Before any systematic interpretation, the description of the known facts shows that the fate of an excitation is determined by its relation to the whole of the organic state and to the simultaneous or preceding excitations, and that the relations between the organism and its milieu are not relations of linear causality but of circular causality.
— Merleau-Ponty (1942, 15)
The idea of circular causality in complex systems goes back at least to Kant, whose Critique of Judgment prefigured current concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis (Thompson 2007). His stipulation that the parts of an organism ‘combine into the unity of a whole because they are reciprocally cause and effect of their form’ (Thompson 2007, 134) anticipates the concept of circular causality as explicated by Walter Freeman. For Kant, ‘the fact that organisms are so complex, so full of feedback loops in which each part is “cause and effect of itself” means that we cannot possibly describe them as machines’ (Depew and Weber 1995, 104).
Kant is sure that the collapse of functional processes into mere mechanical effects will never be reached in analyses of organisms. His point, however, is that whenever we see it, we must be willing to reject what he called external teleology, which collapses into mechanical cause and effect, so that the genuine inspiration we can derive from the internal teleology of organic integrity will not be exposed to ridicule.
— Depew and Weber (1995, 104)
Lacking the tools of nonlinear dynamics, Kant saw no way to ‘naturalize’ these ideas. He argued instead that our investigation of organic nature is guided by ‘a remote analogy with our own causality’ (Thompson 2007, 137) and is therefore grounded in teleological thinking. To put it another way, we have to see other organisms as guided from within because we ourselves are.
Darwin’s theory, ‘in which external rather than internal causes do most of the explanatory work’ (Depew and Weber 1995, 110), was an attempt to bring biological (evolutionary) theory within the respectable pale of Newtonian science. Despite its success, it now appears to be a stepping-stone to a more comprehensive theory recognizing organic unity as collaborating with myriad mechanisms, by means of operational closure, to determine how systems live and move.