Teleology asks what something is for. Not who made it, not what it consists of, not how it works, but where it strives toward. This question sounds simple, yet it is one of the most contested in the entire history of philosophy. For whoever asks whether nature pursues purposes thereby poses the question of whether the cosmos is alive or dead.
#What Aristotle Saw
Teleology goes back to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), specifically to his doctrine of four causes. Every natural thing is determined by four aspects: the matter of which it consists (causa materialis), the form it assumes (causa formalis), the impulse that sets it in motion (causa efficiens), and the purpose toward which it is ordered (causa finalis). An eye exists for seeing. A seed carries the future plant within itself as an inner determination. Nature, Aristotle held, does nothing in vain: “We see that nature does nothing without purpose” (Aristotle, De respiratione, Ch. 10).
This insight is neither naive nor metaphorical. Aristotle was a precise observer of the animal world. His comparative anatomy (De partibus animalium) demonstrates across hundreds of individual findings that organic structures only become intelligible when one asks about their function. “For the body is an instrument: each individual part exists for the sake of something, and likewise the whole itself” (Aristotle, De partibus animalium, I, 1). This is not pious speculation about a divine watchmaker but the observation of a natural researcher who refuses to ignore the obvious.
The concept that captures this inner directedness is entelechy — literally: that which carries its end within itself. The acorn contains the oak not as a hidden blueprint but as a living striving. Every living being realises what it is by disposition. This realisation happens not through external control but from its own nature.
#The Rupture: Mechanism Against Purpose
Modern natural science struck teleology from the record. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) declared final causes barren “like virgins, who bear nothing” and banished them from physics. Descartes reduced nature to extension and motion, animals to automata. Newton described celestial mechanics through gravitational laws without asking about any ‘for the sake of which.’ Laplace answered Napoleon’s question about where God appeared in his system: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
What took place here was not a refutation of teleology but a methodological decision. Natural science resolved to admit only efficient causes: pressure, impact, gravitation, later chemical reaction and electromagnetic interaction. This restriction was extraordinarily productive. It made possible the steam engine, electricity, and nuclear physics. But it was silently reinterpreted as an ontological claim: not only the method but reality itself was said to be free of purpose.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) diagnosed this shift as “bad metaphysics” — a metaphysical prejudgement masquerading as fact (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 1980, Anti-Geschichte der Physik). Natural science operates, as he termed it, in “systematic subject-blindness”: the living human being removes themselves as scientist and turns themselves into a “recording apparatus” of reality (Kirchhoff, J., “Was ist Erkenntnis?”). Everything about nature that is living, directed, and meaningful falls through the grid of a method that by definition excludes precisely these dimensions.
#Schelling: Nature as Purposive Without External Purpose
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) undertook the sharpest philosophical rehabilitation of teleology and simultaneously raised the question to a level that neither Aristotle nor Kant had reached.
In the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant had rescued teleology as a regulative principle: we simply cannot help but regard organisms as if they were purposive. But whether nature actually pursues purposes remains undecidable for Kant. Schelling goes further. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) he formulates the fundamental thesis of his teleology:
Behind this formulation lies a precise distinction that Schelling unfolds in his History of Modern Philosophy (1827): there is an outer purposiveness, “merely externally imposed on a tool, like the purposiveness of a machine,” and an inner one, “which obtains only where, as in the organic, form and matter are inseparable.” In a machine, the constructor remains outside the work. In the organism, the “formative activity is one inherent in the matter itself, fused with the matter” (Schelling, 1827, Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie).
This is the decisive point: nature is purposive not because a god designed it from without. It is purposive because the formative power lies within it. Natural philosophy understands the cosmos as an absolute organism in which spirit does not arrive from outside but works as an inner principle. Nature is to be visible spirit, spirit invisible nature (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur).
#What the Elimination of Teleology Costs
The consequences of the teleological elimination reach further than first appears. Whoever denies all purpose to nature faces at least three problems that cannot be solved by purely mechanical means.
The first concerns life. An organism cannot be fully described through efficient causes. Every biological explanation unavoidably employs teleological language: genes “code for” proteins, the immune system “recognises” intruders, organs “serve” functions. Schopenhauer noted: “Teleology, as the presupposition of the purposiveness of every part, is a perfectly reliable guide in the study of organic beings” (Schopenhauer, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. 2). Whoever dismisses this language as mere metaphor must explain why it is so indispensable.
The second problem concerns consciousness. In a purposeless cosmos, consciousness is an epiphenomenon — a by-product that causes nothing and serves no purpose. Yet this claim contradicts the most immediate experience of every living being. The riddle of consciousness cannot even be formulated without posing the question of purpose.
The third problem concerns meaning. If nature knows no purpose and the cosmos is blind occurrence, then human experience of meaning is nothing but an illusion that happened to be useful for evolution. The epistemology of natural philosophy holds the opposite: the human being is not the only locus where meaning appears. We participate in a cosmos to which meaning is inherent.
#Teleology Today: Between Darwinism and a Living Cosmos
The usual objection runs: Darwin made teleology superfluous. Natural selection produces the appearance of purposiveness through a purely mechanical process — variation and selection. No designer, no purpose, only blind adaptation.
Yet this objection too falls short. Darwin explains how existing variations prevail within a population. He does not explain why there are organisms at all that vary, reproduce, and relate to their environment. The question of the inner striving of the living, of Aristotle’s entelechy, is not answered by selection but presupposed.
Schelling had already formulated the decisive point: the difference between natural and artificial product consists in the fact that in a work of art the concept of purpose is imposed upon the surface, while in a natural product it “has passed over into the object itself and is absolutely inseparable from it” (Schelling, 1800, System des transzendentalen Idealismus). An organism is not like a machine upon which an external purpose has been imposed. It is purposive from within. The analogy one chooses — machine or living being — determines what one can see at all.
The natural philosophy running from Schelling through Goethe to Jochen Kirchhoff therefore insists on an insight older than modern natural science, one not refuted by it but merely suppressed: the cosmos is alive, directed, and meaningful. Teleology is no relic of the Middle Ages. It is the condition for being able to think life, consciousness, and knowledge at all.
Related entries: Natural Philosophy, Epistemology, Analogy Model, Organic, Critique of Science
#Sources
Aristotle (c. 350 BCE). Physics.
Aristotle (c. 350 BCE). De partibus animalium.
Aristotle (c. 350 BCE). De respiratione.
Kant, I. (1790). Kritik der Urteilskraft.
Kirchhoff, J. (1991). Anti-Geschichte der Physik: Grundlagenkritik und Alternativen.
Kirchhoff, J. (2023). “Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transzendentalen Idealismus.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1827). Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie.
Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Second Volume.