Organicism

Plato’s writings were cast in the dialogue form, usually with the philosopher Socrates as the main figure, talking, teaching, arguing with his disciples. Over the years, Plato increasingly used this dialogue form to introduce his own ideas, putting them in the mouth of Socrates. One such dialogue, the Phaedo, purports to tell of the last day of Socrates, before he is forced to drink poison, a punishment for filling his young admirers with all sorts of treasonable ideas. Plato has Socrates tackle the question of the possible chance nature of the universe, a problem of pressing importance to one about to die, having Socrates argue that truly all must be the product of a designing intelligence. “One day I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, and saying that it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything. I was delighted with this cause and it seemed to me to be good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all” (Cooper Reference Cooper1997: Phaedo 97, c–d).

In another dialogue, the Republic, Plato fit this idea into his overall metaphysical picture of reality. The main aim of this dialogue is to set up the ideal society, one that he thinks is based on our realization that this makes for the happiest form of life. The rulers – the “philosopher kings” – will be guided by their understanding of the nature of reality. This world of ours is the world of change, of becoming. It is not unreal, but it only reflects the world of ultimate reality, the unchanging world of the Forms. These are universals, standards, that guide and inform our world of experience. Dobbin is an individual horse. Dobbin is a horse, not a dog, because he “participates” in the Form of Horse. Fido, the family dog, participates in the Form of Dog. These forms are hierarchical, linked together through their relationship to the ultimate form, the Form of the Good. It is this that is in some sense the guiding intelligence. The equivalent in our world is the sun, which likewise has the role of linking all together and making possible continuation and thriving. First it illuminates:

And then it is the sustenance, as one might say, that leads to growth: “And this Idea of Good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in dignity and power.”

It is in a later dialogue, the Timaeus, that Plato argued for an organismic view of the universe – the organism was the root metaphor – with The Good being characterized as the “Demiurge.” This Creator made the world an organism, so that it could be as good, as perfect, as possible. It is valuable:

Aristotle, Plato’s student, was also an organicist, with a very different take from that of Plato. For a start, unlike Plato, he did not think that universals were entities existing in their own right, in a transcendent world of Forms. He thought rather that universals were more like templates, and they had existence only in the individuals of this world. Dobbin and Daisy were formed in the same pattern, and there is nothing beyond this. Again, Aristotle did not believe in an external Designer. He believed in something Godlike – the Perfect Being. This is not a physical being, but in some sense thought personified. “For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object.” Hence, life “belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God” (Barnes Reference Barnes1984: Metaphysics, 12, 1072b).

Famously, Aristotle divided causes into four categories (Physics, 194b16–195a3). Suppose we want to make a statue, for example of a British private – a “Tommy” – from the First World War (Reiss and Ruse Reference Reiss and Ruse2023, 17) (Figure 1.1). You start with the efficient cause, the modeler or sculptor who actually made the statue. Then next you have the material cause, the substance from which it is made – metal (bronze) or stone (marble) or whatever substance. Then you have the formal cause, the pattern that Plato was trying to capture with his theory of forms. The model must look like a real British soldier. It would not be wearing a hat with a Pickelhaube for instance. And then, fourth, in a way the most important of all, you have the final cause. The teleological element behind your commissioning the statue. Why is it being made? The answer is simple. Future generations will be alerted to, and give thanks for, the sacrifices of such humble men and their comrades.

Figure 1.1 Statue of a British WWI soldier, a “Tommy.”

One of the problems with teleology, final-cause thinking, is that of the “missing goal object.” If you hear someone hammering away, you can easily identify the efficient cause. It is a hammer striking a nail as it penetrates a plank being laid down as a floor. Material causes are iron and wood. Formal cause is the kind of house you are intending to build – a row house, semi-detached house, bungalow, or whatever. Final cause is the yet-to-be erected house. The final cause of the statue of the soldier, in the middle of the village green, is (as just noted) to remind us each time we pass by of the sacrifices made by so many young men in the Great War so that we might live in harmony and peace. But what if, halfway through your building, you fail to get planning permission and you have to tear everything down? What if there is an accident when transporting the statue to the village, it is destroyed, and the parish simply does not have the money to replace it? They are going to have to be satisfied with a brass plaque. How can we speak of final cause when it never happens? Plato has a ready answer. The final cause is the thought of the house, of the statue. It is in fact a kind of mental efficient cause. There is no such easy way out for Aristotle. He has to say something like, there is a force, a tendency, directed toward the house or the statue. This exists now so is a kind of efficient cause, and it simply doesn’t get to its end. The direction exists now.

Final causes must be saved. Final causes can be saved. So, we can still ask, meaningfully: Where do humans come in all of this? As you might expect, at the top! We are the animal equivalent of the mighty oak. Monad to man. We are the ultimate final cause. There is direction, from lesser to greater, from (and this is important) little worth or value to greater worth or value. Note that this is worth or value that is objectively “out there.” It is not a judgment based solely on our preferences or desires. I am a passionate supporter of the Wolverhampton Wanderers soccer club, “the Wolves.” Regretfully, these days this is rarely something based on objective value. To the contrary, Plato tells us: “God gave the sovereign part of the human soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from earth to our kindred who are in heaven” (Cooper Reference Cooper1997, 90b). Likewise, Aristotle: “after the birth of animals, plants exist for their sake, and that the other animals exist for the sake of man … . Now if nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man” (Barnes Reference Barnes1984, 1256b15–22). The unique bipedality of humans is also readily understood: “of all living beings with which we are acquainted man alone partakes of the divine, or at any rate partakes of it in a fuller measure than the rest.” Hence, “in him alone do the natural parts hold the natural position; his upper part being turned towards that which is upper in the universe. For, of all animals, man alone stands erect” (656a17–13).

Although, as standing outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, technically Plato and Aristotle qualify as “pagans,” the last thing that would have appealed to either would have been dancing stark naked save for Birkenstocks, around a campfire, out in California. (Socrates might have welcomed the chance, so long as his fellow dancers were attractive young men.) To the contrary, the seminal Christian thinkers – Augustine and Aquinas, particularly – were greatly influenced by the Greeks. This, despite the fact that neither read Greek. Augustine got his understanding from the Neoplatonist Plotinus. Aquinas reaped the rewards of recent translations (into Latin) of original Greek texts, particularly those of Aristotle.

In his Confessions, Augustine’s characterization of God could have come straight out of the Republic. Necessary: “For God’s will is not a creature but is prior to the created order, since nothing would be created unless the Creator’s will preceded it. Therefore, God’s will belongs to his very substance.” Outside space: “no physical entity existed before heaven and earth.” Outside time: “Your ‘years’ neither come nor go. Our years come and go so that all may come in succession. All your ‘years’ exist in simultaneity, because they do not change; those going away are not thrust out by those coming in … Your Today is eternity.” Likewise, the design and creation of the Earth.

Ours is a world of great value, coming from God. “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Humans, one hardly need say, are “very, very good.” “Thou sayest not, ‘Let man be made,’ but Let us make man. Nor saidst Thou, ‘according to his kind’; but, after our image and likeness” (Augustine 396, Confessions, 13).

As one influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas tended more to an internal reading of final cause, but the message was the same. Their very functioning shows that living things are of great value and humans of the greatest value. For a Christian, faith will always outrank reason. Remember the story of Thomas, who was scolded for demanding evidence that the man before him was indeed the crucified Christ. But reason is crucially important. Nicely backing Aquinas’s conviction that reason does point to God is the fact that Aristotle embraced a geocentric view of the universe (with Earth at the center). This was very much in line with what Aquinas wanted to believe. The Earth is not just another planet, but (literally) the center of the universe, where all the action takes place. “The heavens are moved by God, and they in turn affect what happens down here on Earth” (Aquinas Reference Aquinas1947, Compendium Theologiae I, 4).

Mechanism

Back in the time of the Ancient Greeks, there were those who were unimpressed by the organic metaphor. They saw the world as meaningless, in the sense that there was no organizing force, internal or external. No values. Everything was the result of one thing happening after another. One set of particles, “atoms,” existing in otherwise empty space, the “void,” reconfiguring themselves driven by blind law. Given enough time, given enough combinations, and things would begin to work. Even before Socrates, the atomists – Leucippus, Democritus, and a little later Epicurus – were denying final cause and putting everything down to efficient cause. This got its fullest expression in the work of the pre-Christian Roman poet Lucretius (1950). Laying things out in his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), he made the case that all was a product of chance, with no direction.

Then, from grotesque figures – three legs, one coming in the middle of the back, no mouth or eyes but several pairs of ears, and more – slowly functioning creatures started to appear.

No final causes, only efficient causes. Eyes just appeared, and then they were put to use. To think otherwise is to get things backwards.

Expectedly, especially given the coming of Christianity, none of this convinced. It was at most a curiosity – an example of how not to use one’s reason. No matter how many typewriters, monkeys do not produce Shakespeare.

Then, around 1500, things started to change: With the Renaissance came a whole new appreciation of the thinking of the past, especially pre-Christian thinking. Writings such as On the Nature of Things were hauled out and studied in their own right. Paralleling the Renaissance was the Reformation, when Martin Luther, followed by Jean Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, broke from Rome and started the Protestant challenge. There are many ways of categorizing this major break, but above all it was a move from the overintellectualized Catholic form of Christianity – epitomized by the theology of Aquinas – to a more literal form of religion. A religion, based on the Bible – sola scriptura – undergirded by faith rather than reason. Famously, or perhaps notoriously, Luther said: “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God” (Luther Reference Luther1914, 51, 126, 7). This was not a critique of organicism as such, but it was a philosophy that did not regard organicism as God’s way of thinking, as one might put it.

Third and most important of all was the Scientific Revolution, from the heliocentric universe of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) (1543), to Newton’s theory of gravity, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) (1687). More than just raw science, it was a change of root metaphors, from the organism to the machine.

But why did this metaphor conquer? In major part because people were starting to invent and use machines. The clock above all: “it is no less natural for a clock constructed with this or that set of wheels to tell the time than it is for a tree which grew from this or that seed to produce the appropriate fruit.” Reduction! Take it to bits and see how it works. “Men who are experienced in dealing with machinery can take a particular machine whose function they know and, by looking at some of its parts, easily form a conjecture about the design of the other parts, which they cannot see.” Same for organisms. “In the same way I have attempted to consider the observable effects and parts of natural bodies and track down the imperceptible causes and particles which produce them” (Descartes, Discourse on Method [1637] 1985, 288–89). Note that a natural consequence of this way of thinking is that the notion of “mechanism” has two connected but distinct meanings. One refers to the root metaphor – the world overall is to be considered in machine terms. It is like one big functioning entity. The other refers to individual cases and causes. The mechanism driving a watch consists of springs and so forth connected in particular ways to make the hands circulate in a steady, regular manner. Generally, there is no ambiguity about the particular sense in which the term is being used.

Where Descartes led, others followed. In his A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, Robert Boyle, seventeenth-century chemist and philosopher, set things out (Figure 1.2). The world is

Figure 1.2 The clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, 1574. (This is the updated version of 1843.)

Most immediately, the heliocentric universe envisioned by Copernicus simply has objects going round and round according to unbroken law. Just like a clock. One might think there is an ultimate purpose. A clock tells the time. The universe provides a home for humankind. But this is not part of the scientific explanation. Unlike the organic metaphor, there are no objective values presupposed by this overarching metaphor. No values. Where then does God figure in all of this? He was a “retired engineer” (Dijksterhuis Reference Dijksterhuis1961, 491). In a way this is true. We are moving from the organicist’s God, always at work, to a more distant God, who sets things going and then stands back.

Note that this does not mean that God is nonexistent, although people certainly thought Lucretius veered that way. But it does push one toward what is known as “deism” – God created and then stood back – as opposed to “theism” – the God of the Christian always involved in His creation. In the words of the eighteenth-century thinker Matthew Tindal, Jesus was simply telling us that everything is ruled by unbroken law. “The Religion of the Gospel is the true original Religion of Reason and Nature” (1730, 6).

Evolution

As we move on past the Scientific Revolution, we enter the Age of the Enlightenment. Until then, Christianity had been a religion where we are always dependent on God. Thanks to Adam and Eve, we are all tainted by sin, and, except through the sacrifice on the cross, we are lost. This is made clear in the much loved hymn of Isaac Watts (Reference Watts1707).

Providence!

Now, in the opinion of Enlightenment thinkers, we must rely on ourselves. God is not going to intervene. But, thanks to our discoveries – in medicine, in engineering, in running our lives – we can improve our lot.

Progress!

