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Evolution in Metaphysics
Around the turn of the twentieth century several philosophers made evolution a principle of metaphysics: not a finding of biology to be interpreted, but the way the world as a whole comes to be. They did not agree on what evolution was, and each drew the line between its senses in a different place.
Peirce’s three modes
Charles Sanders Peirce’s “Evolutionary Love” (The Monist, 1893) sorted the ways a thing can evolve: “Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us; evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm.” Darwinian selection was tychasm, growth by chance variations sorted by circumstance; anancasm was development by necessity, the working out of what is already given; agapasm was growth by attraction, in which a thing develops by sympathy with what it is drawn toward. Peirce read Darwin’s theory as an extension of the economics of his century, “politico-economical views of progress” carried “to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life”, and called its moral counterpart the Gospel of Greed. He declared his own “passionate predilection” for agapasm, while holding that all three modes operate.
Bergson’s creative evolution
Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907) rejected both of the explanations of evolution available to him. Mechanism explained living forms by the accumulation of chance variations under selection; finalism explained them by a plan set in advance. Bergson held that the two rest on the same assumption, that everything is given: “Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism.” Against both he set a vital impetus, the élan vital, which diverges into lines of development, plants and animals, instinct and intelligence, and creates forms that were in no sense contained in what preceded them. Evolution on his account is creation in time, unpredictable in principle, with no plan and no merely mechanical cause. The book drew critics on both counts: Bertrand Russell attacked its method as anti-intellectual, and Julian Huxley remarked that explaining evolution by an élan vital was like explaining the movement of a train by an élan locomotif.
Emergent evolution
Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) and Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923) read evolution as the successive appearance of genuinely new qualities, life from matter and mind from life, each resting on the level below and none predictable from it. Alexander placed the series in space-time and extended it past mind toward deity; Morgan distinguished resultant effects, predictable from their components, from emergent ones, and saw the course as the expression of a directing Activity. The doctrine is one of the sources of the modern debate set out under Emergence.
Whitehead’s organism
Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925) argued that the materialism of modern science, which treats nature as inert matter in motion, cannot accommodate the evolution it helped to discover, and proposed a philosophy of organism in its place. In Process and Reality (1929) the basic units of the world are occasions of experience, each coming into being by taking up its past, so that creativity, the production of novelty, is the most general feature of what exists. Evolution on this account is the history of such processes at every scale. The broader tradition is set out under Process philosophy.
Teilhard’s Omega Point
The Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in Le Phénomène humain (written 1938–40, published 1955), gave the arrow reading a theological form: evolution is a rise in complexity accompanied by a rise in consciousness, from matter through life to humanity and the layer of thought he called the noosphere, converging on a final point of unity, the Omega Point, which he identified with Christ. The book divided biologists. Julian Huxley wrote the introduction to its English translation (1959), and Theodosius Dobzhansky defended Teilhard’s reading of evolution as directional and gave it a place in his own thought. Peter Medawar’s review in Mind (1961) held that “the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
Aurobindo’s involution
Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine (1939–40) takes the word as his own and sets involution before it: Spirit is involved in Matter, and evolution is its manifestation through Life and Mind to Overmind and Supermind. “Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution.”
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Progress and direction · Process philosophy · Emergence · Peirce · Bergson · Whitehead · Alexander · Lloyd Morgan · Russell · Julian Huxley · Dobzhansky · Medawar