Ends

A gentle critique of natural law teleology

Untitled, oil on canvas, 2022.

In his classic essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger describes various ways of characterizing the essential nature of things. (As he puts it, “the thingness of the thing.”) One such characterization, found originally in Aristotle, describes all things as fundamentally composed of matter and form. In this view, everything is made out of some raw material, to which a “form” is added. This addition of a form may happen by transforming the matter, arranging it into parts, bringing out a latent perfection, or even adding some organizing principle which gives the thing unity and identity. It is the form which makes the resulting thing whatever it is, not the matter from which it is constructed, though the form inheres in the matter and could not exist without it.

The greek word for matter, ὕλη, also means “timber”, suggesting to us that the fundamental metaphor of this matter-form analysis is that of furniture or other manufactured goods. And because this schema refers back to the idea of making, it is also bound up with the ordinary ideas and dispositions we as humans have toward things we make—specifically: we make things for reasons, with intent and designs, to express in them some desired purpose or end.

Heidegger says the following:

The inclination to take the matter-form structure to be the constitution of every being receives … particular encouragement from the fact that, on the basis of religious—biblical—faith, the totality of beings is represented, in advance, as something created. And here, that means “made.”

He goes on to say that through the union of Aristotelian metaphysics, Biblical faith, and medieval Thomism, the idea of the universe as a manufactured whole, with God as the craftsman making each thing for its purpose, became the primary method in the West for interpreting the nature of things from the medieval period into early modernity.

The importance of this metaphysical schema is clear from the way Thomism is still taught in seminaries today, with reference to the “four causes” of every thing: the matter of which it is made, the form which is imposed on the matter and gives it its nature, the efficient cause which produces the form in the matter, and the end for the sake of which the production of the thing occurs.

The conceptual patterns generated by this analysis recur throughout Thomistic theology. One sees them especially in the view of causation implied by Thomas’s “five ways.” There the ability to reduce the subsidiary causal explanations of particular objects to a universal cause (whether efficient, formal, or final) is used as the basis for various claims about the nature of God and his relationship to the world. God is the force driving the actualization of the universe from mere potency. God is the summum bonum which encompasses within itself every possible perfection participated in by creatures. God is the craftsman ordering all things to their intended ends, and the universe as a whole to its cosmic perfection, et cetera.

And in fact this conceptual schema retains its rhetorical force well outside the world of Thomistic theology, and is used apologetically by a wide range of non-Catholic Christian denominations, albeit less formally. One sees it perhaps most often in a certain counterfactual appeal made by preachers against the viability of atheism: If God does not exist, then what meaning does life have? If there is no supreme moral authority, then why should people not just devolve into wanton criminals? If heaven is not real, why suffer for the sake of righteousness? If no one created the universe, why does anything exist at all? Each of these questions functions as an enthymeme, leaving unstated the assumption that this causal schema of agent-effect-end is universally valid, and that in the absence of a supreme and universal cause, the entire universe would devolve into terrifying absurdity.

However, there are difficulties. As it turns out, the matter-form schema does not describe most things very well. In his treatise De Anima, Aristotle adapts the matter-form analysis to describe the forms of living things, grouping their perfections under various “faculties” which can be actualized to achieve the true form or perfection of a given species. For example, vegetable life achieves its highest perfection in bearing fruit and reproducing. Animal adds to this the ability to move and sense. And human life adds above all these the faculty of reasoning.

It’s a very tidy taxonomy, and to some extent this faculty-based analysis does well as a means of describing the health and function of various organisms. The health or well-being of a living thing is determined by the extent to which it has actualized the potential of its faculties in accord with its overall end. For plants and animals, the overall end of life is reproduction. For man, according to Aristotle, it also includes higher perfections, namely, the contemplation of first causes, the fellowship of friends, and a life of virtue in a political community.

But when one asks about things not described in Aristotle’s analysis, the cracks begin to show. In the first case, consider things which are absolutely not the product of craft. What is the form, essence, or perfection of a slab of granite? What is the “final cause” of a lightning bolt? These are puzzling questions.

More troubling, though, is the fact that the analysis does not apply well at all to living things. Consider the problem of identifying the true form of a given species, the highest degree of actualization it can achieve in its particular faculties. How would one go about identifying the qualities that constitute perfection?

Suppose you are looking at a tulip. What particular shade is the “best” shade? What size? What is the ideal shape for the sepals, the stamen, the stem? And in fact, how does one know that the highest end of this plant is reproduction and not something quite different? Who’s to say that these attributes and tendencies constitute perfection for the tulip at all?

These questions become still more disturbing once one realizes that, biologically speaking, species are not really just one thing. Evolution happens constantly, and sometimes what appears as an aberrant mutation in an individual may become the typical form down the line. There are indeterminate forms that straddle the line between species, and even within a given species there are often innumerable natural attributes which do not contribute in any way (and may even thwart!) what we imagine to be the end or perfection of the thing.

These problems of demarcation, ranking, and explanation end up, if not totally eviscerating the matter-form/potency-perfection schema, then certainly reducing it to a quaint form of analysis with severely limited applicability. It turns out that simply documenting phenomena without seeking out a normative standard of natural perfection tends to be more descriptively fruitful and less blinkered by assumptions about how things “ought” to be, or what they are “for.”

