The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand

My argument for Darwinian natural right originated as a response to what Leo Strauss had said in his Introduction to Natural Right and History.  Strauss explained: "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe.  All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them."  This dependence of natural right on a teleological view of the universe was clearly seen by Aristotle, Strauss explained.  The "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."

I agreed with Roger Masters that Strauss was wrong to suggest that the question of teleology depended on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle's teleology was primarily biological, and so the question was whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature, and whether modern Darwinian biology supports such a teleological explanation of organisms.

My answer to this question was that Darwinian biology really does support Aristotelian teleology.  My thinking here was decisively influenced by my reading of Allan Gotthelf's dissertation at Columbia University--"Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality" (1975)--and some of his other writing (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 238-43).  I was persuaded by Gotthelf that Aristotle's final causality is best interpreted as living nature's irreducible potential for form: the development, structure, and functioning of a living organism manifest the actualization of its potential for organic form, an actualization that depends on, but is not reducible to, the natural potentialities of its material elements.  Moreover, far from refuting Aristotle's teleology, modern Darwinian biology provides an evolutionary explanation for living nature's irreducible potential for form.

I was pleased, therefore, to see that Oxford University Press has recently published a collection of Gotthelf's papers on Aristotle's biology--Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology (2012).  Although I have read most of these papers in their earlier versions as articles, I had not read the two papers at the end of the book--"Darwin on Aristotle" and "Aristotle as Scientist: A Proper Verdict."  These remarkably brilliant papers reinforce my response to Strauss by showing that Aristotle's teleological biology was an empirically based science, and that this teleological science is deepened by modern Darwinian science.  For me, this provides the biological solution to Strauss's "problem of natural right."

But while my motivation for formulating the idea of Darwinian natural right came mostly from my reading of Strauss, Gotthelf's motivation came from the influence of Ayn Rand.  As a college student, he came under the spell of Rand from reading Atlas Shrugged.   He met and talked with Rand, and he shared her enthusiasm for Aristotle as the greatest philosopher for explaining the rational basis of human existence as part of the natural world, without any need for a Platonic transcendence of nature.

As an epigram for his new book, Gotthelf quotes the following passage from Rand's review of John Herman Randall's Aristotle (1962):

"For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature.  And consciousness is a natural attribute of certain living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action--not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension.  For Aristotle, 'living' and 'knowing' are facts of reality; man's mind is neither unnatural nor supernatural, but natural--and this is the root of Aristotle's greatness, of the immeasurable distance that separates him from other thinkers.

"Life--and its highest form, man's life--is the central fact in Aristotle's view of reality.  The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle's philosophy is 'biocentric.'

"This is the source of Aristotle's intense concern with the study of living entities, the source of the enormously 'pro-life' attitude that dominates his thinking."

This points to Rand's biocentric conception of ethics--that value exists only for living organisms, because it is only for living entities that existence is an achievement--an end or goal--that requires securing the conditions for one's existence and avoiding the threats to one's existence.  Only for living organisms does it makes sense to say that some things are good for them and other things bad for them.  Thus it is that we can speak of what is naturally right or desirable for human beings as that which conforms to their nature in securing the conditions for their life.

Wanting to understand this Aristotelian and Randian conception of biological teleology, Gotthelf decided to study under Randall at Columbia University, where he could write his dissertation on Aristotle's biology, while being close to Rand in New York City.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, John Dewey delivered a lecture on "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy," in which he argued that Darwin exerted his greatest influence on philosophy by refuting Aristotelian biology.  But on the centennial anniversary of Darwin's Origin, Randall delivered a lecture on "The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy."  Contrary to Dewey, Randall concluded that, as a result of Darwin's influence, "nature is once more for us, as for the Greeks, full of implicit ends and ideals."  Randall argued, "When Darwin led men to take biology seriously once more, they had to reintroduce these functional concepts that physicists had forgotten--means and ends, function, teleology, and time."

Gotthelf elaborated Randall's thought in a long intellectual career devoted to studying Aristotle's philosophy of biology.  Along with David Balme, James Lennox, and a few other scholars, Gotthelf has stirred a renewed interest in Aristotle's biology.

The intellectual fruitfulness of this research is illustrated in the last two papers at the end of his new book.  In "Darwin on Aristotle," Gotthelf shows how Darwin recognized Aristotle's greatness as a biological scientist, and perhaps, in particular, Darwin recognized some anticipation of his own understanding of biological teleology in Aristotle's writings.

A few months before his death in 1882, Darwin received from William Ogle a copy of his new translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals.  As early as 1838, Darwin had written in a notebook a list of things "to be read," which included "Read Aristotle to see whether any my views very ancient."  Many years later, in a letter dated February 12, 1879, he confessed his shame that he had never read Aristotle, but he wrote: "From extracts, which I have seen, I have an unbounded respect for him, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest observers, that ever lived."  And, indeed, as Gotthelf indicates, many of the books Darwin read contained references to and quotations from Aristotle's biological works.  But it was not until he received Ogle's translation that Darwin read Aristotle for himself. 

One month after receiving Ogle's translation, Darwin wrote the following letter to Ogle (on February 22, 1882):

"You must let me thank you for the pleasure which the Introduction to the Aristotle book has given me.  I have rarely read anything which has interested me more; though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper.  From quotations which I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was.  Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.--How curious, also, his ignorance on some points as on muscles as the means of movement--I am glad that you have explained in so probable a manner some of the grossest mistakes attributed to him--I never realized before reading your book to what an enormous summation of labour we owe even our common knowledge.  I wish old Aristotle could know what a grand Defender of the Faith he had found in you."

Unfortunately, Darwin died two months later (April 19), without leaving any evidence that he had read more of the book or any explanation of what exactly he found so exciting in what he had read.  Gotthelf points out, however, that if Darwin read "a quarter of the book proper," that would include Ogle's Introduction and the first book of the Parts of Animals, in which Aristotle writes about his teleological explanation of animal parts and animal classification.

Gotthelf speculates that what excited Darwin in his reading of Aristotle was seeing that he and Aristotle were in basic agreement about biological teleology.  If so, this would contradict Ogle's understanding of the question of teleology.  In his Introduction to his book and in an earlier letter that he had written to Darwin, Ogle set up a fundamental contrast between teleology and mechanism, with Aristotle and Plato on the side of teleology and Democritus and Darwin on the side of mechanism.  In his Introduction, Ogle wrote: "One group of philosophers there was, who fancied that they found an adequate cause in the necessary operations of the inherent properties of matter; while another sought a solution in the intelligent action of a benevolent and foreseeing agent, whom they called God, or Nature, as the case might be."

