Quotes About Telos

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Man's self-destructiveness and failure to attain a telos that cures dissatisfaction suggest a disjunction in his origins to which, theologically, the name "original sin" is applied.

One of the first things we learn from our earliest teachers in the church is that the bible has a purpose, a point, a goal, a telos. It wants to save us. Or rather God wants to save us, and the whole world that God created in the first place, and all who bear the gospel to us leave their fingerprints on it as they transmit goodness to us.

evolution meanders more than it progresses. But over the long haul, evolution has a broad telos, a broad direction, which is particularly obvious with increasing differentiation—an atom to an amoeba to an ape!

unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.

The normal form of motion always involves telos or goal," I say, trying to get a word in edgewise. "Motion involves the transition from an acorn to an oak. Newton made violent motion the paradigm for all motion because it was the perfect description of the actions of William of Orange, the usurper whom the Whigs put on the throne in England. The impetus for all motion now came from without. There was no telos. All motion was a function of human will and intention.

The Christian life of obedience is, therefore, not a pilgrimage toward a goal, as is commonly supposed. It is a witness or signpost to that telos (end, goal) that has already been achieved by Christ the Kurios and will be consummated in the last day by the action of God

All action presupposes an end.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its "telos"—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife.

Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good.

What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.

As historian Richard Tarnas writes, "As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world." And philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.14

Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.

How could they reach such a conclusion? Their reasoning was simple and profound. They posited that virtually every object in creation is directed toward an end—a telos, in Greek. The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren't separate things—values are embedded within facts. For example, a watch is virtuous if it tells time properly; a horse is virtuous if it properly pulls a cart.

The modern mind rebels at this notion—the notion of something's virtue tied to its inherent purpose. Nature, we believe, is blind and valueless—we don't blame a snake for biting or a baby for crying. But that's not what the ancients meant by virtue. They didn't mean our modern moral sense of "virtue"—being a nice person, or something similarly vague. They meant fulfilling the telos for which you were created.

Whereas modern systems of morality focus far more on whether given actions are good or evil, ancient ethical systems worried less about rules for action, and more about making men and women virtuous people—people capable of fulfilling their telos as human beings, and utilizing reason and character to carry out complex moral equations.

individual purpose lay in acting virtuously—fulfilling our telos by pursuing right reason in accordance with nature. Virtue, in turn, could only be defined with reference to the community. The individual, in this view, tends to disappear into the community.

Athens rejected the concept of individual freedom beyond the freedom to pursue the virtuous in pursuit of telos; freedom merely meant self-control, the very opposite of what we often mean by freedom today.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

Many young people strangely boast of being motivated; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [ Ende ]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning.

We will still need to consider the implications of our blind faith in technology because the iGods' promises did not point to or include the divine. Instead, they suggested that we are becoming divine as we develop such amazing intelligence within smaller and smaller devices, so small that a point of Singularity will blur humanity with machine, our minds with eternity. Should we find this inspiring or distressing? What is the telos of technology—the end goal?

Aristotle spoke of the goal or end, the telos, of human moral behavior. We are on a journey toward that point, which he called EObaiµovia. That has normally been translated as "happiness"; but the meaning Aristotle had in mind was not the one that word often suggests in today's Western world (the feeling of contentment or pleasurable excitement) but the more organic one of becoming our full and true selves, discovering in practice the best and highest activity of which humans are capable.

Truth,' Hegel says, is seen as the end of thought. It is revealed where thought attains its telos, which is something to be determined by thinking itself. The truth is not something external to thought to which it may correspond and which would allow the possibility of the skeptical question, but is rather the immanent goal thought is itself directed towards…