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Ask ‘why?’ four different times, and Aristotle said you will get four different answers — and all of them matter. This lecture from Academy of Ideas introduces his famous doctrine of the four causes, better understood as four ‘becauses.’ It walks through the material, formal, efficient, and final causes, and zeroes in on the most controversial one: purpose in nature. Where modern science sees blind machinery, Aristotle saw things naturally tending toward their own fulfillment. It closes with his conviction that using reason lets us touch what is divine.
Full Video Transcript
The Greek philosopher Aristotle famously claimed that all men by nature desire to know, but what according to Aristotle does it mean to know something, and how do we arrive at knowledge of the world?
The purpose of this video is to answer these questions, and in the process we will provide a detailed examination of Aristotle’s famous doctrine of the four causes, paying particular attention to his teleological view of nature.
Aristotle is without a doubt one of the most influential thinkers in history.
His influence has been so great that he has been given prestigious nicknames such as the Master of Those Who Know,
Aristotle the Wise, the First Teacher, and simply the Philosopher.
Aristotle made contributions to many fields including logic, biology, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics,
political theory, aesthetics, rhetoric, and philosophy of mind.
The huge body of his work, the duration of time that has passed since he lived,
and the fact that he is one of the most commented upon thinkers in history
makes the interpretation of even the most basic points of his thought controversial.
This point should be kept in mind when studying Aristotle.
Aristotle was driven by a desire for knowledge,
and believed that human beings, by virtue of having rationality,
are animals that naturally desire explanations of things in the world.
Throughout his life he constructed an edifice of thought
laying out the requirements and processes necessary for the attainment of knowledge.
The first step in the acquisition of knowledge, according to Aristotle, is to identify the puzzles and difficulties that the various phenomena of the world present to us.
As he wrote,
Identifying a puzzle, whether it be in ethics, natural philosophy, or metaphysics, requires the use of the senses.
Observation with the senses allows one to state the appearances, making us aware of the puzzles that require explanation,
while also providing us with the information our minds need to discover the potential solutions to these puzzles.
It is important to stress that for Aristotle, it is not merely sensory experience that leads to an understanding of the world,
rather understanding arises from the activity of the mind working with the information from the senses.
In addition to stating the appearances, Aristotle also saw great value in examining what he called
endoxa. Endoxa is a Greek word translated as credible beliefs or reputable opinions.
A significant portion of the writings of Aristotle consist of him examining and critiquing the views
of other philosophers such as Plato and the pre-Socratic philosophers. The appearances
and endoxa were not the endpoint of Aristotle’s quest for knowledge, but only the beginning.
As he wrote in the physics,
The question now arises as to how Aristotle determined when proper knowledge of something had been obtained,
whether further investigation was required. For Aristotle, a proper
explanation needed to satisfy what has come to be called the four causal
accounts of explanatory adequacy. This doctrine is one of the most famous,
important, and powerful components of Aristotle’s philosophy, playing a
significant role in much of his thought. The first thing that should be
emphasized concerning this doctrine is that a lot of confusion surrounding it
comes from the use of the word cause, as the 20th century philosopher John Moyd
it, Akril explains. The doctrine of the four causes might better be called a doctrine of the
four becauses. Aristotle is distinguishing different sorts of answers that can be given
to the question why or because of what. Therefore, remember that the four so-called causes are types
of explanatory factors. Aristotle’s suggestion is that a full knowledge and understanding of
anything requires a grasp of all four. So what are the four causes or explanatory factors that
Aristotle deemed necessary for proper knowledge of something. The most basic of the four causes
is called the material cause and simply requires an understanding of what something is made of,
or as Aristotle put it, that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists. In addition to
identifying what something is made of, Aristotle also believed that proper knowledge required one
to identify the pattern, structure, or form that the matter realizes in becoming a determinate
thing, and this is what Aristotle called the formal cause. Next is the efficient cause and
this requires identification of the agent or entity responsible for the matter taking its
specific structure or form. And lastly the final cause is identified when one can state the purpose
or function of the thing being explained, or as Aristotle put it, that for the sake of which a
thing is done. In Aristotle’s work physics he uses the example of a statue to help explain the four
causes and we will do the same using a bronze statue of Hercules. With this
example the material cause or that which the statue is made of would be the
bronze. The statues form, in this case the body of Hercules, would be the formal
cause. The efficient cause of the statue would be the sculptor which is the agent
responsible for the matter becoming what it is. To determine the final cause of
the statue one must identify its function purpose or more generally what
the statue is for. In our example the statue’s function could be simply to
honor Hercules, so this would be its final cause. The ability to spell out
these four causes or explanatory factors of the statue would, according to
Aristotle, reveal that we have a full understanding of it. Aristotle’s final
cause in particular has proven very controversial to those who study
Aristotle. In the case of artifacts or man-made objects such as an airplane, a
musical instrument, or a hammer, it is not too difficult to identify its purpose
or final cause. This is because humans build artifacts with a purpose in mind, or in other
words, there is a designer that gives the artifact its final cause. However, the controversy
surrounding the final cause arises because Aristotle identified final causes not only
in artifacts, but he also saw final causes as operative in nature. In other words, he
believed that natural organisms, such as plants and animals, as well as their parts, such
the liver, teeth, lungs, etc. had final causes. This view is referred to as a teleological view
of nature, as in the Greek word telos is translated as end or purpose. While Aristotle’s teleological
view of nature has proved problematic for modern scholars, too often people dismiss this view based
not on what Aristotle himself wrote about it, but rather because of persistent misconceptions.
To dispel these misconceptions, it is beneficial to contrast Aristotle’s teleological view with
two other views on purposes in nature, namely, the view that no purposes exist in nature at all,
and the view that purposes exist in nature but only where there is a designer. Aristotle’s view
differed from both those who deny purposes in nature and those who only see purposes where
there is a designer, and is rather positioned somewhere in between these two extremes.
Aristotle believed there to be purposes in nature, but explicitly denied that there were some divine
craftsmen who designed nature and gave natural objects their final cause in an analogous manner
to how humans give artifacts final causes. As Aristotle wrote in Physics, it is absurd to
suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe an agent deliberating. Or as the 19th
century German scholar Edward Zeller succinctly put it, the most important feature of the Aristotelian
teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric nor is it due to the actions of
a creator existing outside the world, or even a mere arranger of the world, but is always
thought of as immanent in nature.
But what does it mean for final causes to be immanent in nature?
While there is no consensus opinion on exactly what Aristotle meant, a common suggestion
is that to better understand Aristotle’s notion of final causes, one must realize the
intimate relation between the final and the formal cause.
As Aristotle wrote,
Since nature is twofold, as matter and as form, the form is the end.
And since all other things are for the sake of the end, the form must be the cause in
the sense of that for the sake of which.
To understand this idea, it is useful to note that Aristotle’s teleological view of nature
was developed partially in response to the mechanistic view of nature developed by his
predecessors the pre-Socratic atomists.
A mechanistic worldview, which formed the basis of the scientific worldview of the 17th
18th century, and remains prevalent to this day, posits the behavior of all physical phenomena,
including living beings, to be reducible to the operation of elemental physical processes which
are purposeless and accidental by nature, atoms interacting blindly in the void, as the
pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus put it. Aristotle’s teleological view of nature, in
contrast, posits purposiveness and undirected behavior to be intrinsic in nature and the
entities that make up the world. Instead of grounding all behavior in the interaction of
independent elemental processes that are purposeless by nature, as a mechanistic worldview
does, Aristotle maintained that holistic phenomena can have causal effects on physical systems.
This type of causation, where the whole determines the behavior of the parts,
is Aristotle’s notion of the formal cause, the form being the whole, structure, or essence of
what a thing is. As Aristotle wrote, we must think that a discussion of nature is about the
composition and the being as a whole, not about parts that can never occur in separation from the
being they belong to. Jonathan Lear in his book Aristotle, The Desire to Understand, explains what
Aristotle may have meant in terms of this connection between the formal and final cause.
Keeping in mind that Aristotle believed there to be real purposefulness in the world, Lear wrote,
Real purposefulness requires that the end somehow govern the process along the way to its own realization
It is not, strictly speaking, the end specified as such that is operating from the start
It is form that directs the process of its own development from potentiality to actuality
Of course, the existence of potential form at the beginning of the developmental process
is due to the antecedent existence of actual form
In natural generation, the potential form of the child is due to the actual form of one of the parents being passed on in sexual reproduction.
Ultimately, it is actual form which is responsible for the generation of actual form.
So in this sense, the end was there at the beginning, establishing a process directed toward the end, actual form.
This defense of Aristotle’s teleology, whereby the final and formal cause are seen as intimately related,
is not universally accepted, but it is certainly one of the more prominent interpretations.
Philosophers continue to debate the particulars of Aristotle’s teleology, however, what should
be remembered is that Aristotle saw final causes as operative in both the parts of organisms as
well as the organism as a whole, and that these final causes were imminent in nature and not the
result of a divine craftsman. Interestingly, Aristotle’s teleological view is experiencing
a quiet resurgence of late after being shunned for hundreds of years.
Most notably in the field of robotics,
where some believe that the quest for autonomous robots
capable of self-directed purposive action
is unreachable when operating under a mechanistic worldview.
What has never been shunned, however,
is Aristotle’s observation noted earlier
that human beings by nature have unenquenchable thirst for knowledge.
Going further than this relatively tame observation,
Aristotle posited that the exercise of reason,
along with being the most pleasant activity we can engage in,
also gives one the potential to transcend their mortal existence
and come in contact with that which is divine.
And we will conclude this lecture with a passage from Aristotle reflecting this view.
It is not insofar as he is man that he will live a life of contemplation,
but insofar as something divine is present in him.
If intellect is divine, then in comparison with man,
the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life but we must
not follow those who advise us being men to think of human things and being
mortal of mortal things but must so far as we can make ourselves immortal and
strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us for even if it
be small in bulk much more does it empower and worth surpass everything
Source: Academy of Ideas