Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin is presented not through a biography or a single discovery, but as a turning point in arguments about humanity’s place in nature, the absence of preordained purpose, and the emergence of new forms. His significance is double-edged: Darwinism undoes the fantasy of a world harmoniously arranged for human understanding, yet its account of purposeless processes also leaves difficult questions about how life, consciousness, and purposeful behavior arise.

Darwin and the Loss of Human Privilege

In the book’s account of modernity, Darwin’s unsettling force lies less in the bare fact that human beings evolved than in the character of evolution itself. The process is chaotic and nonteleological; it offers no guarantee that the world is attuned to the mind that tries to understand it. Nature does not appear as a completed order designed to meet human needs. Its history instead unsettles the expectation that the human being holds a privileged place within a meaningful whole.

The contrast with Lamarck sharpens this point. Where Lamarck is associated with a more reasonable and truthful nature, the account emphasizes Darwin’s attention to nature’s eccentricities, irregularities, and apparent silliness. It describes his interest in marginal and out-of-kilter cases as helping to support natural selection. The emphasis falls on disharmony, not on a smoothly coordinated fit between inner and outer worlds. In this presentation, Darwinism’s force is precisely that it removes the foundation for assuming such a preexisting harmony.

This challenge belongs to a broader reversal in modern philosophy. The human being is no longer treated as the crown of creation: as an empirical part of nature, humanity is subject to the same material world and its processes as anything else. The text sets this humiliation beside the elevation of the transcendental subject, understood not as a substantial object within reality but as an immaterial void. Darwin’s account intensifies the loss of human centrality by making nature’s history contingent rather than purposefully arranged around humanity.

Evolution, Contingency, and the Emergence of New Forms

The discussion of consciousness uses evolutionary contingency to distinguish the emergence of a capacity from its later uses. The human brain is described as a product of evolution whose features arose through random acquisitions; natural selection may have encouraged some of those features only after they had appeared. On this account, the brain did not develop in anticipation of its future functions. A new combination could produce an unforeseen result rather than fulfill a plan already implicit in nature.

The book connects this claim to exaptation: evolutionary processes can reuse features in ways not specified by their original development. But it argues that a dialectical account asks a further question. The New may emerge not simply as another element within an existing order, but as a new structure: an Order that arises suddenly out of Chaos. A long period of development may be visible in retrospect, yet a final trigger can precipitate a rapid shift. The text contrasts this structural account with what it calls hard Darwinian explanations, which select among contingent variations but do not describe the emergence of a new totality in the same terms.

That distinction turns on a problem of circularity. Adaptation can explain how an organism persists once it exists, but it cannot by itself explain the organism’s initial emergence by saying that it came into being in order to survive. Survival presupposes something already there to survive. The book’s formulation is that a newly emerging order also posits its environs: in relating to what is other, it establishes a relation to itself. Darwinism thus supplies the account of purposeless selection, while the philosophical argument presses on the point where a new order appears and begins to organize the conditions through which it operates.

A related account of consciousness stresses a threshold rather than a gradual, smoothly continuous ascent. Consciousness is said to emerge when feedback loops reach a level of reverberating activity; such activity either acquires sufficient support over time or fails to arise. The comparison is to the transition from sleep to waking. This example reinforces the book’s interest in discontinuity: processes may have a history of preparation, but the resulting capacity appears only once a threshold is crossed.

Purposeful Appearance and Mechanistic Explanation

Darwinism also serves as the model for understanding how behavior can appear purposeful without being guided by conscious intention. In Daniel Dennett’s account, the intentional stance describes organisms or systems as if they knew, believed, wanted, and rationally pursued ends. This is a useful mode of interpretation, not a claim that the underlying process literally contains the intentions attributed to it. Evolution provides the model: organisms act as if they seek survival and select advantageous organs, although the process itself is described as mechanical and senseless.

The book draws attention to a tension within this explanation. Darwinian thought opposes teleology, yet explanations of natural processes often borrow images of decision, striving, or design to make their operation intelligible. The example of memes reproducing through human beings illustrates the problem: it can sound as though cultural units intend to use people, even though that language does not offer a ground-level mechanistic explanation. The intentional stance works by treating a process as if it had a purpose that cannot be established as an actual design within nature.

The text therefore reads the appeal of such purposeful language as more than a convenient turn of phrase. Darwinism explains how the appearance of purpose can arise from a senseless mechanism, but the imagery used to convey that appearance can smuggle in the very teleology the theory rejects. It also questions whether a deterministic account of underlying physical processes leaves motivation with any independent causal force, or whether intentional explanation merely translates processes that could be described physically. The unresolved issue is whether the teleological description is only an observer’s useful perspective or points to a real gap in direct physical causation.

Darwinism Within the Book’s Materialist Argument

Darwin’s place in the discussion reaches beyond evolutionary theory to the book’s comparison of materialism and idealism. The text distinguishes a reduction of higher capacities to lower processes from an account that recognizes the autonomy of appearances and events. Twentieth-century thought, it argues, does not simply continue the earlier demystifying move of explaining noble appearances through more basic forces. It also rehabilitates phenomena as such, attending to processes that cannot be treated merely as effects of underlying substantial things.

That argument places Darwinism alongside, but not identical to, accounts of emergence in other fields. The book describes quantum physics in terms of processual vibrations, and cognitivism and systems theory in terms of emerging properties and self-organization. It then compares three philosophical accounts of the Event: Martin Heidegger’s epochal disclosure of Being, Deleuze’s immanent becoming, and Badiou’s event as the beginning of a truth-process. These are not presented as versions of Darwin’s theory. Rather, they mark the wider question raised by the book’s evolutionary discussion: whether a genuinely new order can be reduced to the material conditions that precede it.

The distinction is also political and philosophical. The materialist wager, as the book frames it, is to investigate how an event emerges from a gap within the order of Being, rather than treat it as wholly detached from its material preconditions. Darwinism makes contingency unavoidable, but the argument refuses to equate contingency with a complete explanation of the New. Its importance is thus not that it settles the question of emergence, but that it removes the comfort of purpose while sharpening the problem of how structure, consciousness, and agency can arise from processes that did not aim at them.