Physics 2.3 (194b17-195a4)

Aristotle's four causes

• First off, Aristotle's 4 "causes" are not all causes in the way that most modern English speakers think of causes.
• For Aristotle, science = causal knowledge
  
• Thus knowledge of what causes are is essential for every science
• we think we have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause (APost. 71 b 9-11. Cf. APost. 94 a 20)
• we think we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause (Phys. 194 b 17-20)
• Aristotle's "causes" are often better thought of as "explanations" or "reasons."
  
• Take any single thing, then ask yourself four questions:
1. What is it made of?
   
2. What made it/what action/what trigger led to its creation/coming to be/happening/becoming what it is?
3. What is it: shape, structure, arrangement? What makes it one sort of thing rather than another? What holds it together? What about the way it is put together makes it work?
   
4. What is it for? What end is it likely to serve? What goal is it likely to reach?
   
• Those four questions correspond to Aristotle's four causes:
• Material cause: "that out of which" it is made.
  
• Efficient Cause: the source of the objects principle of change or stability.
• Formal Cause: the essence of the object.
  
• Final Cause: the end/goal of the object, or what the object is good for.
• A note about final causes: they always presuppose the formal cause: in order to explain the goal/purpose/end, you must use the formal cause.
  
• Each of those four questions leads to a different sort of explanation of the thing.
• The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue, the letters of a syllable.
• The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue, the arrangement of a syllable, the functional structure of a machine or an organism.
• The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
• The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of the following things: walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.
• Take a statue:
• Its material explains its existence: a bronze statue is a certain sort of thing, and its material constituents, the elements that make up bronze, cause it to have certain properties and explain a lot about it.
• Some qualities of bronze are important for the statue-ness of the statue. Others are not. Those that are important explain the statue and are the material cause.
• bronze is also the subject of change, that is, the thing that undergoes the change and results in a statue.
  
• art of bronze casting in the artisan = efficient cause or the principle that produces the statue (Phys. 195 a 6-8. Cf. Metaph. 1013 b 6-9).
  
• the artisan manifests specific knowledge, which is the salient explanatory factor that one should pick as the most accurate specification of the efficient cause (Phys. 195 b 21-25).
  
• this knowledge is not dependent upon and does not make reference to the desires, beliefs and intentions of the individual artisan
• it helps us to understand what it takes to produce the statue: what steps are required
• Its form explains its existence: it is not *just* a lump of bronze, it also has a certain shape, structure, and arrangement.
  
• can an explanation of this type be given without a reference to the statue? no!
• Its purpose as a statue explains it: it is "to commemorate," "to instantiate beauty," "to decorate," or some combination of those or something else. The need for a commemorative object, or the need to express beauty, or the need for a decorative object can explain the statue.
• bronze is melted and poured in the wax cast. Both the prior and the subsequent stage are for the sake of a certain end, the production of the statue.
  
• Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done.
• conceptually the efficient and the final cause can be separated, but the formal and final causes are tightly linked.
  
• By "final causes," Aristotle offers an explanation that refers to the telos or end of the process= a teleological explanation
  
• teleological explanation does not necessarily depend upon the application of psychological concepts such as desires, beliefs and intentions. But if they are present, they are often integral to the final cause, although it's possible that they are merely accidental to whatever is the object of explanation.
  
• Aristotle explains natural process on the basis of a teleological model
• Causes, like primary substances, have what we can call species and genera, and the species and genera of the cause are also causes (we might call them secondary causes).
• The material cause of the statue, bronze,, is a particular sort of matter whose genus is metal, and so metal is a material cause of the statue.
• In somewhat modern terms, the material cause of our body is organs, but organs are made up of something like tissue as their matter, and tissue is made up of cells as its matter, which are made up of cellular organs as their matter, which are made up of plasms, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of elements, etc.
  
• all the way down this ladder, we may have  mere matter and most basic form.
• and the ladder gives us a genus-species-and-particular ordering of the material cause of our body
  
• Causes also have coincidental properties/aspects, which are coincidental causes.
• For instance, let us say that Joe the sculptor makes a statue: Joe is the efficient cause of the statue. But Joe also is a mountain climber, and so we might say that a mountain climber is the efficient cause of the statue. If we are more precise, we say that Joe's sculpting craft is the efficient cause, and the other qualities of Joe, such as mountain-climbing, are coincidental efficient causes.
  