Gotthelf argues persuasively that Ogle has misinterpreted both Aristotle and Darwin:

"But, contrary to Ogle's sentiment, Aristotle's natures are not literally intelligent, not literally planners, and arguably the philosopher's genius lies in plotting a third course between these two pictures, and defending it as scientifically legitimate.  This third course involves the postulation not of an 'intelligent Nature' but of inherent natures--that is, of natural capacities (in Greek, dunameis) directed at form, irreducible to the capacities for the production of a living organism of a particular type that are irreducible to the capacities of the elements that constitute such an organism.  From that perspective the isomorphism with Darwin becomes clear, and there is some evidence that Darwin himself saw it" (367).

Darwin seemed to recognize the teleological character of his evolutionary science.  In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology."  In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that."  So, we can infer, Gotthelf suggests, that when Darwin read Aristotle's explanation of biological teleology, he saw that he really was bringing back into science a teleological conception of living nature that was originally formulated by Aristotle.

Gotthelf's account of the common ground between Aristotle, Darwin, and modern biology on the question of teleology is what I have found most insightful.  For Aristotle, the directiveness and adaptiveness of organisms are basic, irreducible facts about nature.  For modern biology, the directiveness of organisms comes from the DNA program, and the adaptiveness of organisms comes from natural selection (368-69, 389-91).  As an empirical scientist, Aristotle would be open to the modern biological explanations, Gotthelf argues, because for Aristotle determining the most basic level of explanation is an empirical question.  Gotthelf writes:

"These are the conclusions of a theoretical scientist, a student of nature.  Were Aristotle to reappear tomorrow and be presented with the results of the last several hundred years of biochemistry and evolutionary theory, including the evidence which grounds them, my view is that (after recovering from the most awe-filled experience of his life) he would surely retreat from his insistence that the directiveness in nature is a primitive directiveness and the adaptiveness in nature a basic fact.  Facts they would remain, but they would, for him, as for us, no longer be basic.  The determination of what the basic level of explanation is, is for Aristotle ultimately an empirical or scientific matter" (392).

Here then is the solution to Strauss's "problem of natural right":  modern natural science has not refuted natural teleology, because, on the contrary, modern Darwinian biology provides the ultimate explanation for the goal-directed nature of organisms, including human beings, which thus sustains the teleological ground for the idea of natural right.

Some of these points are elaborated in some previous posts that can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  

I was saddened to learn, shortly after writing this post, that Gotthelf died a few days ago.  I did not know him personally.  But I will remember him for a body of intellectual work that has helped me think through some of the deep questions indicated in this post.

Darwinian Conservatism Supports Emergent Complexity and Immanent Teleology: A Response to Robert Koons

The Darwinian conservatism of the permanent things requires a biological teleology of human nature.  Because one needs to claim that evolved human nature is directed to certain ends or goals that constitute the natural norms (the permanent things) of human existence, so that the fulfillment of those norms can be understood as the human good.

By contrast, the metaphysical conservatives argue that modern science--and particularly Darwinian biology--denies teleology in denying that human beings can have natural ends.  The metaphysical conservatives claim that for modern science, all reality is understood to be nothing but the blind motion of particles in space governed by material and mechanistic laws of motion; and in such a world, there can be no final causation.  At the Kirk Center conference, that claim was made by Robert Koons (University of Texas at Austin) on a panel on "Conservatism and Religion."

Koons said this as part of his general argument that modern science has been "mostly a very bad thing."  On this point, he saw himself as agreeing with C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man that "modern science was born at an inauspicious hour and in an unhealthy neighborhood."

I saw two problems in Koons' presentation.  First, he identified modern science with a reductionistic physics, and he was silent about the emergent complexity of biology.  Second, in arguing that modern science rejects teleology, he ignored the distinction between cosmic teleology and immanent teleology.

EMERGENT COMPLEXITY IN DARWINIAN BIOLOGY

In my chapter on "Emergence" in Darwinian Conservatism, I argue for the "emergent evolution of the soul in the brain," and I defend the idea of emergence as an alternative to both reductionism and dualism. As I have argued in previous posts, the simplest expression of the idea of emergence is that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomena are those complex wholes with properties that we could not explain or predict from our knowledge of the parts. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine chemically to form water, we see emergent properties in water that we could not have predicted from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. This emergence of novelty is manifested throughout the evolution of the universe. As we pass through levels of complexity, we find new properties at higher levels that are not fully reducible to the lower levels. This idea of emergence denies strong reductionism, because it denies that the higher levels of organization can be completely reduced to the lower levels. But the idea of emergence also denies dualism, because it denies any radical separation of matter and mind.

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin recognized--if only implicitly--that human beings show an emergent difference in kind from other animals.  Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105).  Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.  We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135).  And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).

Darwin could implicitly affirm such emergent differences in kind without affirming any radical differences in kind.  Emergent differences in kind can be explained by natural science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary expansion of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates.  With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their hominid ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity.

Now we know from the work of neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel that human beings are unique as compared with other primates in that human beings have 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion in the prefrontal cortex.  The human mind or soul can arise from a natural process of emergent evolution in which differences in degree become differences in kind after passing over a critical threshold in the size and complexity of the primate brain.  As a consequence of her research, we can now identify that critical threshold as the remarkably large number of neurons in the human cerebral cortex and particularly in the prefrontal cortex.  That probably explains the three points of human uniqueness that Darwin saw--self-conscious awareness, morality, and language.

Koons is silent about this emergent complexity of human biology in asserting that all of modern science must reduce reality to the motion of particles in space.

IMMANENT TELEOLOGY IN DARWINIAN BIOLOGY

Koons is also silent about how Darwinian biologists recognize the immanent teleology of living beings even though they deny the cosmic teleology of the universe.  In insisting that modern science denies teleology, Koons has to assume that cosmic teleology is the only kind of teleology.  And thus he ignores the fact that for Aristotle natural teleology was more clearly biological than cosmological.

As I have argued previously, Darwin recognized the teleological character of his evolutionary science.  In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology."  In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that."  So, we can infer, that when Darwin read Aristotle's explanation of biological teleology in the Parts of Animals and expressed his admiration for Aristotle's biological science, Darwin saw that he really was bringing back into science a teleological conception of living nature that was originally formulated by Aristotle.

