Featured Image Credit (edited) by Hans on Pixabay
Click here to read Part II. Illustration
On Teleology: III. Purpose
Inside a missile is a computer, programmed for action, but what do we find inside an acorn? Where inside its shell do we find its driving function, its purpose?
Is an acorn like the cells in our body, which seem to function toward some consequence? Is there some kind of dormant determination slumbering inside its organic innards – this, again, being neither human awareness nor living sentience per se yet, if it be anything at all, then perhaps akin to intention?
One suggestion in Part II was look to Science. After all, the forever-task of Science, as we all know – its telos, you might say – is to study and inform and science the shit out of things. Science might try an answer by lifting that acorn from whence it lies and working it over with responsible Scientific hands in pure Scientific investigation: lab coats, microscopes, dissection tools, the works: take no prisoners and cut to the core – our efficient pursuit of cold hard fact.
Yet the task of Science is disproof, refutation, a reliable rebuttal to hypothesis. We look to Science for what isn’t, leaving whatever remains – however outrageous or unlikely – as putative fact.
Alas, though, the remains of that poor little acorn… sliced and diced and cloven in twain, its natural telos nullified in an instant – can we even live with ourselves? The answer to that, of course, is hard core “Yes” and anyway, now denied its soil, denied its rain, denied its life, what natural purpose is left to that specimen under glass apart from subjection? That little acorn may as well be lying on the surface of Mars: this merely the price of Science… or is it the cost – I’m never sure which.
p.s. while we Scientifically shed no tears for that poor little acorn, let’s also see things just as clearly another way… upon each mighty tree, each little acorn is really just a free-loading itinerant, passively riding energy that arrives through some branch from up the trunk by roots sunk deep inside the earth, thanks to some previously far more successful acorn whose search for nourishment and stability plainly went closer to plan.
Still, someone says, that poor little acorn… a free-loader? Go ahead and don’t believe it, but one thing you don’t ever see – one thing you will never see – is an acorn refusing or resisting the energy that arrives through the branch up the trunk from roots sunk deep in the earth. Trust me, no acorn isn’t glad its attached to the branch of a tree. And as far as that goes, leeching off an oak tree, maybe what we ought to say is no acorn attached to a branch has any telos of its own, at least not until it falls to the ground below… which somehow awakens its purpose, and here we go again, ‘awakens’, yet another anthropomorphization alongside images like ‘gladness’, ‘intention’, and ‘sentience’.
For some, all these investigative attempts and theories transcend natural scope and approach something more spiritual. And fair play, I suppose, if Science can provide no satisfactory answers in that regard. Then again, fair play even if Science can – ‘Science’ being merely that latest movement of faith to grab our rapt attention.
Whichever perspective we take – be it Science, spirituality, or something else again – it’s still worth asking one question: when’s the last time you saw an acorn, lying on the ground, really striving to ripen and root and really just exert itself from that spot on the ground to “Be the tree!” Behold! in its stillness such determination, in its peace such persistence and passion.
Meanwhile, in clouds of thought, that same question remains, hovering above our heads: whether upon the tree or once it falls, from whence its purpose? How does an acorn ‘know’? What is its source of telos?
Click here to read Pt. IV. Source?
The Rhetorical WHY 