UN INCONTRO TRA DARWINISMO E PRAGMATISMO: LA FILOSOFIA EVOLUZIONISTICA DI CHAUNCEY WRIGHT

The Darwinian evolutionary theory was a real revolution, not only in biology and, generally, in scientific fields, but even in philosophical and epistemological thought. However, in the years that followed the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), virtually nobody, among scientists and philosophers, agreed with the principle of natural selection put forward by Darwin as the main explanation of the evolutionary process. This happened because Darwin’s theory was quite opposed to the “orthodox” view behind natural sciences and the philosophy of nature both in Europe and in America. Natural theology was taught in every school, academy, college, and it claimed that all the species in nature are created by God for a good purpose or a general design, are fixed in time, and they are already fitted to their environment from the beginning. Some theologians could account for organic forms by evolution to a certain degree, but all of them agreed on the “argument from design” and to the idea that man was «the glory and the supreme king of the natural realm», as Darwin ironically wrote. One of the few that stood against this background and followed Darwin in his “struggle” against the teleological and anthropocentric interpretation of natural beings was an American philosopher from Cambridge whose name was Chauncey Wright. Wright (1830-1875) was the well loved master of famous thinkers as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, or Oliver Wendell Holmes at the “Metaphysical Club” in Cambridge, now considered the birth place of American Pragmatism. Wright started from the William Hamilton’s philosophy and then, in the 1860s, rejected it in favour of the utilitarianism of Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. When Darwin’s Origin arrived to America, in 1860, he immediately became a firm supporter of the evolutionary theory. To him, the principle of natural selection was just an application of the Mills’ utilitarian philosophy and, moreover, it was even an improvement of it: e.g., the principle of natural selection could shed new light on the origin of different complex human feelings, ideas, behaviours, whereas the principles of mental association, which were the basis of the utilitarian ethics, were very vague and generic on these genetic problems. For these reasons Wright thoroughly studied the Darwinian theory for ten years and then he wrote some articles on this topic in the early 1870s. Three of them aimed to take issue with Alfred Russell Wallace and George Mivart’s arguments against the principle of natural selection, and they were so well conducted that Darwin himself thanked Wright and decided to publish one of them in England as a pamphlet at his own expenses. The last of these articles on evolution, titled The Evolution of Self-Consciousness (1873), is the most important of the series. After the death of this author, in 1875, his friends collected almost all his published works in a book entitled Philosophical Discussions (1877) and most of his Letters (1878). In general, until now, Chauncey Wright’s philosophy has been obscured by the more famous thought of the American Pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, Dewey. Not many scholars wrote on this philosopher and, among them, those who studied his philosophy were more interested in comparing it to the Pragmatist one, rather than in directly elucidating its basic principles and in deeply exploring its theoretical features. For these reasons Edward Madden, the most important Wright scholar, named him a “forgotten philosopher”. At present, only one of Wright’s articles (The evolution of self-consciousness, 1873) has been translated into Italian, and, in general, this thinker is almost unknown in Italy. On the contrary, my work sets out to prove that Wright’s philosophy is not only fundamental to well understanding the origin and the roots of American Pragmatism, but it is also very important in order to focus on the most interesting philosophical implications of the Darwinian evolutionary theory. In particular, my thesis examines the new epistemology worked out by Wright, which, beginning from a deep analysis of Darwin’s theory, highlighted the still unseen importance of the principle of “the new uses for old functions”. In his stressing the significance of this principle, Wright showed to conceive the evolutionary process in a very similar way, in its main features, to the one advanced by some modern biologists, such as, for example, Gould, Eldredge or Lewontin. As Wright did a century and a half ago, the above mentioned biologists highlight the importance of this mechanism of new uses for old functions, or, as they call this transformational principle, “exaptations”, in order to go beyond an “adaptationist” or “panselectionist” interpretation of the Darwinian theory. This pluralistic view, as a working hypothesis, is very effective in its approach to the theoretical problems, especially when Wright applied it on the very classic philosophical question of the nature and of the origin of self-awareness. The main role of these new uses of old powers (like “memory” or “attention”) in relation to the new importance accorded by Wright to the habits and to the use of signs, establishes that Wright’s approach to the problem of the evolution of self-consciousness is a very new one, as it appears to be an interesting combination of an original (and modern) version of Darwinism and an incipient kind of Pragmatism. Nowadays, the solution developed by Wright in his approach to the question of the “human”, could be useful in philosophy and biology to better think and to shed new light on this very controversial and ancient riddle, namely, the origin of language and the evolution of human mind from an evolutionary point of view.