I have a few arguments that I want to make, and I will do so in one fell swoop, so hold onto your britches. It has become the custom under the postmodern paradigm to distinguish figures such as Spinoza and Proudhon from Aristotle, and so from perennial philosophy more generally. I consider this a great mistake. Rather, I argue that these figures, and so mutualism more generally, are begrudging continuations of the Aristotlean perennial philosophy, though indirectly so, as given new form, and with great reservation.
What I am going to say can be mirrored by an understanding of anarchism’s relationship to Christianity. Jesus Christ, if he existed, and according to folk religious belief, was a working class man, a carpenter, who challenged the banksters in the Synagogue of Satan, and so was tried and hung, despite his innocence. Among radicals and heretics of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and Reformation, it was common to hold to beliefs that are today considered to be a part of "primitive Christianity," or Christianity as it had originally existed in more recent form. Part of this involved biblical unitarianism, including the propensity to believe in the mortal humanity and adoption by God of Jesus. In other words, the radicals often held Jesus to be an exemplary one of their own, a flesh-and-blood individual that one should take influence from and model one’s life on. And some of these took it to heart.
Eventually, groups such as the Bogomils, the Free Spirit, the Albigensians, the Waldensians, the Lollards, the Hussites, and many more spread these kinds of views and produced their own martyrs, some of whom were seen in a similar respect to the earthly, radical peasant understanding of Jesus Christ. A great too many people were burned on the stake or otherwise tortured and killed for beliefs contrary to the Catholic Church. Michael Servetus, for instance, had been burned alive atop his own books for his unitarian and anabaptist beliefs. All of this is to say that Christianity had begun and was maintained as a radical notion well into modern times.
However, somewhere along the way, the Catholic Church had managed to wrestle Christianity—which likely had anticipants in the form of pagan heroes such as Lugh— from popular sources and canonize it, establishing a dogma that could be enforced externally onto others, including by force. This necessarily caused a reaction among the radicals, who at first—at least those who had not already secretly maintained paganism or atheism— took toward various proto-Protestant and pagan heresies and religious dissent and then became increasingly drawn to a form of populist, reactionary anti-theism, misotheism, or atheism. This was, however, a distancing of radicals from their actual roots, and a flip-flopping of the historical situation in the public mind. Whereas the cross had previously been a symbol of popular rebellion against the banksters by the grassroots church, it had become a symbol of domination as instituted by the Catholic Church and made into legend through the incorporation of various pagan myths.
As with Christianity, which had become institutionalized and dogmatized by the Catholic Church, Aristotleanism had also been a subject of control, especially by the scholastics, who had already been wed to the dogmatisms of the Church, and so who generally could not approach the topic in a wholly honest fashion, without themselves being placed upon the pyre. Eventually, especially among the lower classes, the scholastic delivery of Aristotle’s teachings became a subject of scorn, much as had occurred with Christianity. However, Aristotle’s philosophy had allowed for the spread of Western secularism into the Orient, and was thereby transferred to what would become the Muslims, at a time when secular philosophy was primarily a Greek endeavor, and so when Greece was something of a cultural underdog. While Aristotle had been largely forgotten in Europe during the Dark Ages following the Fall of Rome, the Muslim success with his works had promoted a return to an interest in his worldview. This is why Aristotle’s works are intricately connected to the perennial philosophy, which would be enunciated during the Renaissance. Aristotle’s work is perennial because it pops up time and again by those who wield it properly and ensoul themselves thereby.
It was nominalists such as Roscellinus, Peter Abelard, and William of Ockham who would begin to oppose the scholastics and the realist philosophies of Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle in the Church, and for this Abelard was castrated, but the nominalists rarely faced as much difficulty as primitive Christians or as radical realists who argued that universals entailed freedom, equality, and justice. Nominalists rejected these kinds of ideas, and argued instead that all that really existed were individual things, which lacked an essence or nature that could be said to be held in common with others, as the realists, following Plato and Aristotle, believed. Nominalism would come to be embraced by atheists such as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, and would become a staple of pessimism and postmodernism. Its original home appears, however, to have been with the Buddhists.
In contrast, the radicals had actually come from the radical realist interpretations that were affiliated with pantheists such as John "the Scot" Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, Amalric of Bena, David of Dinant, Giordano Bruno, Lucilo Vanini, Baruch Spinoza, John Toland, Gerrard Winstanley, Georg Hegel, and others, whose views were optimistic or balanced rather than pessimistic.
