Criticism of teleology

 'In order to have any arguments for the priority of consciousness, one would need to take a cinema film of the history of the world, and to run it backwards. Since this cannot be done, the conclusion is irresistible. We know for certain that until a particular period in the development of the earth, there was no life on it. We know for certain that life arose. We also know for certain that the presence of life became a fact before human beings appeared. We know for certain that human beings arose out of other types of animals. Initially, life was little pieces of living protein with rudimentary forms of the so-called "psychic" among its properties. Are we being ordered to consider this the great "World Reason," "God," and so on? What rubbish! The same rubbish as the teleology that Goethe mocked wittily in his Xenia, with the ironic assertion that cork oaks were created so that corks could be made for bottles. It is obvious that such primitive views of the universe are crudely anthropomorphic. Ascribing a "soul" to the stars, "reason" to the world, and so on is to judge things by analogy with human beings, while investing humanity with [inverted] characteristics such as omniscience, all-beneficence, omnipresence, and so forth. It is true that analogies often contain something rational, and the history of science has repeatedly witnessed extremely fruitful analogies. But there are facts and facts. Nothing whatever can be said in favor of analogies such as those described above, which all science, all real science, serves to refute. So where is the basis for idealist arguments? Or for a reversion to the animism of savages? 

Marx in his Holy Family wrote: "Hegel makes men and women people of self-consciousness, instead of making self-consciousness the self-conscious-

ness of men and women, of real people, that is, people living in the real, objective world and conditioned by it."2 An abstraction of human consciousness, torn apart from human corporeality, turned into "being" and transferred to the entire world-this is the stuff of idealism. 

Here, however, it has to be said once again that this very abstraction contains a huge betrayal of dialectics. Once thought is abstracted from thinking, we also see the destruction of that integrity about which the same idealists sing like nightingales when they turn to discussing life. And here (that is, in the thesis on integrity) they are completely correct. So what is the end result? Is it really hard to see that when you tear the spirit apart from the body, you turn the spirit into nothingness, and the body into a corpse? It is simply comic to see how respectable people, after making fiery protests against crude empiricism, rationalism, vivisection, and the destruction of life, after triumphant odes in praise of integrity, unity, the individual whole, and so on, suddenly seize on a man or woman, tear them in two, sever the thought from the body, and imagine that in the process the body has become the body and thought has become thought! No, dear philosophers! No "'self-development of ideas," no "procession of the spirit," and no other metaphysical devilry can really exist, precisely because you, despite the doctrine of dialectical wholeness, have destroyed this wholeness, slain the "body" and done away with the "spirit." Hegel, when it came to the fundamental question, sacrificed his brilliant dialectics to the idealist God.'

--Bukharin, Philosophical Abaresques, pg. 135-6