THE FUTURE OF POST-HUMAN TELEOLOGY
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is telos really so natural that Aristotle once claimed that “it is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because we do not see an agent deliberating”? (WK 2016) This affirmative view on telos can be contrasted with the negative observation by Richard Dawkins, who wrote that “evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.” (GR 2016)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), teleology (in relation to telos and dystelos) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no telos without dystelos (and vice versa).

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that teleology is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to teleology)—such as philosophy, sociology, economics, physics, biology, communication studies, psychology, cybernetics, control theory, cosmology, praxeology, religion, cultural studies, literary studies, complexity theory, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2016) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of teleology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between telos and dystelos—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the conditional theory of teleology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about teleology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between telos and dystelos) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.