Unteleological

A consistently materialistic conception, consistently adhering to a materialistic interpretation of the process of development as well as of the facts involved in the process, could scarcely avoid making its putative dialectic struggle a mere unconscious and irrelevant conflict of the brute material forces. This would have amounted to an interpretation in terms of opaque cause and effect, without recourse to the concept of a conscious class struggle, and it might have led to a concept of evolution similar to the unteleological Darwinian concept of natural selection.

The essence, the fundamental mood of all Greek thought, lay in the problem of the immediate present, in the quest of an ars vivendi. Upon this confined, unteleological aspect of existence, the idea of man’s spiritual purpose seldom intruded.