We need to see that while Darwin denied cosmic teleology, he affirmed immanent teleology. The natural evolution of living beings does not conform to any cosmic design. But that natural evolution does produce species that show an internal teleology in being directed to ends or goals. For example, a mammalian species is naturally adapted for parental care, so that mothers caring for their offspring can be explained teleologically as goal-directed behavior. Such species-specific, immanent teleology is the only kind of teleology that Aristotle saw in the living world, and modern biology confirms such Aristotelian teleology.

Insofar as Darwinian biology allows for emergent complexity and immanent teleology, this is enough for a Darwinian conservatism.

Prudence or Transcendence?--A Reply to Carson Holloway

Carson Holloway is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He earned his Ph.D. at Northern Illinois University, where I had the great pleasure of being one of his teachers. As often happens with good students, he challenged his teachers; and in particular, he has made disagreeing with me a big part of his career. His book The Right Darwin? is a critique of my Darwinian Natural Right. He has edited a book criticizing my article "Statesmanship as Magnanimity: Classical, Christian, and Modern." And he has written a critical response to Darwinian Conservatism as a contributor to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.

Now he has written two articles on Darwinian political thought for the Witherspoon Institute, which can be found here and here. In criticizing the political interpretations of Darwinism, he compares the Darwinian Left as represented by John Dewey and Peter Singer and the Darwinian Right as represented by William Graham Sumner and me.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Dewey delivered a lecture on "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy." Holloway takes this lecture as the best statement of Dewey's Darwinian thought. According to Dewey in this lecture, Darwin exerted his greatest influence by refuting Aristotelian teleology. Aristotle believed that nature conformed to a rational design such that each thing served some purpose in the order of the universe, but Darwin showed that species evolved through the struggle for existence without any preordained plan or purpose. Therefore, Dewey argues, if we accept Darwinian biology, we have to reject Aristotelian political thought as it rests on an unscientific view of nature.

Holloway seems to accept Dewey's claim that Darwin necessarily denied all forms of teleology. I don't agree. On the centennial anniversary of Darwin's Origin, John Herman Randall delivered a lecture on "The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy." Contrary to Dewey, Randall concluded that, as a result of Darwin's influence, "nature is once more for us, as for the Greeks, full of implicit ends and ideals." Randall argued, "When Darwin led men to take biology seriously once more, they had to reintroduce these functional concepts that physicists had forgotten--means and ends, function, teleology, and time." Obviously, there is confusion among Darwin's interpreters as to whether evolutionary biology denies Aristotelian teleology (as Dewey says) or confirms it (as Randall says).

I have argued that to clear up this confusion, we need to see that while Darwin denied cosmic teleology, he affirmed immanent teleology. The natural evolution of living beings does not conform to any cosmic design. But that natural evolution does produce species that show an internal teleology in being directed to ends or goals. For example, a mammalian species is naturally adapted for parental care, so that mothers caring for their offspring can be explained teleologically as goal-directed behavior. Such species-specific, immanent teleology is the only kind of teleology that Aristotle saw in the living world, and modern biology confirms such Aristotelian teleology.

Holloway is not satisfied with such immanent teleology, however, because he is a metaphysical conservative who believes that the moral order of the universe requires what he has called "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." Although this is not explicitly stated in these two Witherspoon Institute articles, it's clearly stated in Holloway's other writings.

Although Holloway agrees with me that Darwinian science might go far in explaining the range of natural human desires, he argues that this cannot explain human morality, because moral choice requires a ranking of desires--preferring some as good and rejecting others as bad--which requires normative principles that go beyond empirical science.

I have argued that a full Darwinian account of morality requires understanding the complex interaction between natural moral sentiments, customary moral traditions, and individual moral judgments. So, for example, to understand the moral order of property in human life, we need to explain not only the natural propensities to property, but also the customary traditions of property claims and the formal laws of property rights. Resolving conflicts over property or conflicts between the desire for property and other desires requires prudence or practical judgment in deciding what is best for particular individuals or particular societies in particular circumstances. Natural human desires or propensities constrain but do not specify how property is to be defined or arranged in specific cases. I elaborate this point in my chapter on property in Darwinian Conservatism.

This appeal to human prudence is not enough for Holloway, because he believes that morality is impossible without some appeal to a transhuman, cosmic principle of goodness grounded in the divine. In his contribution to the Disputed Question book, he insists that a Darwinian morality of human nature cannot provide any ranking of our natural desires that allows us to choose the good over the bad. "Our ability to distinguish between the good and the bad in human nature depends on some principle that somehow transcends human nature itself. It is this higher source of principle that the older version of natural law could supply and that Darwinian conservatism cannot" (l67).

What is this "principle that somehow transcends human nature"? Holloway is not clear about this. But as far as I can tell, it's the Biblical principle of universal love based on the equal dignity of all human beings as created by God in His image. As I have indicated in my various responses to Holloway, I don't think he has gone far enough in explaining exactly what this principle means, how it is derived from the Bible, why he expects all human beings to live by it, and how it would guide our particular moral decisions.

Does universal love require an absolutely indiscriminate humanitarianism--so that we would love all human beings equally without any partiality at all for those close to us? Would this require absolute pacifism as an expression of the "love your enemies" teaching? Would this require the abolition of private property and private families? Are the Christian socialists and pacifists correct in their interpretation of universal love?

Or would Holloway concede that these positions would go against human nature? But how could he make this concession without falling back into the Darwinian naturalism that he wants to reject?

My elaboration of some of these points in other posts can be found here, here, here., and here.

Aristotle, Darwin, and Marjorie Grene

Marjorie Grene, a retired professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech University, died March 16 in Blacksburg, Virginia, at the age of 98. Her obituary in the New York Times surveys her life.

Grene was a major scholar of philosophy who became known as one of the leaders in the philosophy of biology. When I first began (about 25 years ago) to think about the philosophy of biology--and especially the comparison of Aristotelian biology and Darwinian biology--I studied some of her writings and found them both illuminating and confusing.

Her book on Aristotle--A Portrait of Aristotle (1963)--was illuminating in showing how Aristotle's biology influenced all of his philosophic thought. But the book was also confusing, because while much of what she wrote suggested that Aristotle's biological thought was still defensible today, she also declared that the evolution of species was an "incontrovertible fact" that refuted Aristotle's science. From the evolution of species, it follows that:

"there is no being-what-it-is of each kind of thing, no ultimate and final definition of each natural class of substances, from which, with the necessary definiteness and precision, an Aristotelian science could take its start. We live for better or worse in an evolutionary universe, and, in the last analysis, evolution and Aristotelian science will not mix" (232).