The Catholic Church, however, tended to lump pantheists and atheists together as heretics, considering them both atheists for the pantheists’ immanent worldviews. Along with a shared interest in the workings of material reality, there were some natural comraderies that began to form between atheists and pantheists. However, around the time of Diderot and de Holbach, the atheist position, which requires much less rational and conscientious rigour and is more sensible, became more-or-less dominant, alongside watered-down deist views (the deist views of Matthew Tindal were, in contrast, much more in line with those of the pantheists).
Much as rustic folk paganism and primitive Christianity had been forsaken in favor of Catholicism and scholasticism, pantheism was now losing out to atheism, which tended to have more relation to the nominalists, though this was not immediately the case with figures like Diderot and d’Holbach, whose views also have much in common with pantheism. Come the time of proto-postmodernism, however, in the works of people such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartman, and Philipp Mainlander, a strange anti-theist misopantheism would develop increasingly toward what would become recognized as modern atheism.
Somewhere along the way, radicalism had been usurped by the nominalist and atheist segment of the heretics, such that they began to distance themselves from even natural religious sentiments, which became associated with conservatism. In the process, and as seems to perennially occur, unfortunately, they lost sight of their origins, and largely lost track of the free thought process that had established radicalism as an important sociopolitical force. However, despite the popularity of and embrace of atheism among the radicals—especially following after Diderot, d’Holbach, and etc.—, they would continue to be known as realists, in contrast to the nominalists, as can be seen the tradition of Realism in art as established by Gustave Courbet. In reaction to this tradition, which kicked off modernism (with a small m), the nominalists embarked upon Modernism and then postmodernism, through projects such as impressionism, symbolism, decadence, surrealism, aestheticism, Dada, and etc. Over time, however, and thanks to the infiltration of radicalism by organized international finance and the occult in the form of synarchism, which was an explicit conspiracy to oppose anarchism, this Modernist and postmodernist milieu, the fin de siècle, due to its own affinities to heresies associated with nominalism as well as the Knights Templar, who had also been burned at the stake, became the face of radicalism. Similar instances are seen with the wrestling of socialism into Marxism and of anarchism into anarcho-communism. The Counter-Enlightenment program of the fin de siècle is and has largely been one of namestealing and idiosyncratic confusion established through infiltration and misleadership.
Okay, so we have gone through the historical background, so now let’s get to my argument. My argument is that throughout all of this the fact that anarchism and mutualism are just reinvented forms of basic Aristotleanism has been ignored, and that these are in fact forms or reworkings of Aristotlean perennial philosophy. The main argument that is held up against this is that Aristotlean teleology was rejected by the Enlightenment thinkers. However, this is not really so, at least not as natively coming from Aristotle himself, though certainly scholastic conceptions of Aristotle fit the bill. This is not to say that there were not attacks made against Aristotle and other realists by radicals, but that these attacks were of a certain nature, being themselves legitimate criticisms or strawmanning, but not of an entirely nominal nature. Take, for example, the philosophies of Spinoza and Proudhon.
First of all, it is worth noting that a microcosm of what I am here discussing can be seen in the work of Proudhon as it relates to Spinoza. In Proudhon’s address of Spinoza’s efforts, Proudhon showcases a clear misunderstanding of Spinoza as a sort of authoritarian absolutist, though this is clearly not the case. As with Hegel, whom he gives more credit for some reason, Proudhon had not even read Spinoza directly (he had read passages translated and commented upon by E. Saisset, who was a critic of Spinoza). Nor was he aware of Spinoza’s intricate connection to mutualism, which persisted in the Netherlands before and after Spinoza’s influence, well before becoming a major affair in France, as is relayed by Marco Van Leeuwen and his work on mutual insurance. It can reasonably be argued that Spinoza had been a part of a grassroots mutualist tradition that may go back as far as the Stedinger, the original Hollanders, and that his philosophy is ultimately an expression of Anglo-Saxon "Luciferianism" transferred thereby. Indeed, it was this same cultural group that Peter Kropotkin had traced mutual aid to in the form of frith. This relationship between Proudhon and Spinoza is curious, and appears to be Proudhon losing touch with the very roots that gave way to his influence. After all, Proudhon was riding the wake of the Radical Enlightenment that, according to Jonathan Israel, Spinoza had more-or-less kicked off. Just about the entire Enlightenment can be traced to figures such as Spinoza, Winstanley, Toland, and Tindal, as Margaret Jacob might add. So, in using them both as examples of forgetting the influence of Aristotle in the same way, they are the "as below" to the "so above."
