Aristotle famously held that the existence of a thing could be attributed to four causes. Modern science implicitly operates according to (at most) three of these—the formal, material, and efficient—while overlooking the fourth or ‘final’ cause: the
telos, ‘for the sake of which a thing is done’ [
10]. As stated, there are two different kinds of
teloi, which we may call
immanent and
transcendent. An artefact or machine’s
telos is always and entirely transcendent. As the term is used here, ‘transcendent’ does not refer to a divine entity or higher power, but simply means that the origin of the
telos in question is separate from the being that instantiates it. In the case of a machine or other artefact this origin will, of course, be the person who designed it.
3 A chair, for example, is teleological—having been designed for sitting on—but there is a clear logical distinction between the chair having a
telos and the origin of that
telos, which transcends the chair itself.
The
telos of an organism is quite different, both belonging to the thing itself and originating in it: hence ‘immanent’. This kind of
telos, according to Aristotle, pertains both to the ‘natural organized body’ [
12] and its being ‘moved by intellect, imagination, purpose, wish, and appetite’ [
13]. Clearly not all of the latter features are true of every living being—plants surely cannot ‘wish’—but basic non-conscious purposes are nevertheless identifiable across the living world.
4 Teleology understood in this twofold sense has inspired a variety of accounts of organismic being, including some that are themselves of enduring significance [
16‐
18]. Perhaps the most penetrating such theory, however, is that of Hans Jonas.
5 For both its merits and its neo-Aristotelian character, I will refer to Jonas’ work throughout the remainder of the essay.
6
An Ontological Analytic of the Organism
From Aristotle Jonas takes up the notion of a twofold ‘immanent teleology’ [
25], likewise locating it in the ‘structure and behavior of the organism’ [
9]. These I call ‘self-organisation’ and ‘purposive behaviour’, so as to better capture their non-mechanistic flavour. We shall take each facet in turn, drawing comparisons with the
teloi belonging to machines, before attempting on this basis to categorise synthetic organisms.
As stated, the first type of immanent teleology is the organism’s self-organisation. Jonas’ analysis of this phenomenon begins with metabolism. In it the organism achieves an ‘independence of form with respect to its own matter’ [
9], as the organism actively maintains a formal identity through the act of absorbing and excreting substance. This immediately marks out a living being from, say, a stone, the form of which is at all times identical with its stable material composition. It even distinguishes an organism from a non-living being that is permanently in flux, such as a river or a fire: even though these entities undergo a constant material turnover—ceasing to
be rivers or fires should they no longer do so—this exchange is not in the service of a persisting form, but merely one that is again reducible to material composition. Hence, as Heraclitus said, one cannot step into the same river twice.
Indeed, such is the uniqueness of metabolic being that Jonas suggests we may go further, and say that material composition is in fact of secondary import to the organism. Instead the organism principally exists
as metabolic self-organisation:
In the process of its being, the parts of which the organism consists at a given instant are only temporary, transient contents whose joint material identity does not coincide with the identity of the whole which they enter and leave and which sustains its own identity by the very act of passage of foreign matter through its spatial system, the organic form. This whole is never the same materially and yet it persists as its same self –
by not remaining the same matter [
25].
Jonas stresses the uniqueness of organismic being in the universe by characterising the living thing’s identity as a ‘performance’, ‘act’, and ‘process rather than structure’ [
25].
7 Ontologically speaking, the organism
is because it
does, which must not be confused with a being whose ‘is’ is distinct from the fact
that it does things. The entrance of this mode of being on the cosmological stage therefore allows us to speak of life as an ‘ontological revolution’ [
9].
8
Now, the form achieved through metabolism is systemic, each component part deriving its identity from its place in the whole [
30]. This applies both to individual cells and to organs, ‘which have come into existence through acts of self-articulation of the whole and are thus creations of that which they subserve’ [
25]. The radicalism of this thesis deserves to be spelled out. An organ is not, as its etymology implies, a tool or an instrument, which are extraneous beings that can always be picked up and set down by their user. The organ is instead part of the organism, clearly, but also a ‘part of’ it in a particular way. An unstructured being—a pile of rubbish, say—simply
is the sum of its parts, as these could lie in any given way and the entity would remain the same. A house, by contrast, is a structure arranged in such-and-such a way, meaning that it is more than the sum of its parts. But still this ‘more than’ is something externally applied to the parts, which only take on their teleological status through an act of transcendent intent. The organism, however, as a process or act of self-organisation, is more than the sum of its parts and—crucially—also generative of them
as parts.
The second form of immanent teleology exhibited by living beings is purposive behaviour [
31]. ‘Behaviour’ is here employed in a broad sense, to mean an activity undertaken on the part of the organism in relation to itself or its surroundings. Obvious examples are the acquisition of nutrition, the pursuit of sexual reproduction, and the avoidance of predators. Less obviously, at the micro-organismic level, living beings possess an irritability that is sensitive to certain stimuli. Common to all is the basic capacity of an organism to orient itself in its environment by relating to beings therein. In this way, the organism is, initially and for the most part, engaged with such beings in an instrumental fashion, as something-for nutrition, something-for traversing, something-for shelter, and so on.
