Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 501
12. Regulations and operations relative to valorizations of finality
The concept of finality has a bearing on all the human sciences since there is
scarcely a form of human behaviour that does not involve intention. Yet we
know well enough that finalism has given rise to many difficulties and presented
a problem in biology until the formulation of present-day solutions which seem
to offer satisfaction, at least on the level of principles. Three phases may be
distinguished in this connexion.
During the first phase, which was of psychomorphic origin, finality seemed
to carry its explanation within itself as being a causal principle. Aristotle, who
attributed finality to all physical movement as well as to living processes,
separated ‘final causes’ from ‘efficient causes’, as though the existence of an
aim entailed ipso facto the possibility of attaining it, which presupposes either
a consciousness (within which the aim corresponds to an existing representa-
tion) or an effect of the future upon the present.
In the second phase, the unintelligible nature of this final cause led to the
concept of finality being broken down into its components, a causal explanation
being sought for each. Thus the concept of direction found its explanation in
processes of achieving balance, that of anticipation in the utilization of previous
information, that of functional utility in the hierarchic nature of organization,
etc. As to the central concept of adaptation, efforts were made to reduce it to
two concepts of fortuitous variation and of selection after the event, which re-
places finality by a set of tentative efforts (at the phyletic as well as the individual
level) directed from the outside through successes and failures.
The present phase, which is marked by very comparable schools of thought
in the sphere of the human sciences, results from the conjunction of three kinds
of influences. In the first place, while finalism has never supplied satisfactory
explanations, it has always excelled at denouncing the inadequacies of over-
simplified mechanistics. To explain the eye by hazard and selection is all very
well if one has plenty of time, but if it requires more generations than the age
of the earth will allow, as has been calculated on the basis of, if anything,
favourable postulates, it is best to search in other directions. Secondly, analysis
of phenomena - which always begins in an atomistic mood - leads in all spheres
of life to the unveiling of regulations; after the discovery of physiological
(homeostasis) and embryogenetic regulations, the notion was abandoned that
the genome is an aggregate of independent particles, and it was sought instead
to establish the existence of co-adaptations, regulator genes, ‘responses’, etc.
Thirdly and particularly, these organistic trends, which originated in part in-
dependently from mathematical models, were found to converge with one of the
fundamental discoveries of our age, that of the mechanisms of self-regulation
or self-direction studied by cybernetics. This was rapidly followed by the realiza-
tion of the possibility of supplying a causal interpretation of finalized processes
and of finding ‘mechanical equivalents of finality’ or, as one says today, a
‘teleonomy’ without teleology.
It is in this context, needless to say, that a certain number of trends are at
present evolving towards an analysis of regulations in the field of functioning