But of course, this schema remains current among Thomists and other Christian thinkers not because it is useful for the analysis of biological or other natural phenomena. Rather, its ideological function is to serve as the backbone for a certain kind of normative reasoning based on the assumption that intuited faculties and perfections in nature are descriptive of divine intent. Just as a knife is manufactured with a handle and ought to be held correctly, even so natural human faculties are created with particular proper uses and ends, which they ought to serve.

And so, in addition to the apologetic mentioned earlier, which associates the possibility of meaning and order in the universe with the existence of God, Christians put forward another apologetic aimed at defending their particular moral rules as somehow evident as the intent of the creator in the nature of things themselves. The most familiar form of this apologetic, is the school of moral reasoning known as “Natural Law”, which justifies Christian ethical norms and taboos by appealing to the intuited ends of the natural faculties involved.

Let’s take curiosity as an example. In classical Catholic moral theology curiosity is regarded as a vice opposed to the proper use of the faculty of learning. The faculty of learning is ordered to a specific end, namely the acquisition of knowledge proper to one’s station in life, and the contemplation of higher things to the extent that one is able. If one seeks to know things beyond one’s station or ability, one is guilty of “curiosity,” which we have just shown (by reasoning from the natural end of the faculty of learning) to be immoral.

A similar analysis could be (and was, in practice) performed with respect to a number of other faculties: eating, drinking, laughing, talking, etc. And note that the moral analysis is not just based on the categories of excess and deficiency, but is about the extent to which a particular activity is in accordance with the designated end of the faculty. The faculty of eating is ordered to the end of sustenance. Thus, one ought to eat for sustenance, and if one were to eat for any other reason in a way that was not productive of sustenance, that would be immoral. (Diet Coke fans, take note.)

But of course in practice this sort of analysis is almost never applied to most human faculties. It isn’t needed. Why? Because, as mentioned earlier, the main function of natural law reasoning is not to understand natural phenomena but to serve as an apologetic strategy in defense of the revealed claims of Christian ethics. As a result, the main areas where natural law comes into play are those where Christian intuitions deviate from ambient non-Christian views, namely, rules regarding sexuality.

According to Catholic moral apologists, the primary end of the faculty of human sexuality is procreation. This means that any variant of sexual behavior which is not intended for the sake of procreation and obstructs the possibility of procreation is immoral. Like the examples of eating and learning given above, this seems quite tidy on the surface. One can quite easily draw all the desired conclusions from these principles: masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, and any sex acts other than penile-vaginal intercourse terminating in ejaculation are immoral and pervert the human sexual faculty by thwarting its natural end.

However, this analysis suffers from the same general defect as Aristotle’s analysis of form and perfection in living things. In Aristotle the analysis works well for a handful of chosen attributes and species but becomes less and less cogent as one attempts to apply it in greater detail to things outside that group. Likewise, the Natural Law analysis of natural ends and perverted faculties can seem quite compelling when one sticks entirely to the examples and activities of chief concern to its proponents. But it is quickly rendered absurd when the same principles are applied with the same stringency to non-sexual activities.

Things like gum chewing, artificial sweeteners, whistling, nail biting, inhaling helium, endoscopic procedures, sword swallowing, and many others directly or indirectly thwart the natural ends of the faculties used to perform them, and yet are not considered immoral by anyone, and certainly not by the apologists advancing these arguments. Worse still, there are numerous examples of organs which have no obvious “natural end”. What is the natural end or inscribed purpose of the tongue? If I kiss someone with my lips, am I perverting the faculty of speaking? The faculty of nutrition? Is kissing itself a faculty? What is the natural end of fingernails? Is it immoral to thwart it? How would one go about enumerating faculties and their proper ends? It all ends up being rather arbitrary.

Moreover, some of the seemingly evident faculties cease to make much sense when one looks closer. If the human sexual organs are naturally “intended” to be used only in ways that result in procreation, why is it that, in both sexes, the natural configuration of semen and ova guarantees that the overwhelming majority of both will die without ever undergoing fertilization? This and other questions about the configuration of the sex organs, sexual pleasure, etc. make the foregone conclusion of the Natural Law apologists about the sole primary end of sexuality seem somewhat arbitrary. What if, like a thumb or a tongue, the sexual organs have a variety of acceptable uses? What if, as in the case of biology, reducing every faculty and phenomenon to the categories of form and perfection is ultimately counterproductive as a mode of analysis?

But this brings us back to the terrifying counterfactual we discussed earlier—if there is no natural law about these things, if there are no ends inherent in the faculties of the human body, then how is one to form any moral judgments at all? Doesn’t it mean that all morality will go out the window, and everyone will become some sort of monstrous deviant?

This sort of thinking used to really disturb me. But the reality of the matter is abundantly evident in human society at large. It turns out that human moral norms are not based on natural law reasoning, and cannot be, because outside of a few relatively niche communities no one reasons about ethics this way. And, what is perhaps more instructive, there is very little evidence on the ground that the quality of human flourishing, moral dignity, or virtue is in any way improved by being a proponent or student of this form of analysis.

One may shrink in horror from the notion that nature has no inherent design or purpose, but the reality is that even if one believed nature to have such a purpose, it would remain unknowable in almost every particular case. The cosmic matter-form analysis serves as a background assurance that “answers are out there” to calm us in the face of the reality that we have no access to those answers. Similarly, the natural law tradition is a sort of balm for believers to assure them that the arbitrary and silly proscriptions of their God are in fact somehow rational and knowable by all.

But in the end it seems to make very little difference whether one believes in such things or not. People live and search and love much the same regardless.