Teleological Order Research Articles

The Material and the Divine: Entwined Aesthetics in Alice Meynell’s ‘The Two Poets’

Alice Meynell’s adherence to a reserved lyrical mode could be read as a desire to maintain a sense of teleological order, in which the ironic timelessness of the lyrical moment reinforces the divine purpose of the material. However, the silences and reserve for which Meynell’s work is known instead reinforce paradoxical moments of trauma that are held up and unspoken as impossible to understand within the human experience. The intensity of the lyric depends on the visceral yet disturbingly silent recognition of an aesthetic predicated on violence. From this perspective, the poem becomes a theological and aesthetic space in which a transformative encounter takes place, one that is predicated on human contact that confronts each subject’s understanding of the world and their position within it. Importantly, Meynell’s poetry, like her theology, rests on paradoxes — of theology and aesthetics; of the material and the divine; of the temporal and the eternal; of violence and beauty — in such a way that creates mutual, dynamic spaces rather than a binary structure that defines and divides.

Schopenhauer and the Two Orders of Purposiveness in the World

In this paper, I intend to argue that the emergence of the material conditions for the suppression and denial of the will in the human organism (the extraordinary and to some extent “unnatural” development of the brain) is not something like an “accident on the way” of will's manifestation in the world. It is rather, as it were, an intentional result of the whole process of objectivation of the will, a result that emerges from a teleological order. This teleological order is primary and more fundamental than the teleological order of nature that produces each phenomenon and each organic structure according to its ability to promote the emergence, conservation and expansion of life. This means that we have to understand the problematic principle of nature's purposiveness in Schopenhauer's thought as containing two distinct and largely contradictory orders of purpose. We can call these two orders of purposiveness “order of nature” and “order of salvation” (in analogy to Schopenhauer’s “kingdom of nature” and “kingdom of grace”). These two orders of purpose correspond to what I understand to be two forms of teleology that coexist in constant tension in his system: a functional and an ethical-soteriological teleology.

Music and Justice

Although aesthetics began with an interest in a teleological order, the classical question was largely disparaged and rejected in mainstream academic circles by the twentieth century. The two dogmas of musical modernism were the presumption of formalism and the assertion of aestheticism. Historically, philosophers defending the objectivity of aesthetic value focused on the question of Beauty per se. But what if beauty is descriptive of something else? Our conviction of justice runs deeper than convictions of beauty. This essay explores the significance of human anticipation concerning justice and how moral conviction relates to music as an encounter with teleological convictions. Music is fundamentally an individualized philosophical experience engaging the question of order, based upon a universal teleological presupposition. We do not find the arts to be meaningful because we believe them to be beautiful; we ascribe beauty to that which we find to be deeply meaningful--a way-it-should-be.

Перелом или тупик? Дебаты в рамках теологической рецепции кантовской философии

Kant’s turn to the subject has changed the epistemological conditions for theology. Four intellectual backgrounds of objections are examined: an Aristotelian and Thomistic teleological order of nature (1); Augustinianism based on original sin in which human agency is completely attributed to God’s grace (2); a Hegelian critique of the deontological conception of an “unconditional ought” which also puts Kant’s postulate of the existence of God into question (3); the combination in Radical Orthodoxy of a postmodern critique of the subject, an Augustinian view of human nature, and a monistic understanding of the Trinity (4). Their different diagnoses why Kant’s work constitutes a cul-de-sac are contrasted with theological positions that welcome it as a watershed: its move from ontology to human subjectivity; from a biologically transmitted inescapable sin to a freedom for good and evil; from a strict reciprocity to an unlimited scope of ethics that is faced with the question of meaning; and from condemning the secular as “heretical” to defining it as the genuine space of the free human counterparts created by God, according to Duns Scotus’s late medieval theology which anticipates Kant’s concept of autonomy. The standard by which theologies are judged is how they do justice to the New Testament’s message of salvation by Jesus Christ. The Conclusion argues that Kant’s turn to freedom in its unconditionality and finitude has opened up a thought form in which the truth of the Gospel finds more adequate categories of understanding than in those of earlier eras.

Religion spielen' auf der Bühne der Geschichte Reenacting Religion in der Französischen Revolution

The paper discusses how a 'national game' ('jeu national') of the French Revolution can be regarded as a re-enactment of religion and may help to establish a new religious form. Based on Rousseau's theory of the Contrat Social, the paper examines the so-called Jeu de l'ole (Game of the Goose) as a revolution game by analysing its semiotic and performative character. It argues that the popular Game of the Goose, which was adapted by the printer Basset in 1791, serves as an early mass medium to educate and manipulate the players by putting the events that led to the Revolution in a teleological order, and stages the French Revolution as a Salvation History.

Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter Gabriel Trop Christine Lehleiter, Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014). Pp. 342. $100.00. Christine Lehleiter's Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity tells a story about inheritance: not merely how literature and science around 1800 grappled with questions of heredity and the bioethics of incest, cross-breeding, and whether or not intelligence, madness, or various personality traits could be inherited, but more significantly, how these issues remain unresolved and active in our own time. The book thus describes how we have inherited from the eighteenth century the issue of inheritance as a problem, thereby bringing the history of science and literature around 1800 decisively into the horizon of the present. The central interventions of the book, however, may be regarded primarily from two different perspectives, although the book itself constantly insists on blending these two perspectives: first, from the perspective of the history of science, and second, from the perspective of the particularity of the literary act. The first chapter of the book, which focuses primarily on the history of science, illustrates the ways in which heredity becomes a subject of scientific discourse. Lehleiter notes that the transmission of traits constitutes a problem for both the preformationist and the epigenetic paradigms (the two dominant eighteenth-century models for understanding development): beings who already have their form at the moment of creation (preformation) or who self-organize from amorphous matter (epigenesis) cannot account for consistency in development from generation to generation and between individuals and species. She thus considers a third model, which she calls the "genealogical model" (35), to address this deficiency. The genealogical model, as described by Lehleiter, does not yet do away with natural teleology—something achieved in the "evolutionary model" of Charles Darwin (35)—but seeks to account for the consistency of development in a way that emphasizes species stability. Lehleiter isolates three "principles" that characterize the genealogical model: the principle of fertile offspring (56), according to which only a species that can reproduce itself counts as a species; the principle of equilibrium or economic distribution (56), according to which modification within a species takes place via an economy of equilibrium (the strengthening of one organ demands the weakening of another); and the genealogical principle (58), which claims that all members of one species can be traced back to a common origin. In general, she argues that many German thinkers sought a middle ground: a conception of natural development that was just stable enough to guarantee order (including teleological order), but not so stable that it would preclude freedom or individuality. After the first chapter, the book illustrates how competing discourses surrounding heredity shaped eighteenth-century notions of the self, above all in the context of literature. Literary representations constitute a significant site in which such discourses become strategically invoked (or criticized) for the purposes of envisaging what sort of self could emerge from the tension between the supposed autonomy of the individual and the potentially deterministic forces of heredity. In these sections, Lehleiter makes a claim for a specific form of literary agency: the literary act does not merely illustrate a scientific episteme, but probes its limits and explores its imaginative possibilities. [End Page 385] Chapters 2–4 focus mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96), Jean Paul F. Richter's The Comet (1820–22), and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs (1815). Discourses that invoke heredity—whether in cases of inbreeding, hybridization, or the inheritance of insanity—function like resonance chambers that allow Lehleiter to develop surprising readings for each of these texts. With a deft degree of sensitivity and refinement, Lehleiter does not allow the science to overshadow the power of the literary text; instead, the two domains reciprocally illuminate one another. The scientific discourses open new possibilities in the literary texts, just as the literary texts resignify scientific discourses within contexts of action and emphasis saturated with tensions and ambiguities. Drawing on contemporaneous biological discourses of inbreeding, Lehleiter thus reads Mignon in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship as the hermaphroditic offspring of an incestuous...

Organizing Melville

Organizing Melville Maurice S. Lee In Moby-Dick and beyond, Melville critiques the kind of taxonomic thinking evident in the static categories, rigid hierarchies, and teleological order of much antebellum natural science. We can read this critique into broader narratives of romanticism (organic holism, subjective power, tensions between science and literature). But classificatory systems can also be unsettled by flat ontologies that leave romantic epistemologies behind and instead posit autopoietic systems (as in Niklas Luhmann), heterogeneous assemblages (as in Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour), and even the kind of distributed networks [End Page 107] that Caroline Levine has discussed. The sheer mixing, morphing, and meshed interconnectivity of the object world militate against taxonomy—a dynamic evident in Moby-Dick, not only in its depictions of nature, but also in the potentially commensurate status of whales and texts and in the Sub-Sub-Librarian's experiments with a disorganized chowder of sources that resists the professionalization and organization of literature as it was being constructed in the antebellum period. Drawing on a new source for the Sub-Sub-Librarian's "Extracts" section, this paper asks what it means to think of source study and its knowledge production as a kind of flat ontology. Let's say that there are two dominant ways to think about taxonomies of nature: as ontological systems governed by laws made manifest in the phenomena that are organized and as constructions in which provisional categories are imposed upon phenomena by human organizers. This dualism can be conceived in various registers, and romanticism can point toward a synthesis in which objective ontologies and subjective constructions are ultimately commensurate. This paper, however, considers a different way of understanding taxonomies, one in which the natural objects to be organized become potential agents in their own organization. This possibility appears in Melville's writings in the form of self-organizing, non-human actors including coral insects, automatons, and rookeries. Such examples of semi-agential organization open up a set of questions regarding the status of taxonomical thinking in the nineteenth century: Where does order come from if not from God, Nature, or Man? What role does agency play in conceptions of the human? What happens to taxonomical theory when coherence and comprehensiveness give way to partial systems generated by multiple and incommensurate sources? My paper takes up such questions in light of nineteenth-century taxonomic discourses in natural philosophy and information management. Respondent Michael Jonik University of Sussex [End Page 108] Maurice S. Lee Boston University Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press and the Melville Society