But then in this same book, she seems to criticize Darwin and Darwinian science as unduly mechanistic and reductionistic. "The mysterious multifariousness of living nature, formerly a massive obstacle to mechanistic thinking, was transformed by Darwin's genius into an indefinite aggregate of random changes mechanically maintained. Life itself became machinery, made by no one for no purpose except barely to survive" (228). In later writings, however, she confessed that this was a misinterpretation of Darwinian science based on her then limited understanding of Darwin.

Grene's growing respect for Darwin in her later writings suggested to some readers that she saw common ground between Aristotle and Darwin. For example, David Depew (at the University of Iowa) is a scholarly student both of Aristotle and Darwin who co-authored a book on the history of the philosophy of biology with Grene. He suggests, in his contribution to The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene (The Library of Living Philosophers, 2002), that Grene was promoting a reconciliation between Aristotle and Darwin. But then Grene responded to him by denying this--"I don't want to effect a rapprochement between Aristotle and Darwin."

I am not enough a student of Grene's work to clear up this confusion. But I will say that reading her work--especially the writings collected in her book The Understanding of Nature (1974)--helped me to think through three critical issues--(1) reductionism, (2) teleology, and (3) the concept of species. Even if she herself saw no rapprochement between Aristotle and Darwin, she helped me to see some possible agreement between Aristotelian and Darwinian thinking on these three points. (Chapter 9--"The Ends and Kinds of Life"--of Darwinian Natural Right is my one piece of writing most pertinent to these issues.)

(1) Aristotle denies that living nature can be completely reduced to mere matter in motion. Although some biologists have argued for such materialist reductionism, this has never been achieved, and this failure points to the necessity for hierarchical explanations of life in which higher levels of formal organization cannot be simply reduced to lower levels. For example, the sequence of nucleotide bases in a DNA chain can convey genetic information only if the sequence has not been simply determined by physical-chemical laws.

(2) Although modern science may have refuted the idea of cosmic teleology--the idea that everything in the universe is directed to some hierarchy of ends or purposes--modern Darwinian science must still appeal to immanent teleology in that particular organic processes and particular species show some direction to particular ends. Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed.

(3) Many Darwinians (such as Ernst Mayr and David Hull) have asserted that Aristotle's "essentialist" or "typological" conception of species has been refuted by the "populationist" conception of species in evolutionary science. If Aristotle believed that each species manifested an eternal "essence"--an unchanging set of traits that constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for defining a species--then the Darwinian claim that all species evolve through history--coming into being and passing away--would seem to deny Aristotle's position.

As I have indicated in my post on David Buller's argument, one could conclude from this that there is no such thing as human nature, because the human species like every other species is a contingent product of evolutionary history that is too variable to constitute an eternal essence. Buller's reasoning is derived from David Hull. And I respond to Buller the way Grene responds to Hull. "Why, just because something does not last forever, should it lack a nature?," Grene asks. "That animals are born and die doesn't mean you can't tell one from another while it lasts, or even after it is dead." Although species are not eternally fixed, since they have evolved from ancestral species, that does not make them any less real during the time of their existence.

Richard Richards, a philosopher of biology at the University of Alabama, has suggested to me another way of stating this idea. Hull and Buller are correct to say that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions--essential conditions in the strong sense--that determine the membership of a living individual in a biological class. But there can still be "diagnostic" traits that distinguish one species from another. So even if there are no "essential" traits in the strong sense that define Homo sapiens, we can still see the stability in the diagnostic traits that identify human beings as human beings. And that's enough for speaking about "human nature." Moreover, Richards suggests, the view of Mayr and Hull that Aristotle was a strict "essentialist" in some strong sense is false.

The Darwinian affirmation of the historicity of life--that both living individuals and the species of life come into being and pass away--is compatible with an Aristotelian study of living nature and human nature. But many people will find this deeply disturbing. Those of a Platonic bent will worry that without eternal essences, everything collapses into a nihilistic flux. Those influenced by Biblical religion will worry that without an eternal Creator, evolving nature provides no enduring standards of thought or action.

But these worries from Platonic philosophy and Biblical religion arise from a false dichotomy of eternal fixity versus incoherent flux. Despite the historicity of nature in evolutionary time, the patterns in living nature are stable enough over long periods of time to enable our apprehension of natural kinds as enduring features of the world.

Shouldn't we consider ourselves lucky to have emerged from the natural history of life as the one form of life capable of studying that natural history and wondering what it all means?

I have elaborated some of these points in other posts.

Darwin and Mansfield on Manliness

Harvey Mansfield's new book Manliness is one of the most profound books I have read in recent years. It is a deep study of the nature of human sex differences and of the moral and political implications of those differences.

Mansfield's reasoning about the human nature of male and female is very close to what I have said about sex differences in Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism. And yet he fails to fully embrace Darwinian science because he does not rightly understand the Darwinian account of human nature as confirming Aristotelian naturalism. Mansfield's mistakes in his view of Darwinian biology are shared with other Straussians who fail to see how Darwinism supports the idea of natural right.

Mansfield defines manliness as expressed in assertiveness and spiritedness. He regards such manliness as both good and bad, but essential for politics.

He thinks that in modern liberal society, manliness exists, but it is unemployed. The danger in this situation comes from either too little manliness (bourgeois softness) or too much manliness (Nietzschean will to power). We need to see the wisdom in the reasoning of Plato and Aristotle, who saw the need for a middle ground between too little manliness and too much.

Against the tendency to explain manliness as falling on one side or the other of the nature/nurture dichotomy, Mansfield explains it as emerging from the complex cooperation of nature and nurture. Manliness is a social construction that cultivates a natural inclination.

While criticizing the radical feminist pursuit of gender neutrality, in which manliness would be denied or repressed, Mansfield does not think we can go back to traditional arrangements--with women confined to the home and men free for public careers. Ultimately, he proposes a new liberal feminism based on the liberal distinction between public and private, state and society, so that there would be formal gender neutrality in the public realm but not in the private realm. He concludes: "We need to both respect and ignore sex differences" (228).

Mansfield surveys some of the evidence and reasoning from Darwinian biology that confirms his assertion of differences in men and women rooted in nature that are not likely to be radically altered or abolished by social engineering. But even as he does this, he makes four criticisms of the Darwinian view of manliness.

