ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2018
Design and the Future Cosmopolis: Response to James Freeman’ s“ Teleological Concepts in Evolutionary Theory Applied to Human-Directed Evolution.”
Clayton Shoppa
James Freeman uses teleology to wonder about technology’ s risks. A morally ambivalent phenomenon, technology enables as well as disables, bringing us closer while separating us further. In what follows I will widen the historical bookends Freeman uses and assess the conclusions he endorses.
Freeman looks to Kant for a teleology of nature. Something is purposive when its nature may only be explained by the concept of causality. Kant invokes classical philosophy’ s metaphysical vocabulary to make his point, permitting in these cases the judgment that effective causes are the effect of final causes. Purposiveness unifies the subjective and the objective. The human mind trades in concepts, purposiveness among them. Kant concedes it appears to us as if nature has a purpose, but, because of the epistemic restrictions put forward by critical philosophy, we must be careful to deflate our thinking and curtail naturalism’ s ambitions. Natural entities, and here think of a migrating bird, appear to have purposes insofar as we cannot explain them without appeal to some reason, but the reason is our contribution to the explanation and not nature’ s. Kant permits us to speak of nature’ s purposiveness, a nominalized adjective, but prohibits any inference about its purpose. Hegel, writing later, will contend reason is the enacted self-selection of this subjective-objective unity. When the concept thinks itself, per the highest-order meta-adventure of Science of Logic, the concept’ s freedom and its life are developments of its purpose. Kant restricts concepts to our finite minds. But Hegel refuses this restriction. For him it is valid and sound and philosophically meaningful to speak non-metaphorically of nature’ s purpose as much as it is to speak of our own. Hegel thinks the universe thinks. In fact, he’ s sure it does.
Notwithstanding these differences, both for Kant and for Hegel the operation of reason and the cooperation of human decision-making in history depend on shared purposes that are deliberately and rationally self-selected. This reciprocal structure is important for Freeman since his focus is the self-selection of the future, the intelligent design of what is to come. Freeman challenges us to consider the ethical implications of our ongoing replacement of accident with responsible decision, of evolution with engineering. The former pair we inherit from the natural world that produced us, the latter we contribute back to it and thus to future generations, recycling the structure.
Freeman next looks to William James for a teleology of decision. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James associates Hegel with the monism and mysticism by which all distinctions, inside and outside, knower and known, real and ideal, self and other, spirit and nature, are overcome. Like Kant and Hegel, James wants to restore the primacy of experience. All three work against the dogmatisms of their days. All three, of course, understand experience differently. When he was young, Kant thought experience always referred to the experience of irreducible particularity. By the first critique, experience comes to refer to a manifold conditioned by synthetic judgments.
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