Augustine on Creation, Providence and Motion

AbstractAugustine's theology of creation has been criticized for its Platonic tendency to denigrate matter and for a supposedly extrinsic view of divine providence that is reminiscent of design and even deism. This article counters such criticism and argues that Augustine explicitly blends extrinsic and intrinsic notions of providential teleological order. For Augustine, God ‘administers externally the natures he has created internally’ by inscribing the rationes seminales within creatures and conferring motion through the mediation of measure, number and weight. By resisting a dualism of intrinsic and extrinsic teleological order, Augustine avoids many of the problems that characterize modern theologies of creation and provides a more coherent account of divine providence.

Theologies of Enhancement? Another Look at Oliver O'Donovan's Created Order

Abstract: In this response to Gerald McKenny's “Evolution, Biotechnology, and the Normative Significance of Created Order,” John Berkman and Michael Buttrey suggest that McKenny has not adequately substantiated his claim that O'Donovan's account of “created order” provides no objection in principle to genetically “enhancing” children. Berkman and Buttrey frame an alternative reading of O'Donovan in light of O'Donovan's emphasis on “ordered love” as the task of Christian ethics, and his resolutely Trinitarian theology of created order. Contending contra McKenny that created order inheres in human persons and not only human nature abstractly understood, Berkman and Buttrey argue that for O'Donovan an ineliminable aspect of ordered love of God and neighbour is respecting the primordial teleological order of human persons, especially parents' rightly ordered love of the children entrusted to their care. In summary, Berkman and Buttrey conclude that unless McKenny puts O'Donovan's account of created order in its Trinitarian context and connects it with O'Donovan's rich account of ordered love, McKenny cannot make his case that O'Donovan's account of created order raises no inherent moral objection to genetically enhancing our children.

Transcendência e Imanência na Fenomenologia de Husserl

Based on The idea of Phenomenology , we intend to investigate a path to philosophy overcoming the modern idea that conceives consciousness as a closed container within itself; as such, the field of philosophical inquiry was confined to what is really immanent to consciousness. The transcendental phenomenology opens the reflection to the so-called enigma of transcendence, considered by Husserl as an enigmatic concept worthy of a fundamental phenomenological meditation. Husserl understands the three described types of transcendence -man, world and God- as an expressed teleological order present in the empirical world, in the development of organisms, culture, and humanity as a whole. From the work Die Krisis , the idea of God (transcendence) is presented as the ultimate justification from the tendency to improvement and realization of moral ends present in teleology as a kind of original form, intuited by transcendental subjectivity. Based on this we conclude that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, among which is the religious experience. For a better understanding of this issue, the phenomenological reflection should go back to the field of experience which is based on the non-discursive world of life. Thus, it is expected to expand the horizon of the understanding of religious experience.

Is there teleological order in nature? is there teleological explanation in science?

The paper will be divided into two parts. In the first part concerning teleological order in nature, different types of order will be distinguished: beginning with order as structure and then proceeding to higher and stronger types of order, which include special arithmetical and geometrical relations and eventually also negentropy. It will be shown that certain processes of becoming can possess higher order in such a way that they can have teleological order. In the second part a definition of teleological explanation will be given and the following two questions will be answered: (1) Are there teleological explanations which are logically valid? (2) Are there teleological explanations which are used by scientists?

The Importance of Teleology to Boyle's Natural Philosophy

Boyle prefaced his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things with the claim that there are three dangerous consequences for failing to engage in the pursuit of final causes. Boyle was sincere in this claim, for there is a systematic line of reasoning in his texts that incorporates all three consequences and establishes conceptual connections between his science, his theology, and his value theory. I argue in this paper that Boyle's teleological outlook led him to believe that the natural philosopher is morally obligated to continue his investigations of nature on the grounds that a deeper understanding of the teleological order necessarily motivates divine worship. Moreover, Boyle saw a conceptual connection between a teleological study of nature and revealed theology, a connection that reveals that a study of teleological nature can lead to the highest form of happiness. I conclude with a summary, and some remarks about the sincerity and weaknesses of Boyle's reasoning.