• Aristotle's project with causes is scientific explanation
• thus he is interested in general causes for general phenomena
• that is not to say he does not understand that particular things have particular causes
• this statue is caused by this bronze, this sculptor's skill, this form, and for this end.
• Aristotle searches “for general causes of general things and for particular causes of particular things” (Phys. 195 a 25-26)
• idiosyncrasies that may be important in studying a particular bronze statue as the great achievement of an individual artisan are mostly extraneous to the more general case of statues.
  
• Chance causes some things, as does luck.
  
• luck is a subset of chance (note that this is slightly different terminology from that in our translation: I am using "luck" for what was termed "chance" there): chance in an agent is luck, whereas chance involving non-agents is just chance
  
• Only things that can act can be lucky.
• "Acting" is being confined to "agents" on this terminology: a pebble is not an agent. A person is.
  
• Things that cannot act cannot be lucky, but can be affected by chance.
• A pebble is affected by chance. A person is affected by luck.
  
• An example of chance is coincidence: coincidence can be a cause, but coincidences have no cause (Physics 2.4 ff.):
• A scenario: 10 people fall and hurt themselves on a single day in a single building: no single thing is the cause of those 10 falls (one falls because she wore very slippery shoes and happened to step in a puddle of grease, another falls because a man pushed her out of his way, another falls because he had a heart attack, etc. The institution that owns the building decides to radically overhaul their building to avoid accidental falls BECAUSE of the coincidence of 10 falls, which drew their attention to potential liability. But THERE IS NO SINGLE CAUSE for those 10 falls all occurring in the same building on the same day.
• Cf. Aristotle's man who ate spicy food, went to well, was killed by brigands: no tight causal connection between spicy food and being killed by brigands, but that is nonetheless why the man was killed: bad luck.
  
• There is no direct cause of chance/luck, even though every thing has a cause.
• In the scenario above, each accidental fall has its own causes, and so you can explain all ten of those falls via direct causes. What you cannot explain is why they all happened on the same day: that is the coincidental part of the scenario. But that coincidental part is what CAUSED the institution that owns the building to revise its policies.
• ABOUT FINAL CAUSES
• Physics II 8 is Aristotle's general defense of final causes.
  
• He needs to defend them because, he claims, his predecessors believed only in efficient and material causes.
• His defence of final causes shows that there are aspects of nature that cannot be explained by efficient and material causes alone.
  
• Final causes, he claims, are the best explanation for these aspects of nature.
  
• Aristotle holds, for example, that certain teeth have certain shapes because of what they are for. Those of carnivores are designed to tear and rip. Those of herbivores are designed to crush (cf. Physics 198b24-27).
  
• "Final" causation is often referred to as "teleology," which derives from Greek τελος "end, goal."
  
• Teleology is often thought of as requiring an agent separate from the thing that has a final cause. For instance, if an oak tree has a final cause, must there not be something apart from the oak tree that uses the oak tree for some goal or end?
• The ultimate result of many teleological views is that there must be a God who designs the world: if things have a purpose, whose purpose? If things have a design that makes them FOR certain goals, there must be a designer.
  
• Aristotle would say that for us to have teleology, there is no need for such a separate agent, no need for a designer. The goal of the acorn is to become an oak tree. The acorn aims to fully actualize the form of a full-grown oak tree, but is not an agent, and no agent set it in motion. It is a "self-mover."
  
• A question to ask about teleology is whether it uses an occurrence in the future to explain something that happens now. If that is the case, how can we call it a cause? If the thing that does the causing occurs AFTER the thing that is caused, the normal relation of cause to caused is backwards.
  
• Well, what of it? Think of genes: they provide a sort of set of instructions for the acorn to build itself. They cause the oak to react to its environment in certain ways. They cause the oak tree to produce more acorns (which is perhaps its purpose). I see no need for god to enter the picture, and I see no need for a future event to cause a present one there. Can we characterize genes as involving final causes? I think so. The final cause in nature is a  potential within things to become what they become.
  
• The Rain, for example:
• Phys 198b19-21 explains that it rains because of material processes: warm air is drawn up and cools off and becomes water, which comes down as rain.
• 198b21-23 explains that the crops may be nourished or spoiled as a result of the rain, and yet it does not rain for the sake of that result. It is a coincidence.
• Why is it not a coincidence that the front teeth grow sharp for cutting, while the rear teeth are broad for grinding? When the animal's teeth grow that way, it survives. When they do not, it dies. Why not a coincidence? (198b23-27)
  
• Aristotle replies that he wants an explanation of why it is a regular occurrence that the teeth grow in such a way that the animal survives. It is implausible that it is a coincidence every time. Final causation is offered to explain regularity.
  
