Appendix I: Can belief in teleology be consistent with realist, or antirealist epistemology?

Can belief in teleology be consistent with realist, or antirealist epistemology?

Making Conceptual Distinctions

I have discussed the topic of teleology in an earlier essay, “The Telos of Absolute Idealism,” and in another subheading on historicism, “The Historicist Nemesis.” And by pure coincidence and good fortune I found Professor Braver’s insightful book, “A Thing of This World,” that provides clear definitions of “realist” and “antirealist” epistemologies. There are other powerful conceptual tools that can be applied to this question of teleology and whether telos could be consistent with empirical realism, or Kantian antirealist epistemology.  An antirealist would in general tend to view teleology as a concept dependent on the active projecting subject: this would be true of the early Kantian Hegel (see chart, Hegel-A5), but later rejects the Kantian transcendental self (Hegel-A2), and the noumenal self altogether (Hegel-A6). 

On the other hand, a realist would typically deny historical telos exists independently of the passive observer, and is not actually an attribute of historical change, but merely a subjective contingent interpretation of natural events. There are arguments of support for both views of historical telos. Every few years my viewpoint shifts from one position to another.

There is certainly a subjective side of telos projected by the active self as a “ethical telos,” such as Kant’s ethical maxim, “So act as to treat humanity whether in the own person or in that of any other, always as an end, and never as a means.”  We might project an ethical ideal alter ego, or a divine double with a utilitarian goal (just an example) of acting to create the greatest intrinsic good such as knowledge, beauty, and virtues for the greatest number possible. Such self-created purposed goals are imposed upon the world and are therefore; extrinsic, whereas the telos of natural entities such as an acorn seed, for example, that develops into an oak tree in referred to as intrinsic teleology. 

Aristotle made even finer distinctions with his scheme of “four causes” that recognize “final cause,” or the purpose of a thing and the agent as “efficient cause,” or “moving cause of a change (Wiki: Four causes).” A farmer who plants a grove of fruit trees in order to sell his crop is the efficient cause (κινοῦν, kinoûn); selling his produce to the market is the final cause (τέλος, télos); material cause (ὕλη, hū́lē) is the planted seed; the formal cause is the type of crop planted (εἶδος, eîdos).

Society as Objective Reality 

“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”—Groucho Marx

Also, one can argue there is an objective side to historical teleology good enough for any skeptical empirical realist to study. In an earlier essay, “The Social Construction of Reality,” I pointed to the famous book authored by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann titled, “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,” Anchor Books, ed. 1967 (here after “SCR”) for a sociological study of the subjective reality of society: however, the authors also examine the objective reality of socio-cultural structures (as opposed to physical Nature). They begin by making the anthropological distinction between nonhuman animals and human beings. Their thesis states that human relationship to the world is not closed and fixed, but instead we experience the environment as “world-openness” due to how humans are socialized during childhood (the concept “world-openness” is developed by Arnold Gehlen, “Man, His Nature, and Position in the World,” 1940, and Helmuth Plessner “The Stages of the Organic and Human,” 1928, found in SCR, p. 195). Socialization is key to the development of humans as they are in an extended fetal stage of development for at least a year after birth (see, the “first fetal year” thesis by Portmann, Adolf, 1956, in Zoology and the New Image of Man: Biological Fragments to a Doctrine of Man, Hamburg: Rowohlt, SCR, p. 48 ). After a horse is born its brain is completely developed and immediately begins to walk, while an infant human still needs months to learn how to walk as the brain is still developing for years onward.

This means humans are socio-culturally variable having no fixed human nature except for “anthropological constants” which refers to the “plasticity” of human instincts: in short, she produces herself, and with others, create universal cultural norms and structural “socio-cultural formations,” for “…it is impossible for man in isolation to produce a human environment…(SCR, p. 51).” The totality of societies and cultures are the cumulative result of human actions over generations in a process of  “anthropological externalization,” made objectively concrete through creative productive labor (Hegel and Marx). Although human beings produce themselves and their environment, these variable social structures precede the individual. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “existence precedes essence,” (Wiki) meaning the world exists prior to individuals, and only post hoc do humans reflectively project meaning and provide interpretations (essence) of existence. 