Leibniz's Two Realms Revisited

AbstractLeibniz speaks, in a variety of contexts, of there being two realms—a “kingdom of power or efficient causes” and “a kingdom of wisdom or final causes.” This essay explores an often overlooked application of Leibniz's famous “two realms doctrine.” The first part turns to Leibniz's work in optics for the roots of his view that nature can be seen as being governed by two complete sets of equipotent laws, with one set corresponding to the efficient causal order of the world, and the other to its teleological order. The second part offers an account of how this picture of lawful over‐determination is to be reconciled with Leibniz's mature metaphysics. The third addresses a line of objection proposed by David Hirschmann to the effect that Leibniz's doctrine undermines his stated commitment to an efficient, broadly mechanical account of the natural world. Finally, the fourth part suggests that Leibniz's thinking about the harmony of final and efficient causes in connection with corporeal nature may help to shed light on his understanding of the teleological unfolding of monads as well.

Nature as Origin and Difference

Recently the question of what insights and conceptual resources the traditions of continental philosophy might provide to contemporary environmental thought has received much attention; in this essay I would like to consider this issue, focusing in particular on the traditions associated with poststructuralism. To some extent, interest in this question among environmental philosophers has been marked by a fair degree of anxiety- vague sense that "postmodernism," by turning the whole world into a text, denies the very existence of nature and therefore the significance of attempts either to understand the dangers to which it is currently exposed or to argue for the need to protect it.1 Others, of course, have argued on the contrary that contemporary continental thought is not only compatible with but indispensable for an environmental philosophy capable of grasping the character and origin of our current environmental crisis.2 I want in this essay to ask the question of the relation between the "postmodern turn" and environmental theory not so much in terms of the particular debates it has already engendered, but rather at a more abstract level.3 I will identify four accounts of nature that might be distinguished in contemporary continental thought, and try to point out both the connections among them and also the difficulties they each face, asking in turn of each what it might provide in terms of a philosophically adequate environmental theory. The second and third of these are familiar ones deriving from contemporary poststructuralism. The first is probably familiar too, but is older, and is presented here as a contrast, while the fourth, which I will end up defending, is perhaps less well known and hearkens back to an earlier continental tradition associated with certain forms of Hegelian Marxism. The accounts here will be sketchy ones, for which I apologize in advance; what I am interested in developing is a kind of typology of views of nature, and thus what I present will have something of the character of ideal types. Nature as Origin Some of those who worry about the supposedly pernicious influence of poststructuralism on environmental philosophy do so in the name of a view of nature that has its own (often unacknowledged) pedigree in the history of continental thought, originating in traditions of Romanticism, vitalism, and neo-Kantianism. The view is certainly a familiar one, and holds a powerful grasp on the contemporary environmental imagination, especially that associated with "deep ecology" and similarly radical views. Nature on this account functions as an immense and complex organic whole, a massive order in which humans are embedded and out of which they emerged. This order has its own logic and teleology that transcend human understanding and even in a certain sense the human world. The "natural" here, indeed, is contrasted with the human-made or "artificial": what is natural is that which occurs through the workings of that massive whole independently of human will or action. Humans have a strange (and in fact paradoxical) role in this account, since they too are part of nature and hence are subject to this higher teleological order, yet in applying "calculative" or "instrumental" rationality in a doomed attempt to achieve control over it they forget their own rootedness in the natural, with dangerous consequences. Similarly, the natural is contrasted in this sort of view with the social, via a set of dichotomies whose tenor we recognize well from Rousseau. Natural impulses are reminders of our animal selves, which is to say our real selves; on top of those are imposed social rules and conventions which serve to transform (and thereby to corrupt) those impulses, producing a social world whose artificial character shows it to be a locus of distortion and deception. Thus humans behave naturally when they act in accordance with "natural processes" (i.e., those that would take place anyway in their absence) while their actions are harmful and unnatural (and immoral) when they act in ways indifferent or worse at cross-purposes to those processes. …