• In some ways, it is just a bandaid: we want to know more about how that works: Darwin offered a mechanism: does that mechanism make final causes extraneous?
• Darwin's theory holds that natural selection works like a giant filter: those traits that confer a reproductive or survival advantage get thru the filter and so survive.
• Is this different from final causation?
• an advantage is toward some goal: there can't be an advantage that is not for some goal
• the goal is primarily survival of the species and secondarily survival of the individual
  
• it levels the goal of humanity and that of gnats and protozoans: is that a problem for Aristotle?\perhaps tertiarily there might be some favoring of "well-being" and "development of potential" in that individuals who are faring well are more likely to also mate and reproduce?
• A house and an organism, for examples
• In de Partibus Animalium (Parts of Animals), Book I, Aristotle presents an argument for the priority of the final cause over the efficient cause.
• Take a house:
  
• all the building materials are delivered
• they are necessary: without them a house cannot be built
• they are not sufficient: they will just sit there unless there is something more
• the builder comes: the skill she has is an efficient cause
• but all of this is for the sake of a house: a house is the final cause.
• from the very start, all is done with the house in view as the goal
• without it, nothing happens
• Take an organism:
• Parts of Animals 640a18-19 says that "generation is for the sake of substance, not substance for the sake of generation"
• the chicken came first!
• the proper way to explain the generation of an animal is to begin with the end of the process, the adult full-grown animal.
• when Empedocles explains the formation of the spine as the result of some fetal behavior, Aristotle says that may be part of the explanation, but it is insufficient:
• first off, the fetus had to have the power to move, so that must be part of the explanation
• furthermore, the spine is for-the-sake of support of an adult human's weight. That must be part of the explanation as well.
• procreation and causality
• Aristotle maintained that something that is in motion requires an efficient cause not just to set it in motion, but also to keep it in motion.
• Aristotle had no concept of inertia!!!
• also no concept of causation at a distance (gravity, magnetism, etc.)
• For Aristotle, efficient causation required contact, and that contact had to occur as long as the caused thing was changing/moving
• So what about procreation? see Generation of Animals I and II.
  
• animals procreate, because it is the closest they can get to immortality (immortality is a goal because it would involve permanent being, which would involve more full actuality)
  
• males are superior: they contribute more form for the human: they contribute the last thing that is necessary to create a viable human (obviously Aristotle did not know what we know)
  
• remember this is Aristotle: he was limited in some ways by his environment and culture: nonetheless, as a philosopher, he might/could/should have risen above those limits. Could/should he have in this instance?
  
• females contribute menses, cooked-up blood that falls short of human form: it is closer to human than earth, air, fire, and water, but it falls short.
• The female residue [menses] is potentially what the animal is by nature, and it contains the parts potentially, although not actually, and because when something active and something passive come into contact ... the one immediately acts and the other is acted upon in the manner in which they are active and passive. And the female provides the matter, the male the origin of the change. (GA II4 740b19-25)
• active and passive is explained at Metaphysics Theta, 1046a4-18
• active and passive correspond to efficient and material cause
• the male is the efficient cause, the source of the change
• the female is material cause, the thing acted on
• the semen does its work, then evaporates!
• so what about the need for an efficient cause to maintain contact while the change is taking place?
• does Aristotle think that the change to a human soul takes place right away?
• What is sought now is not the material out of which but the agency by which the parts come to be. For either something outside them makes them, or something which exists within the seed and the semen; and whatever it is must either be a part of soul or soul, or something which possesses soul. But it seems unreasonable to suppose that anything outside could create anything to do with the viscera, or any of the other parts; for it cannot cause movement without being in contact, and nothing can be affected by it unless it causes movement. Therefore it must be something which exists within the fetation, either as a part of it or as distinct from it. (GA II1 733b32-734a6)
• in the case of things with natures, the nature operates by permeating the material and operating from within, not from without.
• the father's semen apparently causes a change to the material, which thereby acquires a nature which works from within.
  
• a materialist might hold that mechanical materialistic explanations work for it all, but Aristotle rejects that as too limited: Aristotle wants an explanation of the organization of the growth of the human fetus.
  
• God and the final cause
• God, for Aristotle, is necessary, because there has to be something which is purely actual. More on this elsewhere: please accept for now that Aristotle thinks there must be something that is pure actuality.
  