First, although Darwin rightly sees manliness as aggression, he does not see how that manly aggression among human males becomes assertiveness (48-49, 64-65).

Second, because Darwin does not recognize manly assertiveness, he does not see how such assertiveness supports male dominance in politics (49-50).

Third, the Darwinian denial of eternal, fixed nature and cosmic teleology prepares the way for nihilism (16, 83, 89, 196, 201).

Finally, Darwin assumes a "spontaneous nature" that denies the need for habituation and reasoning in cultivating natural inclinations (192-93, 196-97, 202, 215).

The first criticism is inaccurate. Male assertiveness is a clear theme in Darwin's writing. In The Descent of Man (London: J. Murray, 1871), Darwin wrote: "Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness" (2:326). He saw men as showing "higher energy, perseverance, and courage" than women in the pursuit of "eminence" and "victory" (2:327-28).

Against the second criticism--Darwin's neglect of politics--I would point to Darwin's account of human sociability as manifested in distinct communities with leaders that lead them in competition with other communities (1:74, 79, 84-85, 95). Mansfield is simply wrong when he asserts that in Darwin's writing, we have no politics, because "all we have is the individual and the species" (1:49).

Mansfield's third criticism is hard to handle, because while he warns that the Darwinian denial of the eternity of species and cosmic teleology prepares for nihilism, he never explicitly affirms the truth of the eternity of species and cosmic teleology.

Mansfield concedes that Darwin himself was not a nihilist. He was not, I would say, because he believed that each species had a species-specific nature, so that there were natural ends for each species for as long as the species endured. This sustains an immanent teleology of species-specific ends as a ground for natural right without any need for a cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole is ordered to some end. That species are not eternal does not deny the natural order of each species for as long as it exists. As Aristotle said: "The Idea of the Good will not be any more good because it is eternal, seeing that a white thing that lasts for a long time is not whiter than a white thing that lasts for a day" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1096b3-5). For as long as the human species exists in its present form, there will be natural differences between men and women, and we will need to take those diffences seriously.

Mansfield's fourth criticism--Darwin saw only "spontaneous nature"--is wrong, because Darwin repeatedly affirmed the importance of habit, custom, and reason in cultivating human nature. In this respect, as in many others, Darwin was close to Aristotle. Darwin explained that "the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection" (2:404; see also 1:165-166, 1:173).

Darwin would agree with Mansfield that natural human inclinations--such as manliness--set a natural guide for action, but we are free to decide how to follow that natural guide as we deliberate about how best to cultivate and direct those inclinations.

If Mansfield--and other Straussian conservatives--were to recognize how Darwinian science supports Aristotelian naturalism, they might see the wisdom in Darwinian natural right and Darwinian conservatism.

Strauss, Darwin, and the Pursuit of a Comprehensive Natural Science

In their recent essay (“Skepticism, Experience, and Science”), Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise claim that the scholars in the tradition of Leo Strauss have failed to include the knowledge gained by modern natural science—particularly, physics and biology—as part of their recovery of the skeptical political philosophy that began with Plato and Aristotle.[1]  Consequently, they have failed to show how political philosophy as the architectonic science can contribute to the pursuit of a modern comprehensive science of the whole. 

Instead of engaging the deep questions raised by modern science about the universe and the place of human beings in that universe, Ellmers and Wise contend, Straussian scholars have withdrawn into a narrow academic profession devoted mostly to commentaries on old texts that repeat the standard interpretive themes of the Straussian tradition of thought.  Ellmers and Wise say that increasingly the new generation of students is losing interest in Straussian teachers who have little to say about the profound issues arising in modern science and technology.

Ellmers and Wise suggest but do not elaborate what I see as the explanation for this situation—Strauss’s fear that the victory of modern natural science over Aristotelian science has created a problem for natural right for which there is no adequate solution that would allow natural right to be rooted in a comprehensive science of nature.

The Problem of Natural Right

As Strauss explained it in the Introduction to Natural Right and History, the problem for natural right is that modern natural science is antiteleological and reductionist, and thus it denies the natural teleology and irreducible complexity of the human species that support the Aristotelian science of natural right.[2]  Strauss thought this was evident in the antiteleological and reductionist science of Darwinian evolution.  The mistake of Strauss (and many of his students) is in failing to see how Aristotle’s biological science of the natural ends and natural kinds of life has been confirmed and deepened by Darwinian biology in ways that support a modern science of natural right.[3]

According to Strauss, natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end distinctive to the human species.  Strauss thought Aristotle had the clearest view of this dependence of natural right on natural teleology.  But “the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved,” and through modern science “the issue seems to have been decided in favor of the nonteleological conception of the universe.”  The motion of the heavenly bodies is determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes, and thus there is no cosmic teleology to support natural right.

This creates a dilemma, Strauss explained.  If the science of man is to be part of a nonteleological science of nature, then human action must be explained by reduction to physical impulses, which seems inadequate to explain the purposefulness of human action.  The only alternative appears to be “a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man,” but this rejects the comprehensive naturalism of the premodern exponents of natural right such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

Neither reductionism nor dualism was fully satisfactory for Strauss.  He concluded: “The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science.  An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”  “Needless to say,” Strauss then added, “the present lectures cannot deal with this problem,” because the lectures published as Natural Right and History are “limited to that aspect of the problem of natural right which can be clarified within the confines of the social sciences.”

Remarkably, the reader of Natural Right and History reaches the end of the book without ever seeing a solution to this problem of reconciling natural right and modern natural science.  Moreover, neither Strauss nor his students (with the exception of Roger Masters) have ever attempted to solve this problem.[4]

Amazingly, in the "Preface to the 7th Impression" of Natural Right and History in 1970, just three years before his death, Strauss spoke of his "preference" for natural right, which sounded like the historicist position as he described it in his book.

The two unsatisfactory alternatives in Strauss’s dilemma can be called “reductionist monism” and “transcendentalist dualism.”  According to reductionist monism, everything should be ultimately reducible to physical mechanism, but this cannot adequately explain the evident purposefulness of human thought and action.  According to transcendentalist dualism, human beings are uniquely free to transcend the nonteleological realm of natural causes, but this typically modern dualism denies us the comprehensive science of nature that we need to make the whole intelligible as a whole.