Trouble in the World-Closedness of Habitude

“…all reification is a form of forgetting.”—Theodor W. Adorno

Human beings have a highly variable relationship to the world thanks to their intrinsic hyper plasticity that allows for world-openness adaptability and enables the creation of stable social orders represented by existing objective institutions as human constructed productions. However, over time these previously constructed institutions create a second order objective reality, or an artificial nature and even artificial needs that  “pre-empt” creative human world-openness even though these social formations have “…no other ontological status…(SCR, p. 52)” other than a product of human effort such as currency, imperialistic conflicts, and state sanctioned corporate entities. These multigenerational institutional social formations become “crystallized” through time as ossified structural “typifications” that take on an independent life of their own while containing sedimented habituated routine patterns of predicable reproducible behavior. Societies also accumulate a massive anonymous “stock of knowledge”-- a concept developed by phenomenologist Alfred Schutz to describe the various aspects of social reality. Berger and Luckmann closely studied his work on the Lifeworld (SCR, p. 53). Professor Schutz most likely developed the concept of “habitue” from Henri Bergson’s study in “Matter and Memory,”(pdf.)(1896) concerning selective perception and how thought applies conceptual classifications.

When multigenerational descendants later engage these social institutions through out their lives, they become less able to distinguish between these socially constructed fixed entities, and physical nature itself. Social institutions appear as natural objects or conditions by undergoing “objectivation,” or “reification” (Hegelian/Marxian Versachlichung) defined as the “…undialectical distortion of social reality…viewing it instead in thing-like categories appropriate only to the world of nature (SCR, p. 60-1).” By the processes of repetitive habituation, socialization, and reification the individual lacks historical memory to interpret the social order as distinguishable from nature’s order that appears to have the same independent persistent meaning as external reality.

Anonymous Knowledge, Sedimented Typifications, and Impersonal Conceptual Schemes

“The subject isn’t in the discursive field like a fish in water, but like salt in water.”

-- Braver on Foucault’s view of the knowing subject (ATTW, p. 370).

We accumulate knowledge about the everyday world by experience, shared recollections, hearsay, and person-to-person relationships starting with our parents, or guardians which then increasingly becomes more random, impersonal, and anonymous moving from trusted relatives to friends, teachers, professors, authors, vocational schools, employers, secular clubs, religious groups, political groups, public media, and government agencies. If a curious student is fortunate enough to study in higher educational institutions, she may discover that much of what is learned from the cultural stock of knowledge is practically useful, even life saving, but are also anonymous reified typifications, which may be obsolete sedimented projections and traditional schema that are incoherent, but appear coherent such as sociological propaganda (Jacques Ellul)(pdf.) designed to unify common public opinion around some issue to enhance social conformity.

Both knowledge and opinion can be presented as Impersonal Conceptual Schemes (ICS) that systematically order a body of knowledge into some theoretical paradigm re-presenting a simulacrum of reality without involvement of the active knowing subject (A5). One of Dr. Braver’s most valuable insights in “A Thing of This World,” (2007) is his formulation of the “Heideggerian Paradigm” as (ICS) meaning the later Heidegger rejected the Kantian thesis of an active subject A5, and instead embraced a “non-subjectivist version of the subject A5 ”(ATTW, p. 285) so that the now reformed “detached” knower is anonymous…”Rather than the subject opening and structuring a field of experience, being maintains us in unconcealment, so we must examine this structure in order to study Being and man, a new form of fundamental ontology…(Ibid., p. 285).” Braver goes on to describe how Foucault and Derrida deal with their versions of the later Heideggerian paradigm shift to the passive subject of (ICS). Braver wrote of the modified new passive knower R5 in Foucault’s thinking that completely integrates the subject with linguistic conceptual systems, “The subject isn’t in the discursive field like a fish in water, but like salt in water (Ibid., p. 370).”  For my argument concerning the subjective/objective character of social institutions as hybrid objects including the cultural stock of knowledge, (ICS) is the perfect example of an anonymous impersonal externalized social creation appearing to us as objectively real, independent of the subject, but having an internal telos because we put it there. 

History Countable and Uncountable

The word “history” can mean both past objective events, or the interpretative story of events: objective events can be counted, but historical narratives determine what is to be counted and their meaning. History is an account, a re-presentation, or the understanding of past events: “…[the German term] ‘Verstehen’ refers to ‘understanding’ the meaning of action from the actor's point of view. It is entering into the shoes of the other, and adopting this research stance requires treating the actor as a subject, rather than an object of your observations…’Verstehen’ can mean either a kind of empathic or participatory understanding of social phenomena…introduced into the practice of sociology in the United States by Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist influenced by Max Weber (Wiki: Verstehen).” The mode that Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, can be described as ‘verstehen,” taking into account the meaning and modalities of consciousness in different categories of historical life. “Verstehen” can be contrasted with  “vernunft,” that in some contexts mean, “reason,” suggesting “the faculty of calculative reasoning.”

