Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
programme to be set up should therefore aim to raise biological
variability from the status of simple fluctuation to the status of
a fundamental parameter. This will require its systematic, quanti-
tative study.
The second and final point concerns the possibility of con-
structing an ethical principle. We have demolished the idea of order
intrinsic to the living organism. We have rejected any form of
animism. In doing so, we have just returned to the general founda-
tions of scientific method. However, in these conditions, on what
basis can we build an ethical principle if there is no natural order
in the world to refer to? What principle can we rely on if “Pure
chance, absolutely free but blind” as Monod said (CN, p. 110), is
the ultimate reality hidden in the deepest depths of ourselves?
Ontophylogenesis could be accused of nihilism: demolishing the role
of Form leads to doubting human specificity, and ends in radical
anti-humanism. Yet this is inexact. Ontophylogenesis does not
reject the idea of order in itself, but the idea of an absolute order,
transcendent and unalterable. Order exists, but it is relative and
can change. It depends on the relationship of the living organism to
its environment. The organism can only exist in and through this
relationship which it just interiorises in its internal environment,
and which spares it precisely the void of absolute chance. The con-
sequence of this is of the greatest importance: the living organism
thus comes into being relative to what it is not. That otherness is
present, inseparable, in its identity.
There seems to us to be no nihilism here; on the contrary we
see the possibility of finding an ethical principle, without resorting
to transcendence.
