On the Nature of Evolution

[AshvinP]

JW,

Thanks for the fascinating, clear, and precise comments above. I hope you don't mind me jumping in with some questions. Your comments provide a lot of fruitful territory to explore and I am not even sure where to start. This question of evolution seems as good a place as any, since it gets down to the core of pragmatic truth which potentially overarches the history of human ideas and culture. It seems to me that you are assuming above that evolution is a fundamentally physical process which eventually led to the development of consciousness, "primordial esthetic understanding", and then later to the seeds of our current "rational understanding". So, in that sense, you reject the idealist understanding of evolution, i.e. perception-cognition as the primary force of evolution, as detailed by German thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Steiner, or Gebser. Is that correct?

PS - we can split this off into a separate thread if Mark or anyone else wants to discuss some other aspects of your responses on this one.

Yes, that is correct, which isn’t to necessarily reject intention in the universe. The difference would be that any sort of direction in the evolution would grow organically out of the manifold essence of Being itself rather than the influence of a transcendent reality.

JW,

My understanding of the thinkers mentioned above (bold) is that they all rejected a "trascendent reality" which influences evolution. Put another way, they all rejected Kant's trascendental idealism. For these thinkers, the "idea" is to be taken as a concrete, ever-evolving reality which structures all of our immanent experience according to its own inner lawfulness - a lawfulness which we can investigate and reveal in precise detail. A beautiful expression of that is illustrated in this exchange:

The elder man replied: ‘It might perhaps be possible to find a method of studying nature, which goes to work differently, and which in spite of being a study which must lead to knowledge, has, as its aim, the unifying element, namely that which is absent in external observation by the various senses.’ The man took a pencil and a piece of paper from his pocket and at once drew a remarkable shape, a shape that resembled a plant, but no existing plant, to be seen or perceived by the outward physical senses, a shape which, as it were, exists nowhere and of which he said that it existed indeed in no individual plant, but was the ‘plant-hood,’ the proto-plant type which existed in all plants and represented the unifying element. The younger man looked at it and said: ‘Yes, but what you have drawn there is not an experience, not observation, that is an idea’ — having in mind that only the human spirit could form such ideas, and that such an idea had no significance for external, so-called objective nature.

The elder man was unable to understand this objection at all, for he replied: ‘If that is an idea, then I see my ideas with my eyes!’ He meant that just as an individual plant is visible to the external sense of sight, and is an experience, so his proto-plant, although invisible by means of an external sense, was objective, existent in the outer world, living in all plants, the archetype in all individual plants. You know that the younger of these two men was Schiller, the elder Goethe

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If we take evolution to be a physical process which begins independent of ideal relations, on the other hand, aside from the metaphysical hard and interaction problems, we end up with another form of transcendental influence - the materialist side of Kant's coin. Because the physical process must be reduced to quantitative concepts which exclude qualities of experience. The only possible 1st-person experience-knowledge of the world is mediated by those qualities, so any reliance on quantitative abstractions as the primary force behind evolution is an appeal to a trascendental influence that we cannot ever possibly experience or know. I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this whenever you get the chance. Thanks!