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of Aristotle being put in the light of mutualism before, but his proto-mutualism is plain to see for anyone who looks for it, and his influence on the later mutualists is just as obvious. His Nichomachean Ethics was not only an anticipant of Spinoza’s own Ethics, but also of the mutualist Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help and Thrift. It is worth noting that Samuel Smiles is the unsung founder of the modern self-help movement, as would later be co-opted by Mesmerist synarchists such as Napolean Hill, William Walter Atkinson, and Rhonda Byrne. Much as with Herbert Spencer’s reaction to Thomas Carlyle, the English Nietzsche, but addressing his influence on the level of psychology moreso than sociology, as Spencer had done, and certainly with a different but nonetheless still mutualist emphasis, Smiles was himself reacting to Carlyle and his "great man" view of history. Whereas Spencer tended to reject the notion of great men as being sociologically significant, however, Smiles embraced Carlyle’s challenge and gave it a practical element that would greatly threaten the ruling class. In this, he reminds the reader a great deal of Aristotle’s efforts in the Nichomachean Ethics, which itself may be considered a self-help anticipant to Smiles.
Of course, many of the other mutualists, such as Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Francis Tandy, to name just a small sampling, explicate Aristotlean views, especially as they relate to excess and deficiency. Whereas Aristotle’s main interest in these, at least in his Ethics, was as these relate to moral character, the sociological-centered anarchist mutualists tended to have similar things to say about economics. The mutualists were absolutely obsessed with balanced economic approaches that would do away with both deficiencies (shortages) and excesses (surpluses), demanding that prices instead be established at the cost of production, and that this be maintained as a natural equilibrium. Though Aristotle focuses on moral character, his Ethics don’t fall short in making similar economic demands, though he lacks the rigour that one finds in the mutualists, particularly in a work like Benjamin Tucker’s "Capital, Profits, and Interest," wherein he establishes the state as oppressor through the process of elimination. Still, even in Aristotle’s politics, which had given way to classical or radical republicanism of the sort that was common among radicals before anarchism, there appear to be anarchic and mutualistic sentiments. Firstly, it is clear that Aristotle holds that the existence of the state and coercive authority is dependent upon a corollary ignorance and inadequacy on the part of the population, and in this his views anticipate thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and especially Henry David Thoreau, who, following after the philosophical anarchism of William Godwin, advocated for increasingly less government as the virtues of the population would afford. Secondly, Aristotle is a harsh critic of usury, or chrematistics, and in this anticipates criticisms leveraged by mutualists as infringements on the cost principle. Aristotle’s ideal polity (as opposed to optimal, which he focuses on due to the corruption in Athens; a mixed government), it may be inferred from his values and preferences (and despite what he says explicitly; that it is the worst of the ideal forms), would be a timocracy, a democracy of shareholders of roughly equal merit (or "an association of brothers," says Aristotle), and particularly one where most of the functions of government are made unnecessary through personal magnanimity and liberalism. As a result, it can be deduced from Aristotle’s collected works, considered in toto, that he may himself constitute a philosophical anarchist with practical reservations (David Keyt has argued similarly). It is only due to the failings of character in others that Aristotle accepts a mixed form of government, yet one that anticipates the democratic republican federalism advocated by anarchists within their industrial confederations to some extent. Most obviously, the mutualist tendency to favor cooperative modes of production might easily be compared to constitutional association or timocracy, as a cooperative is a democratic body of equal shareholders functioning for the common good and not a public state democracy functioning as an ochlocracy (as in communism or statist direct-democracy).
As it regards Spinoza, he is often contrasted harshly to Aristotle and interpreted as an atheist who rejected teleology. Indeed, there are good reasons for this, though this view is quite mistaken, however popularized by atheist academics. Spinoza’s immanent understanding of deity can easily be confused for atheism by the untrained ear or eye, and he made some obvious statements rejecting teleology. Since it is fairly well-established that he was sincere in his pantheism, and was not an atheist—though Jonathan Israel still spreads this misconception—, and since I have already addressed this quite a few times in my works, I will instead focus on the teleological element, which is also of most interest to me personally.
