Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
Aristotle, as a biologist, was interested in how things grow and change. Two key concepts in his philosophy are potentiality and actuality, and what distinguishes living things is that they are self-organizing, in other words growing towards their potential.
In terms of the standard logic of cause and effect, living things present a particular conundrum since they are self-organizing, making use of feedback loops that would be difficult to explain without falling into circular explanations.
In order to remedy this, we need to step outside the Newtonian framework, and turn instead to dynamic systems theory. Here we introduce a distinction between causes / events and constraints / conditions. In Aristotle’s view, the latter are more important, as they compose the structural-functional organization that enables the outcome. These correspond to the potentiality, as opposed to the actuality of the events themselves.
In living things, events cause the structure, but the structure constrains the events, as in biochemical reactions. In a meaningful way, potentiality determines what is possible in the world. Through the combination of enabling and selective constraints, which act as virtual generators and governors of a dynamic system, we obtain a virtual engine that causes things to grow and develop, analogous to the process of evolution.
When we talk about a person’s character, we are really talking about the virtual engine that powers that person’s development, i.e. their virtues. Aristotle proposed the Golden Mean as one way to cultivate character, where there are neither too many enabling constraints nor too many selective constraints. To rationally and reflectively cultivate one’s character is a central way by which we realize our potential. This is what wisdom means.
When we know the right thing but we don’t do it, we experience akrasia, a type of foolishness. This is when we have the right beliefs but are insufficient in our character. Human beings can be said to be autopoetic, in that they create their own structural-functional organization. That is their purpose. We can thus say that someone is a “good” person when they are successful at actualizing their distinctive human potential for rationality. In doing so, we become successively informed towards higher states of being.
In other words, our purpose is to become as fully human as possible. To overcome self-deception, cultivate character, realize wisdom, and enhance our psychic structure and contact with reality.