The detached animal - On the technical nature of being human

Abstract

The problem of the goal-directedness of life, of matter acting purposefully, the problem of the existence of self-organizing, self-sustaining and purposively behaving entities made of matter, the problem of finality in a material universe, in short: the mystery of the living organism, might very well be the all-time Überproblem of the science of biology indeed, as Lenny Moss suggests in his extremely interesting, delightfully speculative paper on the phenomenon of detachment. Living organisms, Moss agrees with Aristotle, are goal-directed beings; they exist as ends-unto-themselves. They cannot be understood without an appeal to some notion of what Aristotle called teleology or final causality and which he conceived of as immanent to the organism itself, not as something assigned to it from the outside, imprinted so to speak in accordance with the will of a transcendent creator, as in Christian thought, or an idealistic Gestaltung by a demiurge working from eternal forms, as in Platonic and neo-Platonic thinking (or, as today's Darwinists and especially ultra-Darwinists have it, according to the whimsical wisdom of natural selection operating from the outside). Living organisms exhibit an internal, not an external teleology. But how to understand this internal final causality as an intrinsic feature of material beings, how to understand the unmistakable existence of internal teleology in entities that just as unmistakably consist of matter (and nothing besides), how to explain the mysterious union of finality and materiality that life represents? This is indeed the question of biology. As Moss puts it: 'to understand life is to recognize its ineluctable finality as Aristotle intended it and to recognize its thoroughgoing materiality and yet how to relate these two is the big challenge' (Moss, 2008). © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.