Biological Finalism
Description
Synthesis from ChatGPT, prompted by Michel Bauwens, inspired by Ben Suriano's ideas in a upcoming draft paper:
Biological Finalism
Raymond Ruyer’s philosophy of biological finalism begins from a simple claim: **living beings cannot be adequately understood as mechanical systems**. A living organism does not merely undergo external forces or passively react to its environment. It actively maintains, reorganizes, and transforms itself. Life is therefore not simply the preservation of an existing order, but a creative activity directed toward its own development and greater perfection.
Ruyer takes the struggle against entropy as one important indication of this. Living organisms continuously work against processes that would otherwise break down their organization. As Schrödinger famously argued, organisms maintain themselves by feeding on what can be understood as “negative entropy.” But for Ruyer, this does not mean that life is simply a machine for maintaining its existing structure. The organism does not merely preserve its order; it continually **remakes and develops it**. Life is therefore a “conquering activity,” rather than mere maintenance.
This creative activity is also **normative**. An organism does not simply remain alive; it develops ways of acting that are better or worse in relation to its own activity. Its ongoing self-organization therefore points beyond mere survival toward more successful, more developed, and more complex forms of life. Even at its most basic level, life displays something like a primitive sense of its own possible perfection.
This is what Ruyer means by **finalism**. Biological activity is oriented toward an end, or *telos*, but this end should not be understood as a fixed model existing in advance. The ideal toward which an organism develops is not a pre-existing blueprint that it simply copies. Rather, it is a **dynamic horizon of development**: a possibility toward which living activity reaches without ever being guaranteed to achieve it.
Ruyer therefore describes biological formation as being guided by a non-mechanical “ideal.” The organism’s activity is not determined entirely by the mechanical conditions immediately acting upon it. Instead, living beings actively organize their relations with the world in ways that open new possibilities for their own development. Life is, in this sense, an **experimental process of perfecting itself**.
This becomes particularly important when we consider the relation between organisms and their organs. We tend to think of an organism as a collection of organs, each of which performs a particular function: the heart pumps blood, the lungs exchange gases, the eyes see, and so on. But Ruyer reverses this picture. The most basic form of life does not begin with a fixed set of organs. The amoeba, for example, is capable of sensing and engaging its environment without possessing differentiated organs at all.
This suggests that **bodily life is more fundamental than organs**. An organism is first of all a dynamic activity of self-formation and relation. Organs emerge as developments of this activity: they are ways in which a body discovers and creates new forms of contact with its environment and with other bodies.
An organ can therefore be understood as a **bodily invention of a new relation**. The eye does not merely perform the mechanical function of receiving light; it creates a new way for a body to relate to the world. The hand creates possibilities for grasping and manipulating objects. More complex organs make possible increasingly diverse forms of sensation, movement, communication, and social interaction.
From this perspective, the development of life is not simply a process of becoming more efficient at surviving. The evolution of increasingly differentiated bodies also opens new possibilities for richer forms of activity and relation. The organism develops capacities that cannot be reduced to the minimum requirements of metabolic survival or reproduction. Life becomes increasingly capable of experimenting with different ways of sensing, acting, relating, and organizing itself.
The *telos* of biological life is therefore not a fixed or final biological form. It is better understood as **the ongoing activity of becoming more capable of living**. Biological perfection is not the preservation of an already completed state, but the continuing creation of more excellent forms of bodily and collective life.
This also explains why Ruyer describes organisms as participating, analogically, in an ideal of life that exceeds any particular organism. No finite organism possesses perfect or eternal life. Yet each living being expresses, in its own distinctive way, the power of life to overcome entropy, create new forms, and develop richer relations. Each organism therefore participates in this ideal without simply becoming identical to it.
Discussion
From Biological Organs to Technology
This account of biological development has an important consequence for how we understand technology. If organs are not simply pre-given mechanisms but developments of a body's capacity to relate to its environment, then **artificial technologies can be understood as extensions of this same creative bodily activity**.
A technological object does not simply reproduce an existing biological organ. Nor is it something entirely external to the body. Instead, technology can extend a bodily capacity into a new form. A tool, for example, extends the body's capacity to grasp, strike, cut, build, or manipulate. More complex technologies extend capacities for seeing, hearing, communicating, remembering, calculating, and coordinating collective activity.
Natural and artificial organs are therefore related **analogically**. They are not identical, but they share a common logic: both extend the body's ways of relating to the world. Technology is thus not fundamentally about producing isolated objects with useful functions. It is about creating new possibilities for bodily activity and relation.
This gives us a criterion for thinking about technology. Technologies should not be judged only by their efficiency or usefulness. We can also ask whether they **enrich or impoverish the body's capacities for relation**. Do they create new possibilities for sensation, creativity, cooperation, and differentiated forms of life? Or do they merely reproduce increasingly narrow forms of mechanical functioning?
Technology, on this account, belongs to the same creative movement that produces biological organs. It is a continuation of the body's capacity to form itself through new relations with its environment and with other bodies.
Biological Finalism and Marxism
It is in this context that Ruyer’s interpretation of Marx becomes particularly interesting. Marx’s account of technology in *Capital* contains a strikingly similar conception of technology as an extension of the human body. Marx describes the labor process as one in which human beings transform external objects into “organs of his own activity.” Technology develops the body’s capacities by adding what Marx calls new “bones and muscles of production,” thereby expanding human powers beyond the limits of the immediately given body.
At first glance, however, Ruyer’s biological finalism might seem opposed to Marxism. Finalism is often associated with the idea that nature is governed by predetermined purposes, whereas Marxism is commonly understood as a materialist theory that rejects teleological explanations of nature.
Ruyer’s reading of Marx suggests a more complicated relationship. Marx’s materialism does not require us to understand human activity as the mechanical result of external causes. The labor process involves the transformation of material conditions according to an end that exists **ideally before it exists materially**. As Marx writes, at the end of the labor process there emerges a result that had already been conceived by the worker at its beginning.
This point is crucial for Ruyer. Human beings do not simply respond mechanically to their environment. They act upon it according to possibilities that they can anticipate and actively bring into existence. The material transformation of the world is therefore inseparable from the formation of new bodily and social capacities.
Technology can consequently be understood as the historical continuation of the same creative activity that, at the biological level, produces organs. Just as an organism develops an organ in order to establish a new relation with its environment, human beings develop technologies in order to extend and transform their own powers of activity.
In this sense, Marx’s account of technology can be read as containing a form of what Ruyer calls a **“blatantly finalist biology and psychology.”** The point is not that Marx secretly believed in a predetermined biological destiny. Rather, Marx’s account of labor describes a material process in which bodies actively transform themselves and their environments according to higher possibilities that they are capable of conceiving.
This allows us to distinguish Ruyer’s biological finalism from both **mechanistic materialism and idealism**. Against mechanistic materialism, Ruyer insists that living activity cannot be reduced to the passive interaction of efficient causes. Against idealism, he insists that ideals do not exist independently of embodied activity. The ideal is realized through the concrete transformation of bodies, environments, and relations.
The same dialectic can therefore be found in Marx’s account of labor and technology. Human beings begin with a bodily capacity to act upon the world; through labor, they transform that world; and in transforming it, they also transform and extend their own capacities. Technology becomes an externalized and historically accumulated form of bodily activity.
The relationship between biology and technology is consequently not one of simple opposition. Technology is neither a departure from nature nor merely an artificial imitation of biological organs. It is an **analogical extension of the creative activity already characteristic of living bodies**.
This also changes how we might understand the Marxist idea of human development. If technology extends bodily capacities, then technological development is not valuable simply because it increases productive efficiency. Its deeper significance depends upon the kinds of bodies and relations it makes possible. A technology that increases production while narrowing human capacities for meaningful relation would represent a very different form of development from one that opens new possibilities for creativity, cooperation, sensation, and collective life.
Ruyer’s biological finalism thus provides a way of reading Marx’s materialism as a theory not simply of production, but of **creative bodily formation**. The development of productive forces can be understood as part of a larger process in which living and social bodies continually create new organs, techniques, and relations through which they attempt to realize more excellent forms of activity.
The finality involved here is therefore not a predetermined endpoint. It is the **ongoing finality of an activity that continually surpasses its existing form**. Life creates new capacities; bodies develop new organs; human beings create technologies; and technologies in turn transform the capacities and relations of those who use them. Biological and historical development are thus linked by a common logic of creative self-formation.
From this perspective, Ruyer’s dialogue with Marx gives us a distinctive conception of technology: **technology is the historical and artificial extension of the organism’s original capacity to create new relations**. Its significance cannot be understood solely through mechanical efficiency or immediate utility. It must be judged in relation to the larger movement of life toward richer, more differentiated, and more collective forms of activity."
Source
* Article (draft): Technology as the Analogical Extension and Resurrection of the Body: A Normative Historical Materialist Account. Ben Suriano.