The Search for Comprehensive Science

In a lecture course on “Natural Right” that Strauss taught in 1962, he explained his reluctant acceptance of transcendentalist dualism.[5]

Seeing that the approach which is peculiar to modern natural science leads to a distortion of human phenomena, the most convenient thing to do is to speak of a dualism of the sciences: the sciences of nature and the sciences of man as man. . . . This distinction was generally known in Germany as the distinction of the natural and cultural sciences. . . . You have heard of this as the humanistic understanding of man in opposition to the scientific understanding of man. . . . So this dualism of sciences is a convenient practical solution.  But—and here I agree with the positivists—there is a need for an ultimate unity of science.  So this dualism of science can be accepted only as provisionally indispensable.  But this comprehensive science is today only a pious wish; and therefore one cannot say more than that it is to be desired.

Strauss’s reference here to the distinction known in Germany is apparently pointing to Wilhelm Dilthey’s separation of the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) from the Geisteswissenschaften (the sciences of the human mind or spirit, the sciences of culture, or the humanities).  The natural sciences seek causal explanations of the objectively observable realm of Nature.  The humanities seek interpretive understanding of the subjectively experienced realm of Spirit or Mind or Culture, which is the uniquely human realm.  The social sciences are in between these two opposing positions, and thus torn in opposite directions.  It has been common for conservative political philosophers—Roger Scruton, for example—to invoke this dualism as a way to defend humanistic knowledge against the expansive claims of modern natural science.[6]

This division of the intellectual world into two or three utterly separated realms of study explains the fragmented incoherence of academic life today, an incoherence that also infects our cultural life generally.  That’s why Strauss yearned for an ultimate unity of thought in a “comprehensive science.”  And that seems to be what Ellmers and Wise are striving for in arguing that the Straussians need to see the unity of the sciences through the architectonic science of skeptical political philosophy.

As an escape from Strauss’s dilemma that moves towards a comprehensive science of nature that supports natural right, I have argued for a Darwinian liberal education that sustains Darwinian natural right, which rests upon what I call “emergentist naturalism.”  Unlike the transcendentalist dualist, I affirm the continuity of nature and the integration of human beings within the natural order.  Unlike the reductionist monist, I affirm the irreducible complexity of nature, in which novel properties emerge at higher levels of organization that cannot be reduced to lower levels, so that the uniqueness of human beings as a natural kind comes from the emergent properties that distinguish the human species, which include those distinctively human natural ends that constitute the ground of natural right.  I thus draw from a long tradition in Darwinian biology of thinking about emergent evolution, which Ellmers and Wise acknowledge in referring to “the overwhelming evidence for such ‘emergent’ order in evolutionary biology.”

Straussians need to see that evolutionary biology recognizes emergent differences in kind when differences in degree pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  In his lecture in 1962, Strauss criticized the theory of evolution for teaching that “there is no essential difference between man and the brutes because man has developed out of the brutes.”  But while Darwin did say in The Descent of Man that the difference between man and the higher mammals “great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind,” he also suggested in various passages that there is a qualitative difference in kind insofar as human beings are unique in their capacities for conceptual thought, symbolic language, and moral judgment.[7]

While Darwin recognized the uniqueness of human capacities as showing a difference in kind, he feared that acknowledging this would suggest a radical difference in kind due to a miraculous creation of “spiritual powers” beyond nature.[8]  He did not see that an emergent difference in kind allows for qualitative novelty but without any miraculous break in the underlying continuity of nature.  A radical difference in kind would suggest a transcendentalist dualism with an absolute separation between natural law and human freedom.  An emergent difference in kind recognizes human uniqueness without such a dualistic separation.  So we can explain the specialness of the human mind as arising from the evolution of the primate brain passing over a critical threshold of size and complexity, where uniquely human powers arise that cannot be seen in lower primate brains. 

Leon Kass has made the same point in suggesting that Darwinian biology supports an emergent naturalism in which novel traits arise in evolutionary development at each higher level of organization in an “unbroken line of descent,” so that differences in degree pass over a critical threshold leading to differences in kind.[9]

Darwin also recognized the natural teleology that supports natural right.  But contrary to Strauss, this natural teleology in organic life is not a cosmic teleology of the heavenly bodies but an immanent teleology displayed in the goal-directed activity of living entities and processes.  This is the sort of teleology that Aristotle studied in his biological works.

Near the end of his life, Darwin read Aristotle's explanation of biological teleology in The Parts of Animals; and Darwin saw that he really was bringing back into science a teleological conception of living nature that was originally formulated by Aristotle.[10]  So Strauss and his students are wrong when they assume that Darwinian science denies the Aristotelian teleology necessary for natural right.

Aristotle and Darwin show us that it is possible to root natural right in an immanent teleology of living beings rather than a cosmic teleology of the universe.  Strauss himself points to something like this in one passage of Natural Right and History:

However indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions. . . . the fact that the atoms are beyond good and bad does not justify the inference that there is nothing by nature good or bad for any compound of atoms, and especially for those compounds which we call “men.” . . . We must distinguish between those human desires and inclinations which are in accordance with human nature and therefore good for man, and those which are destructive of his nature or his humanity and therefore bad.  We are thus led to the notion of a life, a human life, that is good because it is in accordance with nature.[11]

If the good is the desirable, and the naturally good is the naturally desirable, and if the naturally desirable is rooted in our natural human instincts, then the question of natural right becomes the question of how best to understand the range of our instinctively natural desires.  This assumes an immanent teleology of human nature that does not require a cosmic teleology of the universe.  And while cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, the immanent teleology of evolved human nature can be supported by modern evolutionary science.

The Natural Science of Political Theory and Political Practice

If I am right about this conception of Darwinian natural right as part of a comprehensive natural science, Straussian scholars might wonder what difference this could make for their research and teaching, as largely devoted to the interpretation of classic texts in studying the theory and practice of politics.

I can respond with two illustrations.  First, if we are studying the political theory of the state of nature in the texts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we can adjudicate this debate among the political philosophers by looking to the account in Darwinian anthropology of the hunter-gatherer human ancestors in the evolutionary state of nature.  Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau studied carefully the European reports of what the American Indians in the New World were like, because, as Locke said, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” and so the American Indians provide “a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe.”[12]  Now we have 200 years of anthropological evidence and theorizing about the life of human foragers in the state of nature, which we can use to clarify and perhaps even resolve the debate between Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  My conclusion from this is that Darwinian anthropology shows that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.[13]  This conclusion is open to dispute.  But at least this illustrates how the Straussian study of political philosophy could draw knowledge from Darwinian science as a step towards the comprehensive science that Strauss desired.

