Eight decades after The Critique of Judgment, we find the distinguished embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer writing:
“Without doubt the organism is a mechanical apparatus, a machine, which builds itself. The life process runs under uninterrupted chemical operations. Therefore the organism might also be called a chemical laboratory. But it is also the chemist in that it assembles the materials necessary for the continuation of the chemical operations from the external world. If it cannot have them, life ceases. However great the progress has been made in recent times in understanding the individual operations in the life process, something has always remained behind which guides them and which controls the physico-chemical processes: life itself.” (Timothy Lenoir’s translation, pp. 272–73)
I concluded my article as follows:
“Our plant robot will need instrumentation and control systems. For any sort of instrumentation-and-control system, we can discover how its performance characteristics decline as we increase the durability of its components on and on. One decline I see already is in the sensitivity of instruments. An instrument with zero sensitivity is no longer functioning. We are beginning to see the richness of reasons that an indestructible plant robot could not have the values of an actual living plant, the reasons it is unable to act in teleological ways.”
Rand wrote of values within plants and functions within plants. She did not write of plants acting “in teleological ways.” Rand reserved the term teleological to stand for intentional acts, for conscious actions of animals having an end in view. Plants do not act in teleological ways in that sense of the term. In many of the other senses of the term, too, Rand was not a teleologist in her conception of plant life.
“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue. . . . There are alternatives in the conditions [a plant] encounters [heat or frost, drought or flood], but there is no alternative in its function: it acts to further its life.” (AS 1013)
“Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.*
“*When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term ‘goal-directed’ is not to be taken to mean ‘purposive’ (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term ‘goal-directed’, in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of the organism’s life.” (VS 16)
Rand took functionality in biology at this level to be the result of efficient and material causes; no final causes at the nonconscious, physical level. In “Causality v. Duty” she contracts the Aristotelian concept of final causality to animals, specifically, to animals who engage in conscious ends-means cognition (PWNI 99).
Nevertheless, Rand spoke of self-generated, self-maintaining, goal-directed action as essential to all organisms. These characteristics distinguish living action from inanimate action, and they are the fundamental characteristics of living entities as living. In Rand’s journal The Objectivist (1968), Robert Efron maintained that there are “fundamentally different principles of action (causal factors) found in living as contrasted to inanimate entities” (7). He is highly doubtful, moreover, that all of the actions of a living entity can be entirely “accounted for, described by, and deduced from those laws of physics [and chemistry] which are entirely derived from a study of inanimate entities” (7).
Goal-directed vegetative actions would include not only the tropisms such as the gravitropic root response described in #3, but the development of a multicellular individual organism from a seed or single cell. For tropisms and development, and all other vegetative functional activities, in Rand’s view, goal-directed designates not a teleological principle operating in insentient nature, rather “the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of the organism’s life” (VS 16).
The goal-directedness of vegetative actions under Rand’s conception is not the Aristotelian concept of organic final causality. Allan Gotthelf asks: “What, precisely, does Aristotle mean when he asserts that the coming-to-be (or any stage in the coming-to-be) of a living organism is for the sake of the mature, functioning organism which results?” (207) For Aristotle, in complete generality, changes are to be explained by the nature of the entities involved and by their specific potentials for being changed and for inducing change (209–11). Prof. Gotthelf argues that for Aristotle “the development of a living organism [say, from an acorn to an oak] is not the result of a sum of actualization of element-potentials [specific potentials of earth, water, air, fire] the identification of which includes no mention of the form of the mature organism, but is in fact the actualization primarily of a single potential for an organism of that form, an actualization which incorporates many element-potentials, but is not reducible to them . . . . The irreducibility to element-potentials of organic development is the core of the meaning of the assertion that the development is for the sake of the mature organism, and thus the core of Aristotle’s conception of final causality.” (213)
(Although essential specification of element natures and potentials “does not make reference to the form or nature of the living organism as a whole,” Gotthelf is inclined to think that for Aristotle “the elements have (irreducible) capacities to be worked up into such wholes, and that such capacities may be seen as part of their natures as the elements they are” (231).)
Rand evidently doubted the full reducibility of biological explanations to principles of physics and chemistry. In that her view was similar to Aristotle’s. But she had the lay person’s modern physics, chemistry, and biology in her conceptual framework. She did not accept Aristotle’s general conception that changes such as motion are to be seen as passages from potentiality to actuality nor the division he makes between form and matter (ITOE App. 286). So Rand should reasonably resist much of Aristotle’s account of vegetative goal-directedness as actualization of a target potential.
Subsequent to the Scientific Revolution, one formulation of teleology and final causality in vegetative life was the idea of a vital force emergent from the forces of physics and chemistry, an emergent force that effects organic organization and goal-directed action. Examples would be Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb (formative drive [1781]) or von Baer’s Gestaltungskraft (whole-force [1827]). (See Lenoir 1982; Richards 2002; Huneman 2007.)
In The Fountainhead Rand once used the phrase vital force. But in writing about her developed ethical theory, inaugurated in 1957, she never uses that phrase in characterizing its biological bases. She relies on the term function. Vegetative functional activities can be seen as markedly different from the physics- and chemistry-activities of inanimate matter giving rise to those functional activities, without postulating a new kind of (teleonomic) force emergent from the forces of physics and chemistry. Furthermore, the development of an acorn into an oak does not require postulation of teleological potentials in the acorn (ITOE App. 267, 284–86). The seed has biotic structure. Non-teleological physics and chemistry within that structure can precipitate growth and new structure having functions in the current and future survival of the developing organism.
Carl Bergmann and Rudolph Leukart, researchers in anatomy and physiology, write in their monumental text of 1852:
“Within plant life, conditions are offered which permit the affinities between carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen to come together to form organic compounds. In plants and animals, organic matter is everywhere chemically transformed in regular patterns, because the conditions for its breakdown and transformation are provided in the proper sequential order. At the same time, this process is a requirement of the plan of the organism within which the organic matter is formed and for which it is purposeful [zweckmässig].” (Lenoir’s translation, p. 174)
Zweckmässig could also be translated as functional.
References
Efron, R. 1968. “Biology without Consciousness—and Its Consequences.” The Objectivist (Feb):5–14.
Gotthelf, A. 1987. “Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality.” In Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. Cambridge University Press.
Huneman, P., ed. 2007. Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology. University of Rochester Press.
Lenoir, T. 1982. The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology. University of Chicago Press.
Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House.
———. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. Signet.
———. 1969–71. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Appendix. Meridian.
———. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. Signet.
Richards, R.J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. University of Chicago Press.