Living On this Side of the Limitless Horizon of Being

Just a brief one because of horizontal duties and annoyances.

Why all the hate for teleology in the modern era? I suppose that's a question for the history of science:

The 16th and 17th centuries saw a growing interest in mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena, focusing on efficient causes rather than final causes. 

So, the machine paradigm up to its old tricks, tossing out formal and final causation in favor of material and efficient. More generally,

The emphasis on empirical observation, experimentation, and mathematical reasoning during the Scientific Revolution favored explanations that could be tested and quantified, which teleological explanations often could not.

Then there's natural selection, which supposedly

provided a compelling non-teleological explanation for the apparent design and adaptation of living organisms. Natural selection explained the "purposefulness" of biological traits as a result of differential survival and reproduction, rather than an inherent goal or design. 

Never mind that one can never actually describe organisms without recourse to function or purpose. Or that Newton's mechanistic revolution was long ago superseded by the counterrevolution of relativity and quantum physics, not to mention chaos and complexity theories, i.e., non-linear dynamic systems.

Yesterday's post suggested that our cosmos is a suspiciously  teleological place, hence the structure of our minds, in which current behavior is influenced by the future. In short, anticipatory systems take into account potential future states when making current decisions. In fact, living things constantly anticipate future needs and dangers. For example (HT Gemini),

--A plant growing towards sunlight. 

--An animal fleeing at the first sign of a predator.

--The human immune system preparing for potential future infections. 

--Birds building nests in a specific way based on inherited "knowledge" of what will be needed to raise their young.

To say nothing of human behavior, since all but the most impulsive amongus base present behavior on future outcomes, e.g.,

--Taking an umbrella because you anticipate rain. 

--Saving money for retirement. 

--A tennis player predicting the opponent's serve and moving into position beforehand.

 Bottom line:

The concept of anticipatory systems is particularly important in biology and cognitive science. Robert Rosen argued that anticipation is a fundamental characteristic of living systems, distinguishing them from non-living matter.

Clearly, the ability to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of intelligent behavior. Thus, supposing man is intelligent, he is always dynamically engaged with the future. Which was the point of yesterday's post, in that

the dynamism of my intelligence does actually make ultimate sense, is not a radical absurdity, and hence must have some really existing final goal, since an existing dynamism without goal would be unintelligible.

We live within a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, which is "the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned" but which nevertheless "renders all else intelligible."

A Bold Claim, but in its absence nothing is intelligible and we aren't intelligent. Norris Clarke is all over this:

As we reflect on the activities of our intellectual knowing power, we come to recognize it as an inexhaustible dynamism of inquiry, ever searching to lay hold more deeply and widely on the universe of reality. It is impossible to restrict its horizon of inquiry to any limited area of reality, to any goal short of all there is to know about all there is.

Don't fence me in! "As soon as we run up against the limits" and discover a finite fence,

the mind at once rebounds farther, reaching beyond it to wherever else it leads, to whatever else there is to be known beyond it. This process continues indefinitely in ever-expanding and ever-deepening circles. 

As we reflect on the significance of this inexhaustible and unquenchable drive toward the fullness of all there is to know, we realize that the only adequate goal of our dynamism of knowing is the totality of all being.

We live within the horizons of being, immanence to one side, transcendence the other, so "the only adequate formal object of the human mind is being itself."

This means that the mind must have a dynamic a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for the totality of being -- an aptitude that constitutes it precisely as knowing nature in the intellectual and not merely the sensible order.

"Now every dynamism or active potency"

has its goal already inscribed in it in some way, in the mode of final cause, as that toward which it naturally tends, as that which naturally attracts or draws it to itself, and therefore as that which is already present to it. 

In a dynamism which is as self-aware as ours is -- aware not only of the contents of its knowledge, but also of its own activity of knowing and radical desire to know -- there must accordingly be a dim, obscure, implicit but nonetheless real awareness of this goal as drawing it.

This means that the mind has, from its first conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries.

"To live mentally within the horizon of being" involves an "anticipatory awareness" of the telos of all thought, such that 

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another (Clarke).