As a second illustration, if we are studying the political practice of American statesmanship as manifest in Abraham Lincoln’s career, and if we have a special interest in explaining his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, we could apply the intellectual framework of “biopolitical science” as the Darwinian science of political animals.  This requires that we understand evolutionary political history as moving through three levels of analysis—the natural history of the species, the cultural history of the group, and the individual history of animals within the group.  To fully comprehend the nature of politics within the natural order of the whole, we must understand the unity of political universals, the diversity of political cultures, and the individuality of political judgments.  We can see these three levels of biopolitical history manifest in Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation: we can see it as an event in the natural history of cooperation and conflict in the human species, in the cultural history of the debate over slavery in America, and in the individual history of Lincoln as a political actor in American history.[14]

If Strauss was right about the “need for an ultimate unity of science” that would solve the problem of natural right, then what I have sketched could move us toward this goal--the comprehensive science of nature that supports Darwinian natural right.

---

[1] Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise, “Skepticism, Experience, and Science,” The American Mind blog, americanmind.org/essays/skepticism-experience-and-science.

[2] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 1-8.

[3] Here I briefly state some points that I have elaborated elsewhere: Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-48; “Defending Darwinian Natural Right,” Interpretation 27 (2000): 263-77; “Darwinian Liberal Education,” Academic Questions 19, n. 4 (2006): 6-18; Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, ed. Kenneth C. Blanchard (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009), 104-111; “Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism,” The Intercollegiate Review 45 (Fall 2010): 22-32;  Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker, 4^th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016), Chapter 14 on Strauss.

[4] See Roger Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1989); Masters, Beyond Relativism: Science and Human Values (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); and Larry Arnhart, “Roger Masters: Natural Right and Biology,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 293-303.

[5] An audio of this course is available at the website of the Leo Strauss Center: https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/course/natural-right-autumn-quarter-1962  My quotation is found at 24-29 minutes into session 2.

[6] See Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Larry Arnhart, “Roger Scruton’s Fallacious Argument in On Human Nature,” https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/11/roger-scrutons-fallacious-argument-in.html

[7] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols., 2^nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1871), vol. 1, pp. 54, 62, 70, 88; vol. 2, pp. 391-92).

[8] Darwin, Descent, vol. 1, p. 186.

[9] Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Free Press, 1994), 12, 14, 39, 59-63, 76-79.uhUHH

[10] See Allan Gotthelf, “Darwin on Aristotle,” in Gotthelf, Teleology, First Princiles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 345-69, and Larry Arnhart, “The Biology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand,” http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-biology-of-natural-right-aristotle.html

[11] Strauss, Natural Right and History, 94-95.

[12] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, secs. 49, 108.

[13] See Arnhart, Political Questions, 189-93, 228-36, 284-93.

[14] See Larry Arnhart, “Biopolitical Science,” in James E. Fleming and Sanford Levinson, eds., Evolution and Morality (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 221-265.

The Secret Teaching in Aristotle's Natural Science

One of the most common criticisms of "Darwinian natural right" is that Darwinian science denies the cosmic teleology necessary for natural right. For example, in his contribution to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, John West insists that natural human desires can be the ground for a universal morality only if "one believes that natural desires have been implanted in human beings by intelligent design, or that they represent permanent truths inherent in the nature of the universe"; but "Darwinism explicitly denies that natural desires are either the result of intelligent design or an unchanging nature." Straussians offer a similar criticism when they quote Leo Strauss's claim (at the beginning of Natural Right and History) that classic natural right depends on an Aristotelian conception of cosmic teleology that has been denied by modern natural science.

This assumption that the human good must be a cosmic good runs through the fusion of Platonic cosmology and Biblical creationism that constituted the Medieval Cosmic Model that dominated much of Western history up to the 19th century. Last summer, I wrote a long series of posts arguing that, in fact, the Socratic philosophers were skeptical of any cosmic teleology, and that they saw the human good (moral and intellectual) rooted in human nature in a manner that would be consistent with Darwinian natural right. Some of those posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It is often assumed that modern natural science overturned Aristotle's natural science by refuting the cosmic teleology that was fundamental for his science. But this overlooks the evidence that Aristotle did not really believe many of the doctrines commonly attributed to his science. When Thomas Hobbes warned against the "vain philosophy" of the Aristotelian Scholastic theologians, he suggested that their "supernatural philosophy" was not really part of Aristotle's true teaching. He observed: "And this shall suffice for an example of the Errors, which are brought into the Church, from the Entities, and Essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corrobative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates" (Leviathan, chap. 46, paragraph 18). Similarly, Moses Maimonides argued that Aristotle knew that there was no scientific demonstration of the eternity of the world, and that Aristotle's apparent endorsement of this idea was a merely rhetorical appeal to popular opinions (The Guide of the Perplexed, part 2, chaps. 15, 25). So some careful readers of Aristotle have concluded that the overt teaching of his scientific writings sometimes contradicts his true secret teaching, which suggests that possibility that his secret teaching might be compatible with modern natural science.

That's the argument of David Bolotin's book An Approach to Aristotle's Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing (SUNY Press, 1998). Through a meticulous analysis of some of Aristotle's reasoning in the Physics and On the Heaven, Bolotin tries to show that Aristotle deliberately uses weak arguments to lead his careful readers to suspect that he doesn't really accept the conclusions apparently set forth in those writings. Bolotin suggests that Aristotle employs secret writing as a rhetorical strategy to protect his natural science from persecution. In the ancient Greek cities, natural philosophers were commonly thought to be atheists, because they seemed to explain the world as governed by purely natural causes with no need for divine powers. Socrates at his trial was accused of being an atheistic natural philosopher. And Aristotle himself was eventually forced to leave Athens to avoid the fate of Socrates. If one takes account of Aristotle's rhetorical strategy in concealing his true views of science, Bolotin concludes, one can see that his true teaching is consistent with modern science, and that it is also in some respects deeper and broader than modern science.

I generally agree with Bolotin. And yet I don't think he gives enough weight to Aristotle's turn away from theological cosmology to empirical biology as set forth most clearly in the Parts of Animals (642a28-30, 644b22-645a37). Here Aristotle indicates that Plato's Socrates was mistaken in identifying the study of nature with the study of cosmology or astronomy and in failing to see how political philosophy could be grounded in the study of biological nature. This is crucial for the question of teleology. Because even if there is no warrant for a cosmic teleology, there can still be an immanent teleology rooted in the goal-directed order of living beings. Like Strauss, Bolotin fails to notice how Aristotle's best examples of natural teleology are biological rather than cosmological (see, for example, pages 19-22, 24, 43-44).