Deeds and control

Abstract The paper explores the affinities and the differences between the historical order and the technological one. Underlying the two orders in the human feature of transcending the given–in history in the context of time and in technology in the context of space. The sum total of the given is nature. Hence the two orders explored can be understood to belong to what is not nature and can be listed with artificiality. That aspect becomes prominent in technique as the production of tools and in technology proper in the utilization of laws of nature for the sake of responding to human needs or demands–be they in the direction of easing the burden or of attempting to dominate the world or mankind. There are attempts to interpret historical processes as generated by the pursuit to satisfy human needs. These attempts bring to bear an additional feature of the relationship between the historical and the technological orders. The difference between the two orders amounts first to the fact that history is both a process and its awareness as well as interpretation; technology is an intervention in the context of nature but as such is not inherently accompanied by interpretation. History eventually absorbs technology; technology does not absorb history. Attempts are common to identify the structure of alienation in history and in technology, namely the product becomes both independent from the process of production and from the producers. Yet the structure of civilization is characteristic of all human formations and language is the most prominent case in point: language is not only a reservoir of expression but also a formative factor, eliciting a resonance out of its own resources. What happened in technology, in the process of its development, is that in spite of the fact that it originated in human needs and came about to satisfy them, it turned out to be a teleological order without a telos . Whereas history is a multifaced order, neither a single telos nor a single causal factor can be identified in it. Technology is a future-oriented order; it turns products of the past and the present into obsolete ones. History is an order comprising the three dimensions of time. Here the component of interpretation grounded in awareness is the most significant one.

Chaucer's Psychologizing of Virgil's Dido

CRITICISM CHAUCER'S PSYCHOLOGIZING OF VIRGIL'S DIDO Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way? The Village It is my understanding, œncerning the deeper meaning of Chaucer's poetry, that he rejects much of medieval reality and takes to a psychological view of life and man. I find in his poetry an original amalgam of definiteness —about the what and how of things—and a very modern vagueness, an awareness of and a capacity to use ambiguity. Much of what seems perplexingly ironic, strangely orthodox, or otherwise difficult to harmonize in his poetry answers to this view. His early poetry in particular I regard as a poetry of rejection. Orthodoxy he puts aside in The Book of the Duchess;1 conventionalized love in The Parliament of Fowls; and teleological order in The House of Fame. He thus sets aside much of medieval belief, it seems to me, because his intellect demanded, on the one hand, an empirical truth, and his new sense of person, on the other, could not tolerate a return to the collective morality of orthodoxy. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer turns directly to human nature humanistically conceived. Personality, a child of intellect, was required to satisfy his new sense of reality.2 His move into pathedy* that is, into the drama of human emotions, became inevitable once he had withdrawn his faith from the medieval model, that is, emptied his faith, such as it was, of its literalness . Conventional allegory requires a structured, vital, and autonomous order, a meaningful world designed by God. Once this fails, allegory retreats further into man, into drama.* It becomes, then, a structured correspondence , not between a theology and the world, but between human actions and their assumed significance. From an even further intellectualized position of the drama of the absurd, such assumed significance itself becomes as artificial as did earlier allegory to the first rationalism. Chaucer's 1AIl references are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1961). I use orthodoxy here to mean sincere compliance to external doctrine. 2H. R. Patch, "The Subjects of Chaucer's Poetry," Franciplegius, Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Ir. (New York, 1965), pp. 255264 , approaches this view. 3John Nist's term from "The Art of Chaucer: Pathedy," Tennessee Studies m Language and Literature, XI ( 1966), 1-10. *E. T. Schell and I. J. D. Shuchter in the introduction of their book English Morality Phys and Interludes (New York, 1969) p. xvi, acknowledge this tendency, citing E. C. York, "Dramatic Form in Late Medieval English Narrative," MLN, LXXII (1957), 535-536. 52RMMLA BulletinJune 1970 transformation of Virgil's Dido anticipates his development away from medieval conventions toward modem, psychological people. I have called this essential development psychologizing, a term difficult to clarify in its representing a style of consciousness, equipped with its own logic and view of the world. "For investigations of this sort," as Lounsbury put it, "the personal equation becomes a factor of supreme importance."5 C.S. Lewis, discussing the semantic diminution of god-like genius into the merely human talent, says: To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalization , and that consequent aggrandisement of man and dessication of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.6 Regardless which substantive is preferred, in Chaucer one meets a deep and difficult-to-name condition marked by a peculiar fascination with intellect and the emotionally potentiated world it produces. Lewis gives literary expression to what others,7 upon other grounds, have likewise concluded in less elegant, philosophical language. Before rationalism , scientism, or before the general de-animation and de-sacralization of nature and the universe, or later, the triumph of method; before, in other words, intellect became the sole means of valid knowledge—before all this, men's consciousness was radically different from what it has been since the seventeenth century or, as I hope to demonstrate, even earlier. And it seems unreasonable to expect literature, especially, to escape the universal efficacy of man's larger moods...