The Ontological Status of Human Societies and Cultures

Berger and Luckmann tell us “Language provides the fundamental superimposition of logic on the objectivated social world (SCR, p. 64).” Without the relevant conceptual and linguistic distinctions one cannot effectively think, speak, or write about these complex philosophical questions such as historical teleology. Our conceptual tools are the distinctions draw between 1.) subjective/objective objects; 2.) extrinsic/intrinsic telos; 3.) efficient cause/final cause telos; 4.) world-openness/world-closedness; 5.) countable/uncountable history; 6.) abstraction/reification; 7.) and, understanding/calculative reasoning. 

Societal institutions are difficult to categorized since they were originally established from a planned (or unplanned) subjective human consensus (democratic or not) intended to achieve some extrinsic goal over time that become viewed by individuals (consciously, or unconsciously) as historical objects intrinsic to the larger whole of Nature itself. What were before abstractions are now reified objects. Societal cultural artifacts such as art, language, and the stock of knowledge are unique kinds of hybrid-objects (having subjective and objective sides), or pseudo-objects (not intrinsic objects of nature) that at one time had extrinsic purposes that can easily outlast any single generation, but now appear self-sustaining and intrinsic to the natural world of things. 

“Pray and curse”—Hegel

(Documents on Hegel's development, Johannes Hoffmeister,1936, pp. 351, 353 ,360, 370 found in Heiss, p. 38 ).

But can teleology originate from natural history, and not just the history of human civilization? Some would argue the natural world is completely contingent (Wittgenstein) while other philosophers such as Hegel, agree that nature itself unfolds teleologically encompassing human history. Interestingly, the later Hegel would give less emphasis to the historical teleology of “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807)(pdf.) as the first volume of his system subsequently followed by the second volume, “Science of Logic” (Greater version)(1812-1816), and lastly “Philosophy of Nature “(1817).

However, when Hegel again presented his system in a summary form, the “Science of Logic,” (Lesser version)(pdf.) became the first division as his introduction in “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,”(1817)(pdf. final 1830 version). In the Encyclopedia summary, Hegel derives each category of reality from the previous to finish a unified system: The subdivisions are ordered as Science of Logic (Lesser), Science of Nature, and “Science of Geist “(Mind) (pdf.). For a further study see, “Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx,” by Robert Heiss, trans. E.B. Garside, Delta books, 1975, p. 122-23. So logic is now first in the Hegelian philosophical system, instead of the teleological history of human cognition found in his Phenomenology of Spirit, suggesting there is within the system an ontological foundation for telos in history. Professor Houlgate commented, "Nature, as it emerges in Hegel’s philosophy, is in turn understood to be not just brute contingency or sheer givenness, but actually existing reason (“An Introduction to Hegel, Freedom, Truth and History,” Stephen Houlgate, Blackwell 2005, pp. 106-8 ).”

In Hegel’s system, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational (“Philosophy of Right,”1897; pdf.) which means that Reason (Logos) expresses itself in a dialectical process of unity, diremption, and re-unification as actuality that encompasses both the natural world (science of nature), and the history of cognitive experience (phenomenology of Mind, or Spirit).  In Hegel’s logic “…pure being proves ultimately to be self-determining reason or what Hegel calls the ‘ldea’ …‘The Idea, ... contracting itself into the immediacy of being, is the totality in this form – nature’ (Hulgate).” Being is nothing but nature; however, Hegel also says that nature is not fully rational and requires time to develop: “Time is the teleology of consciousness” (J. Hyppolite, “Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Northwestern University, 1974 p. 579)(pdf.). We can conclude that Hegel believed in a version of ontologism (plus time) whose thesis is “the human intellect has as its proper object the knowledge of God, that this knowledge is immediate and intuitive, and that all other knowledge must be built on this base.” Historical teleology can also be a religious belief. Hegel’s position on historical teleology is ultimately based on the Christian concept of the Logos. Ironically, this very idea of teleology in Marx’s historicist criticism of capitalism is interpreted today as absolutely anti-Christian.

Narratives are inherently teleological, and like Kant’s category of efficient causality, we cannot think of an effect without a cause so we irresistibly think (with habituated reified language) of a final cause for such events.  And yet, teleological historicism is also a useful methodology for researching society and human history as the Italian historicist, Giambattista Vico, once wrote, “What is made is true.” My evolving view now is that historical teleology is not only subjective, but also objective and can be discovered with research and thereby achieve verstehen for both the realist and antirealist epistemologists.