9 In each case, this ‘something-for’ indicates that organisms are beings ‘whose being is committed to their own care’ [
25].
Jonas argues that purposive behaviour could only belong to a being that self-organises. Why? Because in the process of self-organisation, the organism wrests itself from the remainder of the world, putting matter at the service of its distinct formal identity. In this act of individuation, a boundary is created that governs the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. On the inside, the organism enjoys a freedom of form from matter, as we have seen, yet its dependence on outside beings for the acquisition of nutrition means that this is, paradoxically, a ‘needful freedom’ [
9]. On the basis of this need, the organism then relates to the world from which it has separated itself:
In the single encounters this otherness has the quality of foreign body or influence which is either useful or harmful; in its entirety and as an enveloping horizon it has the character of ‘the external world’ confronting the organism’s overwhelming concern in its own life-process which has to assert itself within it and, so committed, is of constitutive egoism. [
25].
Thus, purposive behaviour is tied to the demands of organismic being and primarily oriented toward staving-off inexistence, regardless of the complexity of the living being in question.
Machine-Being and Synthetic Organisms
How, then, does this existence compare with that of a machine? It might be supposed that even though inert artefacts and simple machines do not act in the organismic fashion outlined, modern technologies certainly do. We could think, first of all, of a car, the parts of which need petrol, oil, and water, amongst other things, for it to run properly and not break down. Is this not a systematic entity identical to the organism, which equally requires sustenance in order to continue living?
In fact there is only a superficial similarity between the relations of car to fuel and organism to sustenance. This becomes apparent when noting that the car utilises fuel without the fuel ever
becoming the car, whereas metabolism entails that the organism actually reconstitutes itself [
34]. This is, to reiterate, the organismic condition: for as long as the organism lives it is irreducible to its material composition, only becoming the latter when it ceases to metabolise—i.e. die.
10 A machine, on the other hand, has a material identity that is complete whether switched on or off, because the formal division between itself and the world is not its own doing.
This key difference then serves to explain the difference between organisms and yet more complex machines that appear to purposefully behave in relation to their surroundings. Robots are the most obvious example, but even the humble thermostat is, through feedback loops, able to take cues from its environment and then regulate its own functioning so as to modify that self-same environment. Would we be right to say that the atmosphere surrounding the thermostat is something there for the thermostat to engage with, indicating purposeful behaviour on the part of the machine? Surely we would not: this is teleological functioning, no doubt, but again of a different kind compared with that of the organism. Whatever is of relevance to the thermostat in the external world is not based on any kind of need, grounded in processual being, but merely represents an input into a fixed and self-sufficient system. And the reason for this self-sufficiency harks back to the nature of the machine, which is an arrangement of matter in accordance with a telos that transcends it.
Having staked out the basic ontological difference between organisms and machines, we may now turn to synthetic organisms. A clue as to their ontological status may be found in the preceding paragraph. We said that—in contrast to the immanent telos of an organism—the principle of a machine is an arrangement of matter in accordance with a telos that transcends it. Which, then, is true of a synthetic organism? Is its telos transcendent or immanent? Is it an organism or a machine?
Unfortunately there is no straightforward answer to this question. Although, as Jan Schmidt notes, the defining characteristic of synthetic biology is that it ‘harnesses, or aims to harness, the self-organization power of nature’ [
35], the discipline is comprised of a multitude of techniques that have differing implications for our present enquiry. Simplifying matters greatly, however, we can divide these techniques into two kinds. ‘Top-down’ methods typically insert selected genetic material into pre-existing cells stripped of their nuclei, whereas ‘bottom-up’ methods seek to build artificial cells
in toto from rudimentary biological materials such as proteins. The former is synthetic biology as it is currently practiced, while the latter is a research effort that is not yet technologically feasible [
36].
This division of techniques undermines analyses of synthetic biology that stress its radical novelty. For instance, Christopher Preston [
37] has argued that synthetic biology represents a break even from previous biotechnologies, as it now allows for the wholesale substitution of the natural with the artificial. But as Tim Lewens [
38] notes, the science as a whole cannot be described as such—rather, its two different forms permit varying degrees of substitution of the natural by the artificial. The ontological status of synthetic organisms is therefore dependent, to some extent, on the method of synthetic biology employed.
Taking top-down synthetic biology first, the answer lies somewhere in between our previously drawn distinctions: a synthetic organism created in this way has characteristics of both an organism
and a machine [
39], being teleological partly in the immanent sense and partly in the transcendent sense. If this sounds odd, in light of the starkly distinguished account of immanent and transcendent teleology given above, then we would note that a substantial amount of non-human life already possesses this status. Animals bred by humans are one example, GMOs another. Put in the language used so far, we may say that while such an organism organises itself and behaves purposefully, the way it carries out both capacities are to varying degrees subject to the design of an external agent: namely, the farmers who selected the organism’s ancestors or the scientists who modified its genome. And much the same is true, only more so, of a top-down synthetic organism, the parts of which are chosen to inform its development in fundamental ways. As such, this type of synthetic organism appears near the far end of a scale of living beings that are partly characterised by purposes transcendent of themselves.