And very soon people began to wonder if progress was more widespread. God is not going to create things miraculously. This must be left to the laws of nature. But can we slip in values even in a mechanist’s view of the world? The French philosophe Denis Diderot is perhaps best known for his pornographic writing about lesbian nuns.

Expectedly, one who had so freed himself from the constraints of conventional religion felt open to speculate about the possibility of progress working its way in the world of animals and plants. “Just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an individual begins, so to speak, grows, subsists, decays and passes away, could it not be the same with the whole species?” Continuing:

Indeed, who dare now say that everything is over? Life

Playing the same song, on the other side of the Channel, was the English physician and part-time poet Erasmus Darwin (paternal grandfather of Charles). He too was given to somewhat risqué thoughts on sexuality, although he confined his attentions to plants rather than nuns.

Turning to the nature of species, he gave full throat to the ideas that so excited Diderot.

And lest there be any mistake, explicitly Darwin tied this in with thoughts of cultural progress. The idea of evolution “is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants” (Darwin [Reference Darwin1794–96] 1801, 2:247–48). Value!

Best known of all, the French biologist, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, writing at about the same time as Darwin – his masterwork, Philosophie Zoologique, was published in 1809 – seems to have presupposed some kind of Aristotelian vital force, teleologically directed toward humans (Figure 1.3). Note that Lamarck was not thinking in tree-metaphor terms. The higher animals are at the bottom rather than the top. He believed that life is continuously spontaneously generated, and all newly generated organisms follow the same path. Hence, if lions go extinct, we just have to wait and then more will appear, having followed the same path of those now gone. Famously, Lamarck is better known today for his secondary mechanism, one which now bears his name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The blacksmith’s arm gets more muscular thanks to days at the forge, and so his children are born with muscular arms built-in, as it were. But even if this be true – another point we shall pick up on – it hardly explains full-blown evolution. Muscular arms do not explain the evolution of reptiles from fish, or mammals from reptiles.

Figure 1.3 Lamarck’s history of life.

Lamarck’s neo-Aristotelianism is, in a way, more consistent than Erasmus Darwin’s views. Darwin wants to slip in progress, a value notion, and hold on to a mechanist view of the physical world. Lamarck is more openly rejecting pure mechanism as a root metaphor. Yet this gives us the clue to the big difficulty. How, if we do not appeal to some kind of teleological vital force, do we explain the final-cause nature of organisms – fins, wings, legs, brains? We are cast right back to the Lucretius problem. Blind law simply does not make for design-like features. And if we opt for a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian solution, as a (root metaphor) mechanist one is no better off. True, God designed it all in the beginning, but we are still stuck with the blind-law problem. Robert Boyle spotted this. He embraced mechanism fully for the nonorganic world. Planets circling the sun, qua science, have no purpose. The world is (objectively) value-free.

But there is still the problem of organisms. They seem to be value impregnated. Whether we care or not, the heart is of value to the mammal. And progress likewise brings in value, again whether we care or not. Boyle’s solution was to kick this problem out of science and to say it was all a problem for religion. God did intervene directly when it comes to the final-cause nature of organisms. In other words, talk of mechanisms is part of science. Talk of final causes is part of theology! In his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, Boyle wrote:

Continuing, that supposing that “a man’s eyes were made by chance, argues, that they need have no relation to a designing agent; and the use, that a man makes of them, may be either casual too, or at least may be an effect of his knowledge, not of nature’s.” However, intermingling science and religion, the penalty from taking us away from a designing intelligence is taking us from the chance to do science – the urge to dissect and to understand how the eye “is as exquisitely fitted to be an organ of sight, as the best artificer in the world could have framed a little engine, purposely and mainly designed for the use of seeing” (5: 398).

So, Boyle tells us, we go from science to theology and onto God. First:

Then, second, the science finished, theology steps up to the plate: “It is rational, from the manifest fitness of some things to cosmical or animal ends or uses, to infer, that they were framed or ordained in reference there unto by an intelligent and designing agent” (5: 428). In short, from a scientific study of what Boyle called “contrivance,” in the domain of science, we go on to inferences about design – or rather Design – in the domain of theology. Thanks particularly to the influence of Aquinas, organisms were understood in an Aristotelian way. With the coming of mechanism as a root metaphor, Aristotelian vital forces were banished from science, and purpose, inasmuch as it applies to organisms, was seen as a consequence of Plato’s Demiurge, now (thanks particularly to Augustine) identified as the Christian God.

