The Trap of Evolutionary Organicism

This article is a slightly summarised version of an invited plenary at the 3rd Aegean Seminar which took place at the Greek island of Samos in July 1992. The original title was “An Interpretive Systemological View of the Issue: ‘Environmental Fluctuations and Cultural Change in Island Societies`.” It is an hermeneutical inquiry into the interpretive context that provides full meaning to the issue of Environmental Fluctuations and Cultural Change. The roots of the relationship of causality embedded in such a title are traced so that the its underlying ontological assumptions are uncovered. This sort of archaeological inquiry will finally unearth the interpretive context that provides full meaning to such a relationship of causality; namely, neo-evolutionary organicism. This theoretical outcome of Modernity embraces natural and social sciences under the aegis of a single way of thinking, feeling and acting which buries the Enlightenment conception of liberty and its consequent problem of morality and of practical reason.