Spinoza says, in the Appendix to Part I of Ethics, that,
I have explained the nature and properties of God. I have shown that he necessarily exists, that he is one; that he is, and acts solely by the necessity of his own nature; that he is the free cause of all things, and how he is so; that all things are pre-determined by God, not through his free will or absolute fiat, but from the very nature of God or infinite power.[1]
It is important to understand this prefacing of what he is about to say, because it is not to be taken out of this context. Spinoza’s view here is similar to Parmenides’s, in that God is the very stuff of being, in which the whole phenomenal world inheres. God is eternal, infinite, and absolute, and nothing occurs outside of or counter to God. But this also means that everything is pre-determined and that everything is ultimately inevitable. That is, the future is fixed. Spinoza might be considered, in modern cosmological terms, to be a believer in a block Universe, a Universe which has no actual change within it, and that might even be considered completely homogenous. [2] And he is certainly not a nominalist. Spinoza believed that everything could be reduced to God, Nature, or Substance, which had two attributes, mental and material, but which is itself eternal and infinite.
He continues,
Yet there still remain misconceptions not few, which might and may prove very grave hindrances to the understanding of the concatenation of things, as I have explained it above. I have therefore thought it worthwhile to bring these misconceptions before the bar of reason. All such opinions spring from the notion commonly entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view. It is accepted as certain that God himself directs all things to a definite goal (for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he may worship him). I will, therefore, consider this opinion[…] I will point out its falsity […][3]
Notice that Spinoza grants that "men themselves act […] with an end in view." He also wants to assume for his starting point, "what ought to be universally admitted," such as that "men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek." Remember that this occurs within the context stated prior, that "all things are pre-determined by God […] from the very nature of God." So, Spinoza acknowledges that human beings act with an end in view—with a purpose, or telos—, and that this end is pre-determined, but he is aiming to point out that this not true of everything. Seems pretty clear to me so far, how about yourself?
Spinoza did make general statements against teleology. However, these have to be understood in the context of the scholastic control he was battling and as it relates to his own immanent monism. The scholastics were not immanentist Aristotleans, the way many of the Arabs were, because they believed in a deity that was external to the Universe and that was not the same as Aristotle’s unmoved mover, which the Arabs had long before interpreted as a rendition of pantheism. Thus, their rendition of teleology differed from that which the Arabs, such as Al-Farabi, had adhered to, wherein transcendence occurred temporally within the Monad. Spinoza uses an example, for instance, of how people tend to make assumptions such as thinking that "what is useful," such as "eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the Sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, etc." [4] are made
for their use. As they look upon things as means, they cannot believe them to be self-created; but, judging from the means for which they are accustomed to prepare for themselves, they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the Universe endowed with human freedom, who have arranged and adapted everything for human use. They are bound to estimate the nature of such rulers (who have no information on the subject) in accordance with their own nature, and therefore they assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of man, in order to bind man to themselves and obtain from him the highest honors. Hence it follows that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vein, ie., nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc.; so they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry and some wrong done them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still, they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easily for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God’s judgements far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth of the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. [5],[6]
The scholastics, who were also the temporal authorities of the day, used Aristotle’s teleology as a means of whimsical, exoteric control, and interpreted it to the public as a demand for certain kinds of action that were not to result from self-interest but that could be compelled. This ran directly counter to the mutualistic notions of Aristotle, which used teleology as an explanation for the individualistic impulses of the individual as well as the source of their long-term thinking. Whereas Aristotle appealed to self-interest and self-direction, Church authorities appealed to the pyre, and demanded that if one did not do what their interpretation of God said that one should do, one should be harshly punished (another infringement on Aristotle’s philosophy). Spinoza was immersed in this intellectual climate, itself a complete bastardization of Aristotle. Nonetheless, and despite his criticisms of teleology, Spinoza has been considered an Aristotlean by some serious scholars, and his philosophy, while also incorporating elements from Epicureanism and other worldviews, does indeed appear to be highly Aristotlean.
