Étienne Gilson - From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution

From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again

A JOURNEY IN FINAL CAUSALITY, SPECIES, AND EVOLUTION

TIENNE GILSON

Translated by John Lyon

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Original French edition:
tienne Gilson, DAristote Darwin... et retour. Essai
sur quelques constantes de la bio-philosophie
1971 Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris
www.vrin.fr

Original English edition:
1984 University of Notre Dame Press,
Notre Dame, Ind.

Front cover illustrations:

An engraving of Aristotle seated, published in an 1894 general history book.
Steven Wynn Photography / iStockphoto

Cartoon of Charles Darwin, from Vanity Fair , 1871.
HIP / Art Resource, New York
English Heritage, National Monuments Record
Great Britain

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

Foreword 2009 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-169-8 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-195-0 (E)
Library of Congress Control Number 2008939910

Printed in the United States of America

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires
(Pleiade, II, p. 466.)

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
(London: Geoffrey Bless, 1955; chap. 13, p. 195.)

Foreword

Christoph Cardinal Schnborn

Mechanism, Scientism, Teleology and Evolution

There are two questions that loom large in the re-appraisal of modern science. Neither directly addresses the current debate about the idea of design or the adequacy of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Yet they are decisive for our understanding of what evolutionary theory does or can explain in principle.

In this marvelous book by tienne Gilson, these questions and other key topics are treated in a sensitive and illuminating fashion. Gilson, the great 20th-century commentator and historian of philosophy, helps us to see that reductionist accounts of evolution are the visible part of an intellectual iceberg, and that the issues that lie under the surface of the current evolution debate are ultimately far larger and more important. They extend to our understanding of nature and of modern science quite broadly, and to the intellectual culture that gave rise to modernity.

Two Questions

The first question is about the truth of mechanism, the dominant form of reductionism in science. While no one can question the methodological value of treating natural things as if they were nothing but an agglomeration of simpler parts all the way down, and then seeking an understanding of the parts and how they interoperate to cause the operations of the whole, the ontological question remains, and grows more and more urgent by the day: Is a stable natural wholewhether atom, or molecule, or bio-chemical, or cell, or plant, or animaltruly nothing but an arbitrary combination of indifferent parts? In other words, is it not really a whole at all, but only a label we give to a relatively stable interaction of parts? Even phrasing the question that way raises another: If so, why are only certain interactions of parts stable in the first place?

The second pressing question is the truth of scientism, the (usually) implicit philosophical claim that modern science provides the best or even the only valid answers to the questions raised by human reason as it considers the world around us. Science, according to this view, has rightly earned a privileged status in public discourse. The weak version of scientism, almost universally accepted today, is that science is the preferred, perhaps only valid way of really knowing anything about the material world around us: the cosmos; the stars and planets; our Earth and its seemingly unique biosphere; the animals, plants, minerals, and their evolutionary history. The only limit to this version of scientism is human nature itself, and even then only the supposedly spiritual or mental as opposed to bodily aspects of human life. These supposedly immaterial aspects of human nature are claimed to be exempt from the encroachments of science, a fortress-garden wherein notions of values, ethics, and religion are claimed to be able to flourish. The strong version of scientism, still widely contested but growing in strength in the modern West, ignores or abolishes the commonly accepted Cartesian mindbody boundary, and claims as for its future conquest everything about material reality, which is to say reality itself, including the historically conditioned, illusory, and now crumbling notions of spirit or mind in human existence.

The Historical Background: From Newton to Darwin

Those two questionsmechanism and reductionism on the one hand, and scientism on the otherare twins, entangled from birth in the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Those revolutions began in earnest with the philosophical and scientific speculations of the empiricist Bacon and the rationalist Descartes, in many ways so at odds with one another, yet sharing a profound unity in their condemnation of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition of formal and final causes, and their proclamation of the pressing need for the control and domination of nature through the study of its secrets in order to serve the comfort and bodily health of man. Galileos discoveries and speculations also help set the stage for change, in two respects. Positively, his astute decomposition and quantitative analysis of the laws of motion and his development and use of the telescope to show the unity of the sublunary and superlunary realms were of great scientific importance. Negatively, his polemic against geocentrism and simplistic biblical exegesis that was said to support it prepared the ground for more radical change.

Others provided much of the tinder for revolution, but it was Isaac Newton who set the fire blazing. The astounding triumph of Newtons physics burned away the last strongholds of the medieval Aristotelian consensus about nature, confirming in the minds of Western elites the truth of the new instrumental science of Bacon and Descartes. By unifying celestial mechanics and terrestrial ballistics into a unified science of the motion of bodies, and providing a convincing set of reasons for the helio-centrism of Copernicus and Galileo over the empirically equivalent geocentrism of Tycho Brahe (as opposed to Galileos essentially aesthetic preference for conceptual simplicity), Newton not only decisively overthrew the Aristotelian cosmos and set the study of nature on an entirely new footing, but also brought into a tense but stable alliance the opposing intellectual poles of empiricism and rationalism under a particles and laws model of all physical reality. Newtons corpuscularism (atoms, particles, bodies) represented the materialist, empiricist pole; and his mathematicism (laws) represented the rationalist, idealist, Pythagorean pole. These two opposing intellectual forces were yoked together in a new synthesis expected to reach and explain all of material reality ! As he wrote in the Preface to the first edition of his Principia (1687):