A move from Aristotle to Plato. A solution. To us, it may not seem an altogether satisfactory solution. It is, however, important to place this in historical context. The English – not the Scots, who, thanks to Calvin’s disciple John Knox, became hard-line Presbyterians – had a particularly idiosyncratic form of Protestantism. Their religion was a function, not of theological disputes, but of the fact that Henry VIII wanted to free himself from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The pope wouldn’t let him. So he picked up his country and went home. When Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne, became queen, she inherited a hybrid religion, with the fabric and ceremonies of the previous Catholicism melded with a mild Calvinistic theology. To cement their religion, for a country starting to rely more and more on machinery, emphasizing natural theology – reason and evidence – was a slam dunk. So, for Boyle and for those who followed him, like John Ray (the first in a long line of parson–naturalists and a pioneer in modern taxonomy), making much of God’s designing influence was part of the package of being English. In a way, it was no compromise, and it did mean that on and through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, the English could go on doing what we today would call “biology” (Ruse Reference Ruse2003). Albeit, at the cost (as others would regard it) of acknowledging that, unlike the study of planets, we are no longer doing science.

Expectedly, we find continental philosophers worrying about this. The greatest of them all, Immanuel Kant, devoted a considerable section of his Third Critique, The Critique of Teleological Judgement (1790), to this very problem. As an avowed Newtonian, Kant started with the premise that organisms are just machines. As one raised a Pietist (a kind of ultra-Lutheran), Kant wanted no truck with natural theology and the like. Given that science is the domain of reason and evidence, we cannot therefore put final cause down to God (even if, on faith, we may believe this). Kant’s trick – “evasive strategy,” if you like – was to regard final-cause thinking as a heuristic guide. Final causes help us think about organisms. They are “regulative.” They are not part of reality.

One much influenced by Kant’s ideas – to whose critical philosophy he “was greatly indebted” – was the French father of comparative anatomy, Georges Cuvier (Coleman Reference Coleman1964, 16). He was born in one of the border provinces that was not then incorporated into France – which accounts both for his having been German-educated and Protestant. Based on this Protestantism and reaffirmed by careful study of Aristotle, Cuvier made the Kantian insistence on teleology central to his approach to life, both living and dead. He stressed that, in considering an organism, we have to look at how the various parts fit and work together. We have to dig into the organization of the organism and ask about purposes. Justifying this, as it were, was something Cuvier called the “conditions of existence.” This demands that we look at the parts of organisms from a final-cause perspective. “As nothing can exist without the reunion of those conditions which render its existence possible, the component parts of each being must be so arranged as to render possible the whole being, not only with regard to itself but to its surrounding relations.” What does this imply for those who would try to understand things? “The analysis of these conditions frequently conducts us to general laws, as certain as those that are derived from calculation or experiment” (Cuvier Reference Cuvier1817, 1, 3–4).

We must keep value questions in front of us all the time. What is the purpose of a particular part? It is hard to overestimate the importance of this principle for nineteenth-century biology. The British particularly seized on it as something exactly paralleling their natural-theological concerns. For Cuvier, for all that he was a Protestant, he was first a Frenchman in the tradition of Descartes. He wanted no part of the Creator in his science. For the British, however, it was important to show that their work was very much in line with proper (English) theological thinking (Ruse Reference Ruse1979). They still stood in the tradition going back to Boyle and earlier, and – especially since many of the scientists were fellows of Oxbridge colleges and hence necessarily had to be ordained members of the established (Anglican) church – they needed a shield against those who claimed that empirical inquiry can lead only to infidelity and heresy, and worse. When the greatest biologist of the time thrust final-cause thinking forward, it was manna from heaven, to coin a phrase. Now, someone like William Whewell (pronounced “Hule”), historian and philosopher of science and future master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had the perfect escape from heretical visions like that of Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck. The problem of final cause meant that, seeing science as Newtonian and hence under the machine root metaphor, there could be no scientific solution to the problem of organic origins. “Science says nothing, but she points upwards” (Whewell Reference Whewell1837, 3, 588).

“Manna from heaven.” Manna, as we shall see in Chapter 2, that when fermented, somewhat unexpectedly and not entirely happily, proved to have the kick of a horse.