Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Europe, tribal Africa (among which there are again huge differences),
and so on, indefinitely.
The sociality of wolves, geese, elephants, and other social animals is
quite different in that there does not exist anything like such a degree of
variation in how they exist socially. Wolves are pretty much wolves;
culture plainly plays a far more insignificant role in animal societies,
which seem to follow more of an inborn biological imperative.
Similarly with rationality. Even if animals can be said to possess some
degree of reasoning (as I believe they do), there is no reason to believe
that they possess the huge variation that humans have in rational
approaches to issues. We can develop elaborate rational, teleological
approaches to biology, and we can develop elaborate rational, mecha-
nistic approaches to biology, both of which claim exclusivity. We can
adopt rationally defended naturalistic worldviews, reductionistic world-
views, or theological worldviews.
Thus, rationality and sociality are highly variegated in their instantia-
tion, and to attempt to create a descriptive account that does justice to
all of their differing manifestations would seem to be impossible. For this
reason, the notions of “is” and “ought” seem to be much more closely
connected in a teleological worldview than in a mechanistic one. If
humans are by nature rational and social beings, and yet rationality and
sociality differ widely in how they manifest themselves, it is natural, as
Aristotle might say, to seek to determine “the best,” “the highest,” the
normative notion of rationality and sociality to which all humans ought
naturally aspire and work toward. And this seems precisely to be what
Aristotle undertakes in his various writings on these issues such as the
Ethics
and the
Politics
. Even if most people, statistically, do not seek hap-
piness as the “rational activity of the soul in accordance with perfect
virtue,” still Aristotle believes that they ought to—counting heads does
not falsify that statement as the telos toward which humans aspire, no
more than most of a math class failing to prove a theorem shows that
the theorem is unprovable.
5
In short, on this interpretation (or misinterpretation) of Aristotle, what
most people do has no bearing on the interesting sense of human
teleology—namely, what they ought to be striving to do.
This same linking of human telos with what people ought to be trying
to actualize has persisted even in our modern political theory. For