Then there are bottom-up methods of synthetic biology. As stated, these are at present a research goal rather than a reality. If, however, such methods are viable, it seems plausible to say that this would represent the most transcendentally teleological living being yet produced, and perhaps that even could be produced. The reason is that its organisation and behaviour would be almost entirely subject to human design, a truly novel being built from standardised biological (or at least ‘biologically active’) parts. Note, however, that I say almost entirely subject to human design, as the components used would still be living. This reflects both their origin—derived from organisms that were self-organising—and, more importantly, their potential. Precisely because the parts in question are living a synthetic organism created in this way would still be processual rather than merely mechanistic, likely possessing the organismic features of mutation, aging, and mortality. The first of these is perhaps the most interesting for the question at hand, as it suggests that were the synthetic organism able to reproduce it might eventually give rise to something other than that intended by its designer. And even if it did not reproduce, adaptive plasticity—which we shall address below—means that such an organism might deviate from its transcendent telos even within its own lifetime.
Now, some philosophers have attempted to collapse the ontological distinctions between synthetic organisms, machines, and natural organisms by shifting the analytic focus toward evolution. They argue that, just like a machine, the development of an organism is always subject to the design of an external being: in this case, evolution by natural selection. On this view, a machine’s telos has a self-conscious transcendent source in its designer, to be sure, but the organism’s telos, being the result of natural selection, is fundamentally the same—simply unconsciously designed. And, since synthetic organisms share characteristics of both organisms and machines, the same must be true of these by extension.
This is precisely the argument made by John Basl and Ronald Sandler. Living things are ‘genuinely goal-directed systems because the parts and processes of the organism were selected for in their ancestors and thereby exist in the organisms for the purpose of realizing certain ends’ [
40]. This also holds for synthetic organisms, which ‘have parts and processes selected for because they contribute to certain goals’, as well as for the creation of artefacts: ‘[t]he parts and processes of (almost all) traditional artifacts have selection etiologies – i.e., they were selected for by humans because they had certain consequences relevant to achieving our ends’ [
40]. Thus, all are ultimately the same insofar as their
teloi are transcendent in origin, regardless of whether the designer in question is a person or natural selection.
Although we shall turn to axiology in the next section, it is worth mentioning that Basl and Sandler’s line of reasoning leads them to the curious conclusion that ‘artefacts have a good of their own’ [
40] distinct from those of their designers. Something has clearly gone wrong here, which we can elucidate with reference to the fundamental distinction between immanent and transcendent teleology. According to Larry Wright’s classic etiological account of biological functions [
41], which Basl and Sandler draw upon, evolution by natural selection acts like a designer of artefacts. This in turn implies that the organism is a passive bystander in evolutionary history and its own ontogeny, just like the artefact that has no influence over its design and production. For both reasons, it would seem that Basl and Sandler ultimately conceive of the organism as teleological in the transcendent sense alone. But are they right to?
When we critically examine the parallels drawn between evolution and a designer and the organism and an artefact, we see that neither stands up to scrutiny. To take the latter first, organisms are not, in fact, passive with regard to their phenotypic development and therefore the evolutionary history of their kind. As Lenny Moss notes, genetic sequences do not determine phenotypes, but are rather ‘indeterminate resources deployed by the developing organisms in different ways, in different places, [and] at different times’ [
42]. In other words, phenotypic development—including not only the organism’s learned behaviour but also its very physiological functioning—is subject to environmental influence. True, this ‘adaptive plasticity’, as it is called, by itself indicates only a certain reactiveness on the part of the organism. It is crucial to note, therefore, that the organism can also make changes to its environment—known as ‘niche construction’—which then feed back into the process of adaptive plasticity [
43]. The upshot is that even over the course of a lifetime, the organism can unintentionally alter its own development, which of course then feeds into the evolutionary process if it should reproduce. For this reason, Basl and Sandler are wrong to treat living beings as teleologically analogous to artefacts.
The second, decisive problem is that the etiological account works by drawing a parallel between the evolutionary process and a designing agent. Understanding evolution in this way is perfectly acceptable in a theological setting, where it can be taken to mean that evolution occurs according to a divine intent. But Basl and Sandler are of course speaking in strictly secular philosophical and scientific terms. In that case, the parallel being drawn is between an agent who has purposes and can design beings in accordance with them, and the blind operations of natural selection. But the very idea of ‘design without a designer’, which is intended to work in this context, ultimately misrepresents natural selection, as Daniel Nicholson notes:
The adaptations produced by evolution are not the result of an intentional preconceived plan by an external agent, but are rather the consequence of the differential survival and reproduction of organisms with heritable adaptive variations. It would be far more appropriate to assert that organisms are ‘fashioned’ or ‘shaped’ by selection
pressures than to invoke design as an explanatory concept [
44].
Full recognition of the fact that evolution is no intentional or agential force means we cannot speak of organisms as designed in any sense. The organism is instead an active participant in its own development and an agent in evolutionary history, responding to various pressures and succumbing to others. And with the collapse of the parallels Basl and Sandler drew between evolution and a designer and an organism and an artefact, synthetic organisms can indeed occupy the space in between the latter pairing, as I have suggested.