Teleology

Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose.

Teleology and modern philosophy II

The area in which, within modern philosophy, teleology has had a powerful influence right through to the present has been in Hegel and the various neo-Hegelian schools, including Marx. In this interpretation of the history of our species on this globe - an interpretation at variance both with Darwin and with what is now called analytic philosophy - the point of departure is not so much formal logic and scientific fact but 'identity'. In Hegel's terminology: 'objective spirit'. Individual human consciousness, in the process of reaching for autonomy and freedom, has no choice but to deal with an obvious reality: the collective identities (the multiplicity of world views, ethnic, cultural and national identities) which divide the human race both now and in the past, and which set off (and always have set off) different groups of people against each other in violent conflict. Hegel conceived of the 'totality' of mutually antagonistic world-views and life-forms in history as being 'goal-driven', i.e. oriented towards an end-point in history in which the 'objective contradiction' of 'subject' and 'object' would eventually 'sublate' into a form of life which has left violent conflict behind it. This goal-oriented, 'teleological' notion of the 'historical process as a whole' is present in a variety of 20th Century authors - from Lukács' History and Class Consciousness ISBN 0262620200, to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, ISBN 0804736324. (Good overview in Herbert Marcuse's Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. ISBN 0262132214)

Related Topics:
Lukács - Horkheimer - Adorno - Marcuse

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