• God exists as pure actuality consisting in rational contemplation of the best thing, god itself.
• God is the final cause of EVERYTHING
• everything aims to imitate God's perfect actuality
• everything seeks actuality, the fulfillment of its potential, full being.
• this "aiming" or "seeking" need not be conscious, involving beliefs, etc.:
• even the elements, earth, air, fire, and water, strive to become fully actual, which would involve their fulfilling their potential:
• each has its own proper place, which is part of its goal.
  
• Causal explanation
• the best explanations will consist of all four causes, but the formal and final will have priority over the efficient and material.
• Aristotle realized that not everything has all 4 causes.
• An eclipse of the moon has no final cause (Metaphysics 1044b12)
• deprivation of light by the interposition of the earth between the sun and the moon is the efficient cause
• there is no final cause
• Aristotle thought that the natural world has nisuses or strivings within its members:
• acorns are simply aimed at becoming oaks
• human embryos are aimed at becoming adult humans
• thus he thinks that developmental biology is an error-theory: the thing that needs to be explained is not why things become what they do, but why in so many cases they fail.
• common objection: Aristotle is just saying that things do what they do because that is the sort of things they do.
  
• where's the explanation in that?
• reply:
  
• until we come up with a way to bridge the gap from a mechanical/material explanation at the most basic microscopic level (atoms? quarks? energy?) to the macroscopic level (us, plants, mountains), there is a point to asking what is different about the macroscopic level
• Aristotle's theory sorts the world into natural kinds: humans beget humans, plants beget plants. Certain things come to be from certain things, and that has to do with their form and their goal.
• if we believe DNA is the code of life, how far are we from Aristotle? Think of it as a formula for local decrease in entropy: that's what a "final goal" is: the instructions for a local decrease in entropy: DNA is the formula
  
• Also, Aristotle's theory contributes to our understanding of how organisms work: the function of parts and the relation to wholes. That's what final and formal causes are about.
• Thus formal and final causes do a bit more work than merely saying that things do what they do because that's the sort of thing they do.
  
• Aristotle as historian of philosophy
  
• Aristotle begins the Metaphysics with a survey of how his predecessors investigated causes
• this is part of Aristotle's typical procedure: phainomena, endoxa, puzzles, then solutions.
• among the most important predecessors:
• Leucippus and Democritus developed ancient atomism: a materialistic theory which posited atoms and void as the basis of reality.
• Empedocles posited four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, which can be compounded and dissolved by two forces, Love and Strife
• Anaxagoras held that everything had the seeds of everything else in it, but Mind directed it all.
• Pythagoreans held that number imposed a limit or structure on matter's indeterminacy.
• Plato held that there is material and formal causation, according to Aristotle. Plato also held that everything is arranged for the best, which is a sort of teleology, but not like Aristotle's.
  
• Aristotle's comment:
• While all generation and destruction may well be from one or more elements, still why does this occur, and because of what cause (aition)? For it can't be that the substrate moves itself.  I mean for instance that neither wood nor bronze are responsible (aitios) for each of their changes: it's not the wood which makes the bed or the bronze the statue, but something else is the cause of the change in each case. To investigate this is to investigate the other cause, that from which comes the origination of change. (Metaphysics A3 984a19-27)
• For neither earth nor anything else of that sort seeem a likely cause of things either being or becoming good and beautiful, and nor did they seem so to them (Aristotle's predecessors). Nor can it be right to entrust such a matter to chance and fortune (Metaphysics A3 984b11-15)
  
• Aristotle was the first to engage in anything like a history of philosophy, but it is not clear that he had any real developed views on historical method, etc..
• But he is not an impartial historian.
  
• Aristotle's account of his predecessors is oriented almost completely toward his own way of viewing causes: thus he claims predecessors who have a different idea got it wrong or missed crucial things.
  
• This situation is frustrating, because Aristotle's account of his predecessors, especially those called "Pre-Socratics," is often our best source for our own knowledge of his predecessors: the Aristotelian lens distorts their intentions and makes it difficult to see their ideas clearly.
  
• Unfortunately, many people blame Aristotle for this. That is unfair, because Aristotle was not trying to give a disinterested account of his predecessors' thoughts. He is, rather, trying to show that his ideas have a history, but are new, different, and better in various ways.
• The fact that his account is often our best information about his predecessors is not his fault. But it's still frustrating, because we would really like to know more about those predecessors.
  

• Texts of interest for Aristotelian causes
• Physics II.3 (general discussion of types of causes)
• Physics II.8 (final cause: has bits tantalizingly close to evolutionary theory)
  

Good additional material: Cause of Persian War (hankinson P. 225-6), stars twinkling (ibidem 225), antlers (ibidem 227).