Bolotin concludes his book with a brilliantly formulated summary of his main ideas (pp. 150-52). Because it's so well stated, I'll quote from it at length:

". . . let us briefly contrast what he says openly regarding the topics I have been discussing with the views that I argue he really held. He teaches openly that our visible world has always existed and will always exist; that one of its principles is a substrate that persists throughout all change; that there are also eternal and changeless forms, which by their actin upon this substrate give rise to the natural beings; that the development of a natural being is set in motion for the sake of the good toward which it tends; that the manifest or perceptible character of the world, as for instance the continuity of its bodies and of their motions, is also its most intimate character, even beyond the range of any possible perception; that the up and the down, as they appear to us on earth, are also features of the world in itself, which characterize the places in which light and heavy bodies fulfill their natures; and, more generally, that there are permanent and proper places for the several elements, including earth, whose proper place is the absolutely fixed center of the world. If my arguments have been correct, however, he was well aware of the dubiousness of the claim that our visible world exists forever; he did not believe that any natural beings come into being from a persistent substrate (and all the less, from the action of eternal and changeless forms on such a substrate); he did not seriously claim that the end toward which a natural being tends to develop is in any sense anticipated by the moving cause or causes of that development; he did not believe that the manifest or perceptive character of the beings also belongs to them independently of our perception, but rather focused on it in the belief that the beings as we perceive them are what we properly mean by the beings themselves; in saying that the up and the down and the other differences of place are not just arbitrary designations, but genuine features of the whole itself, he meant by 'the whole' the experienced whole, which exists as such only for human beings; and similarly, in saying that the earth remains unmoved at the center of the world, he meant that what we experience as the stability of the earth beneath us is part of the normal human perspective, within which natural beings are seen in their truest light."

"What emerges from this contrast between Aristotle's surface teaching and his genuine views is that in the former he presented the natural world as being far more completely intelligible than he believed it was. For if the visible world is eternal, and if natural beings result from the action of eternal forms on a persistent substrate, then it can seem intelligible at least in principle why there are the kinds of beings there are. There arises, of course, the question of why the forms are the ones they are; but even this question can appear to be answered sufficiently, if not completely, if everything natural is brought about for the sake of the good. Moreover, if natural motion is directed toward the good, then the tendency of living beings toward the attainment of their mature forms can appear to be explained with the kind of clarity with which we explain our own purposeful actions. Even the rising and falling of light and heavy bodies can appear to have the intelligiblity of end-directed motion if in moving to their proper places they are becoming more completely the kinds of beings they are. And finally, if we accept Aristotle's arguments for infinite divisibility, then at least to this extent, our knowledge need not be limited to the beings as we perceive them, but can encompass what lies beyond the perceptible realm. In Aristotle's serious view, however, natural beings do not arise from the action of eternal forms, and neither is there any other principle that can make intelligible--except conditionally, given that there is in fact an ordered world--why there are any of the kinds of beings that we know there are. As for the growth of these beings, he knew from experience that they typically develop in more or less the way their parents did, and he understood that their development is necessarily somehow coherent if they are to live; but he also knew that he could not understand the full necessity for this development or any purpose directing it. Though he did have an explanation of why lighter bodies tend to rise, his account of this phenomenon relies on the more primary fact, which he did not really try to explain, that the medium in which they do so presses downward. And more generally, he regarded the task of natural science to be the articulation of the manifest character--understood as the truest being--of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover."

"Now to understand why Aristotle presented what he knew to be such an exaggerated picture of the degree of intelligibility of the natural world, we must consider the implications of the limitedness of the achievement of what he regarded as genuine natural science. For his denial that natural science can finally explain the given world--and in particular his acknowledgment that it can not discover its ultimate roots--seems to leave him unable to exclude the alternative that this world might partly consist of, or otherwise owe its existence to, a mysterious and all-powerful god or gods. If there are such gods, as was suggested by Homer and Hesiod, among others, we can not rely on what reason and normal experience indicate as to the limits of what beings can do and of what can be done to them. What I have called the manifest character of things could not be their truest being but at most their usual way of being, and the most important truth about them would have to include their capacity to undergo miraculous change. In other words, so long as this theological alternative is not ruled out, the very assumption that there is nature, or that beings must become and perish in accordance with fixed natures, remains questionable; and the pursuit of a science of nature remains a dubious and perhaps even a wholly misguided one. Aristotle must refute, then, the claims of this theology in order to vindicate the possibility of natural science. And the primary reason for his exaggerating the intelligibility of the world is to indicate what would have to be the case in order for natural science to be able to complete this task itself."

Bolotin's account of Aristotle here supports many of the arguments that I have made on this blog. Aristotle casts doubt on the claim of Socrates (in the Phaedo) that Mind is responsible for all things and for directing all things to what is good. There is no scientific support for such a cosmic teleology. Nor is there any scientific ground for Plato's teaching that there are eternal and changeless Ideas or Forms. Natural science can articulate the manifest order of the world as we know it by experience, and this we can say is nature. But natural science cannot explain the ultimate roots of this given natural world by explaining why it is this way and not some other way. Natural science can take nature as self-evident--that's just the way it is! But this appeal to self-evident natural experience cannot prove that nature could never be in any other way, or that nature as we know it could not have been originally created by all-powerful god or gods.

Bolotin's account of Aristotle suggests that Aristotle is close to David Hume in crucial respects. Like Bolotin's Aristotle, Hume sought a science of nature rooted in a science of human nature that would be free of theological beliefs. As part of this project, Hume could explain religion as a product of natural history, and he could spot the flaws in the cosmological arguments for God's existence. But, still, Hume saw the fundamental contingency and mystery of nature as a given world, the ultimate origins of which are beyond human reason. Hume could not, therefore, prove that nature was not the work of a divinely intelligent designer. Here Hume was in the same boat with Charles Darwin, who fulfilled the Aristotelian/Humean project for explaining the order of nature in purely natural terms, but who could not rationally explain the ultimate origins of nature, because "the mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."

As I have often suggested, we see here the fundamental tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding. This is, as I think Bolotin suggests, the irresolvable choice between reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem.