FINALITY, FINALISM. - By f. is meant the correspondence that a natural process or any human fact has with a certain result toward which the agent tends: this correspondence requires that the phases of natural processes, like the moments of every event in man's life, realize a comprehensive process, and therefore have their first motive in the end toward which they tend. For this reason the final cause is the first in act in a rational conception of nature as well as of the life of the spirit: f. therefore falls outside both materialism and absolute idealism. In free agents, who directly dispose of the end of their own actions and of the means of attaining it, f. is evident: every decision is made in view of a known good, true or apparent, which one wishes to reach. The correspondence in concrete between means and end is therefore established by the intelligence of the individual agent who then carries it out through his freedom: «De agentibus per intellectum non est dubium qui agant propter finem: agunt enim praecconcipientes in intellectu id quod per actionem consequuntur et ex tali praeconceptione agunt» (C. Gent., III, 2: Adhuc²). In nature, on the other hand, the correspondence is inherent as a necessary law of the process itself, impressed by God, the author of nature, even if the process can be impeded or diverted in its fulfillment because of obstacles or interfering contrary forces (contingency). The f. of nature is attested by the «regularity» and constancy of phenomena, on which the very possibility of the laws of science rests, and it also manifests itself to experience itself as the tendency that nature usually has toward the good and the better: «Videmus autem in operibus naturne, vel semper vel frequentius quod melius est; sicut in plantis folia sic esse disposita ut producant fructus et partes animalium sic disponi ut animal salvari possit» (C. Gent., III, 3: Adhuc²). The constancy and the positivity of the effect constitute the proof of the existence of f. in nature and pose the requirement of an ordering Intelligence of the universe (5th way).
The progress of astrophysics in probing the complexity of sidereal systems and the most recent discoveries of microbiology and atomic physics have given decisive contributions to the confutation of absolute mechanicism that denies f. (ancient atomism and positivist science of the 19th century). The admirable combinations of the movements of the stellar worlds are not the mechanical result of the movement of a machine, but the overall effect that points back to a supreme first ordering Mind. Likewise the physics of atomic and subatomic structures, while it has revealed in its original nucleus the «contingency» of physical phenomena defended by traditional metaphysics, has clarified the meaning of physical laws as laws of global facts (statistical) and therefore their evident finalistic character.
In biology, the researches of experimental embryology have clarified that the development of living matter obeys a plan of structures to be built by virtue of specific and proper functions, so that when either through traumatic accidents or through experimental devices the normal conditions either of the germ or of the embryo are altered, living matter enjoys - within limits at times very vast - self-regulating powers, which equally permit the attainment of the final result (H. Spemann, H. Driesch, M. Hartmann). The same «laws of heredity» (Mendel) that regulate the conservation of the species show the tendency of the germ to return to the average values of the species, every time the genetic endowment should be altered: thus an evolution without norm and principle is repugnant.
The end is therefore the «fulfillment» (τέλος) toward which becoming tends in its development, but in the precise sense that such perfection or fulfillment is understood as immanent to the process itself as the reason «for which» (τὸ οὐ ἔσκα; Paps., II, 2, 194 a 27) the agent acts and shapes the matter according to a determinate form. The f., almost entirely absent in primitive Greek philosophy, was expressly banished by Democritus, who explained the becoming of nature by virtue of the mechanical movement of atoms in the void and according to the diversity of their external shape (ibid., VIII, 9, 263 b 29 ff.). For Aristotle, on the other hand, the end constitutes the first and last reason of all processes of the real, whether they are considered as movements of ascent or of descent of being (generation and corruption), because every being moves insofar as it «tends» to the attainment of a certain structure or «form» that establishes it in its specificity: and this form or substantial nature constitutes the primary f. of the being. Once nature is in itself constituted, there is then set in motion the process for the attainment of the perfection to which it is destined or which such nature can attain according to its effective capacities: this kind of «way from behind» by which natural entities and especially living beings are pushed forward to integrate themselves is what constitutes the secondary f. The very notion of nature (φάσις) in Aristotle (ibid., II, 1, 192 b 21-23) as «principle of motion and rest in the subject in which it is found, per se and not accidentally» expresses the ontological priority and dominance of the end, while the mechanicism of Democritus expresses the ontological dominance of the efficient cause. Since f. supposes the organization of a plan of development, one also understands how for Aristotle the first Principle of the universe must be a supreme Intelligence (Mat., XII, 7, 1074 a 7 ff.) and that the end is absolutely the first of the causes: πρᾶτην αἰτίαν ἢν λέγαιεν ἕνακᾶ τινος (De part. anim., I, 1, 639 b 14).
The Aristotelian theory, submerged by Stoic fatalism, had an immediate repercussion in Epicurus who, in order to save individual personality and freedom, tempered the rigidity of Democritus' atoms by introducing into the motion of atoms a «deviation» or «declination» (κλυνόμεν). Thus Epicurus in substance accepted the Aristotelian critique of atomism even if he did not accept its metaphysics, that is to say the position that every process of becoming derives its order from a «form» immanent to the whole (cf. De Anima, III, 12, 434 e 31): a principle, moreover, that obtained its definitive clarification only in the Christian doctrine of creation, according to which all sensible and finite forms have their origin and foundation in the divine Intellect and receive being and movement according to the free disposition or governance of divine Providence, which is precisely called by St. Thomas: «Ratio (divina) ordinandorum in finem.» (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 22, a. 1).
The anti-Aristotelian philosophies of the Renaissance (Telesio, Campanella), Galilean mechanics, empiricist philosophies (Fr. Bacon) and that of absolute necessity and universal contingency deny f.
From the finality that is manifest in the order of nature, men of every age arrived at the knowledge of the existence of God (5th way of St. Thomas: Sum. Theol., 1st, q. 2, a. 3). With the argument from finality, Plato already confuted the atheists of his time, affirming that for this reason "both Greeks and barbarians believed in the divinity" (Leg., 886 B. Cf. also: Epinomis, 98: F - 98: B, which develops this doctrine extensively). The young Platonizing Aristotle remained faithful to his master and in the order of the world saw the presence of the gods, as Cicero has preserved for us (De nat. deor., II, 37) from the De Philosophia (Aristotelis Fragmenta, ed. V. Rose, in Opera Aristotelis, V, Berlin 1870, p. 1476). St. Thomas too affirms that the consideration of order and of the finality it entails is the most manifest way of ascending to God, whom he calls per auctoritatem Dei (Lectura in Ev. Ioannis, Prologus; ed. Parm., t. X, p. 279a). In Aristotle, moreover, this solidarity, so to speak, between finality and the existence of the divinity was conceived so intimately that the whole world of the heavens, which reveals itself as a wondrous complex of movement, is considered "divine" (De coelo, I, 9, 279e 30 agg. Cf. M. P. Nilsson, The origin of belief among the Greeks in the Divinity of the heavenly Bodies, in The Harvard theological review, 33 [1940], p. 7).
Purpose is therefore the guarantee and the substance of the order of the world as a whole and in its individual parts; this does not proclaim our world to be the best possible, nor that everything that happens in any way is good, but rather that a law is immanent in the world, impressed upon it by a supreme Mind, and that infractions of the law constitute mere sporadic deviations from which nature recoils and which it often succeeds in overcoming. For this reason causality is not opposed to purpose but fulfills it, just as purpose governs and integrates causality.
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Cornelio Fabro