This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. However, modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature. This points to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention while avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

In André Breton’s 1933 essay “Picasso in His Element” for the journal Minotaure, the surrealist poet underlines the intertwinement between Picasso’s recent sculptures and his studio environment, which the photographer Brassaï documented in such a way as to reflect Picasso’s everyday habits. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel and Ravaisson, this chapter explores the preeminence of nature in Breton’s essay in terms of questions of materiality and habit, the latter being a common trait shared by humans and animals. In light of Roger Caillois’s contemporaneous effort to make nature the new paradigm for a revised theory of automatism, it is argued that Breton’s reading of Picasso’s work and environment advances instead a theory of art as self-reflexive nature, which recognizes the material continuity between art and nature without reducing their relationship to one of homology.