Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish

30 Historically Speaking May/June 2006 Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish Aviezer Tucker Bruce Mazlish notes correctly that there is enormous conceptual confusion over contingency, necessity, teleology, and progress in history. I hope to clarify some of these confusions. The related concepts of contingency and necessity are independent of teleology, and teleology and progress are independent of each other as well. Teleology and Contingency Mazlish seems to assume that historical teleology is inconsistent with historical contingency . Since historical teleology implies that history or some historical processes have an end or a purpose, historical contingency , the possibility that things could have turned out otherwise, precludes a predestined end. Historical necessity seems to be a necessary condition for a predestined telos, but it ain't necessarily so. In book two of his Physics Aristotle distinguished four types ofcauses: material, formal, moving, and teleological. The moving cause is the primary source of change or coming to rest, as the sculpture is to a statue. The teleological cause is the end for the sake ofwhich an event happens, such as the finished statue for its making. In his Timaeus and Philebus Plato suggested that necessity, the moving cause (ananke in Greek or causa efficiens in Latin), may be in conflict with telos, the final cause that permeates the universe. Plato considered the moving cause to be a blind, brute, necessary force that the etiologic "Mind"— "Divine Mind," "Divine Intelligence," "Reason," "Wisdom," or plain "Zeus"—needs to "get the better of or to "persuade" to move in the correct meaningful direction, "perfection ." With the exception of the Atomists, Greek philosophers felt that the necessary, moving cause was insufficient for explaining the order of the universe and the place of humanity in it. Plato and Aristotle added teleology for this purpose. Teleology is distinct from necessity, and the two may affect events in contradictory directions. Plato's idea that teleology can use necessity as a tool was developed later in the theistic philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel, where cunning divine reason uses human motivations in the service of a historical plan designed to lead to the end of history. It also appears in less metaphysically presumptuous philosophies that uphold the heterogenesis of ends—the "private vices, public virtues" social theories that Malebranche and Vico shared with Adam Smith. Likewise, Marx One may write about the history of chess or electrical engineering and notice steady progress . ... Yet that does not imply that there is a telos of chessplaying or engineering. combined necessity with teleology in arguing that inevitable economic processes would lead to a classless society, thereby eliminating the class antagonisms he saw as the necessary engine of world history. Individual voluntary action can "lengthen the birth pangs" of the end ofhistory but not prevent it. Conversely, historical contingency can be consistent with historical teleology. If we interpret contingency probabilistically, we may suggest that at given junctures in history (social or natural) there was a certain distribution of probabilities across several options. The fact that one of these low-probability, contingent potentials actualized whereas the others did not may be consistent with either a teleological or purposeless interpretations of history. For example, in a fair lottery, there is an equal distribution ofvery low probabilities for each ticket to be the winning ticket. It is necessary that some ticket should win, but it is contingent that this ticket will. When one ticket —say, yours—wins, it is consistent with a teleological interpretation that you were meant or destined to win. Since both historical contingency and necessity are equally consistent with both a teleological and non-teleological interpretation of history, the concepts of teleology and contingency/necessity are independent ofeach other. Teleology and Progress Obviously, not all teleological interpretations ofhistory are progressive, since the end ofhistory may be a return to barbarism or even the annihilation of the human race in universal entropy. Progressive interpretations of history may be a subset of teleological interpretations. However, progressive interpretations are not necessarily teleological. It may be argued that, from our value-laden perspective, history progressed for a while toward a greater fulfillment of our values, without assuming that there is any grander final cause or design...