While Spinoza is an organicist, and not a mechanist, his understanding of the world does include mechanistic philosophy, which had been fairly recently described in mathematic form by Bacon, Newton, and Descartes, and which appears to him to establish a degree of impartiality on behalf of God as it relates to mechanistic functions, and in this way he has much in agreement with deism. He says,
There is no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments […] However, I will add a few remarks, in order to overthrow this doctrine of a final cause utterly. That which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa: it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and that which is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect. [7]
Spinoza clearly has major beef with the scholastic doctrine of final causation. Mechanical causation ran obviously counter to the doctrine of final causation. But the other side of Spinoza’s coin, one must remember, is an imaginative humanistic idealism, which also has a causal relation to the world, most strongly in the form of what he calls "adequate ideas," those that correlate to the way things inhere in God. Spinoza admits, of course, that human beings act according to final causes, and that everything they do, and even that everything else does, is predetermined by God. Still, he has a bone to pick. He takes issue with the idea that these causes are somehow divorced from human beings, as if commands by an anthropomorphic deity, rather than innate expressions both of human and of God’s nature or being. For Spinoza, God doesn’t really take action, God just is. Spinoza continues, saying that it is plain that
that effect, is most perfect which is produced immediately by God; the effect which requires for its production several intermediary causes is, in that respect, more imperfect. But if those things which were made immediately by God were made to enable him to attain his end, then the things which come after, for the sake of which the first were made, are necessarily the most excellent of all. Further, this doctrine [of final causes] does away with the perfection of God: for, if God acts for an object, he necessarily desires something which he lacks. [8]
So, for Spinoza, the entire idea that God does something is absurd, because it implies something other than God’s own omnipotence, which Spinoza rejects. God is, by definition, that which is not limited or relative to others (except, perhaps, as whole and part). God does not want anything in a literal sense, because God is entirely self-sufficient in God’s own being. Thus, by Spinoza’s view, teleology is not something that can apply to Nature, which is God, at-large. It is only something that can occur within Nature, as through the minds of men and the execution of their adequate ideas. These ideas cannot simply be impressed upon others, because arising as much from them as from oneself, and in unique ways.
Spinoza denies, then, that causation applies to the Whole, including teleological or retrocausation. Fair enough, he already said that the Whole is eternal, which implies that. He is just being logically consistent. He then goes on to dismiss teleology as it relates to physical causation, particularly bare acts of probability. Spinoza uses an example of the perspective of the religious, saying, "if a stone falls from a roof on to some one’s head and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for if it not been for God’s will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance?" [9] The point is that the impious are not smitten by God while the pious are kept from suffering, all through meaningless, impartial, physical phenomena. What Spinoza is arguing here is that material-physical, mechanical causation is not something that can be attributed a purpose. It is necessary, because resulting from laws that work as they do, but is not purposeful. This is important for Spinoza, and especially for his project, called Ethics for a reason, because it suggests that instead of pious damnation of one another, humans can band together for mutual aid and the provision of order where it is otherwise lacking, particularly where their ignorance otherwise keeps it from happening. Indeed, this worldview would inspire the mutualistic projects of John Toland and the mutualistic insights of Matthew Tindal. It was interpreted as or inspired a materialistic outlook by figures such as Diderot and d’Holbach. At the same time, while Spinoza’s rejection of teleology in this regard is semi-materialistic, it cannot be forgotten that basically the whole of German idealism, such as that of Hegel’s, was inspired also by Spinoza. So Spinoza cannot be divorced from idealism and subjectivity, nor from the project of teleology that gives way to it. He can, however, be said to relegate idealism to the mental attribute, and materialism to the bodily one.
Spinoza’s philosophy itself forgoes the possibility that he can be rejecting teleology outright. It is impossible to separate his view from teleology, because it is impossible to separate cosmology from human decision-making in a Block Universe, which necessarily implies some degree of idealism. Since Spinoza's Substance extends from past to future, and since there is a mental attribute, this mental attribute, which is associated with purposeful action, must indeed be situated in the future, be purposeful, and meaningful, while the material attribute must be distinguished otherwise. Spinoza aligns the mental attribute with imagination and creative capacities that must be understood as being purposive and meaningful, and which cannot be oriented in space and time except immanently in Substance and as temporally transcendent. That is, Spinoza’s mental attribute is an element of transcendental idealism, which is made immanent by his pantheism.
