How should natural phenomena be explained: by mechanisms, by purposes, or by a vital impulse?
Nature 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.
Movements 4
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
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
Show inferred positions (2)
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
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
Philosophers 7
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)
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
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
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)