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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