There is not an unfolding of the Substance. Instead— and as I interpret it in modern terms— phenomena unfolds as a rolling present, which results from the holographic interference pattern resulting from the clash of entropy (past causation, material attribute) and syntropy (future causation, mental attribute). Transcendence occurs temporally as the rolling occurs, as duration continues and the mental attribute starts to hold more sway. This temporal transcendence, occurring within the Monad, which is eternal and unchanging, however, is not the unfolding of the Monad, but is more like imaginary filamentation of the worldlines of the various paths of particles and ideas that give shape to the present as we know it. This filamentation—the modalities and their causes— is not itself ultimately real or differentiated, because it cannot be distinguished from the rest of the homogenous Monad except as nominal pathways within it, but it inheres in and is composed of a very real Substance, which is Reality itself. Transcendence occurs within or is immanent to the Monad, but is external to the present event in spacetime, and follows teleological causation, which is expressed in the present as will or conatus, and so can be effectively be said to be "internal" from a presentist perspective, though it ultimately is external from the present moment.
Spinoza did not reject teleology per se, but instead must be understood to reject teleologies of the material attribute, external teleologies, or the imposition of teleologies onto another. In this, he appears to reject the notion of being given an external purpose, as Aristotle had described as being done with inert objects without an innate purpose of their own, such as a table or a statue, which have their purpose given by external forces of mind. For instance, Aristotle says, in Physics, that
Some things exist by nature, others from other causes. By nature, the animals and their parts, the plants, and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, and water)—for we say that these and the like exist by nature. All the things mentioned appear to differ from things which are not constituted by nature, for each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness.
He says,
For nature is what we have said. Things that are natural are the ones that have within themselves a principle of motion and rest, as has been said. A bed or a cloak or any other such thing, insofar as it is of a given kind and to the extent that it is a product of art, has no innate impulse to change.
In Spinoza’s seeming rejection of teleology, when taken into consideration with his own semi-idealism and eternalism, Spinoza must be interpreted as actually defending a position very much like Aristotle’s original teleology, which had actually developed to describe the self-preservation and self-motivation instincts that Aristotle had found prevalent in his zoological studies. To put it simply, Aristotle’s ideas about entelechy, or an innate end-directedness in living things, cannot be divorced from Spinoza’s concept of conatus.
Spinoza does not deny teleology, purpose, meaning, or even temporally-external teleology, only physically-external teleology, that of a being outside of the Universe. That is, the immanent, or within, is connected to the transcendent, or without, in such a way that these are ultimately a non-dual, false dichotomy that Spinoza resolves into monism. His view is not a rejection of teleology, transcendence, or etc. in any degree except where out of place in Nature, such as with the idea that there is a Sky Master that rules the world like a mortal being. Spinoza believes there is a temporally-external goal or divine purpose, but not one that is dictated or compelled so much as one that inheres in Being and which gives one one’s own nature. In this way, while they are immanent to matter and to the self, goals are external to the present moment, and so are indeed teleological. However, Spinoza would clearly disagree that all things have an internal purpose (inert matter, for instance), and would disagree that the purpose of each can be known by one. Spinoza, though, is an idealist insofar as he accepts a mental attribute that has a causal relationship to the present by way of the conatus. Yet his idealism cannot be fully separated from Platonic idealism, otherwise known as Platonic realism, and it naturally inspired Hegel’s philosophy of the Absolute.
Proudhon would take Hegel’s process philosophy and his concept of the Absolute and would turn it into his concept of free absolutes, basically self-defined individuals and collectivities. Proudhon’s vision was that of an atheistic humanist, and he tended to contrast humanity to God and Nature. God, in Proudhon’s view, was entirely fictional and to be done away with, while nature, from his presentist perspective, was both something real and something that humanity was striving to overcome through technology, economy, and association. Yet, even while rejecting Aristotle and Spinoza, Proudhon’s own concept of free absolutes seems to be a reappearance of Spinoza’s conatus and Aristotle’s entelechy. Maybe you can see the pattern by now. Proudhon was losing sight or letting go of his own tradition, which ultimately owed a lot to Spinoza, Aristotle, and primitive Christianity, and was himself partaking in the perennial philosophy. Each of these thinkers were, in turn, contributing to the flourishing of humanity, largely believing they were alone in doing so, and even scolding their own predecessors in the process. And Proudhon speaks of Justice in a teleological manner, as something that society is reaching toward, and, like Spencer, understands this to be an evolutionary process toward a dynamic, societal equilibrium.
References
Aristotle, Physics