The Four Causes:
These might be the most important of all the philosophical concepts we’ve looked at so far.
Material cause > the underlying stuff a thing is made of.
Formal cause > which is the form, structure, or the pattern that the form exhibits.
As you can see, the material and formal causes of a thing are just its matter and form, considered as components of a complete explanation of it.
Efficient cause > which is what brings a thing into being, or more generally and technically, which actualizes a potentiality in a thing.
Final cause > which is the end, goal, or purpose of a thing.
The four causes are completely general, applying throughout the natural world and not only to human artifacts.
Ex.:
A heart’s material cause> muscle tissue of a certain sort.
“ formal cause > muscle tissue organized into atria, ventricles and the like.
“ efficient cause> biological processes that determined that certain embryonic cells would form into a heart rather than, say, a kidney or brain.
“ final cause > it serves the function of pumping blood.
Remember that Aristotle’s entire metaphysical scheme is “moderate realism”.
A thing’s formal cause is, at the deepest level, its substantial form or essence; its material cause entails that it has certain potentialities and lacks others; its formal cause, being its substantial form or essence, is shared by other things and known by the intellect via abstraction from experience; and so forth. To be sure, these various philosophical subtleties are built on common sense and do not contradict it, but they do go considerably beyond it.
Just as material and formal causation are deeply intertwined on Aristotle’s account, so too are efficient causes and final causes. You simply cannot properly understand the one apart from the other; indeed, there cannot be efficient causes without final ones.
Modern thinkers deny that there really are any final causes at all, appearances notwithstanding. This has led them into all sorts of paradoxes and incoherencies.
Modern tendency is to treat cause and effect as essentially a relation between temporally ordered events; the first event causes the second one. Maybe “cause and effect” is just a matter of there being regular or “lawlike” correlations between events, and science must rest content with discovering these correlations.
The way of posing the “problem” of cause and effect just described owes much to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), a big hero to “New Atheists” and secularists in general.
Supposed you asked somebody what caused the broken window. He probably say, “The brick did”—the brick, not “the event of the brick’s being thrown”. In other words, for common sense it is ultimately things that are causes, not events. Aristotle would agree. He would also say that the immediate efficient cause of an effect, and the one most directly responsible for it, is simultaneous with the effect, not temporally prior to it.
It may be noticed that Aristotle’s account seems to entail a series of simultaneous causes and effects, and might also wonder where such a series terminates and how it can be explained.
Also relevant is a further Aristotelian principle concerning efficient causation, namely that whatever is in the effect must in some sense be contained in the cause as well.
Cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have to give.
The effect might be contained in the cause in various ways.
The cause of a fire might itself be on fire, as when a torch is used to start a brushfire, or it may instead have the power to produce fire, as a cigarette lighter has even when it is not being used.
The traditional way of making this distinction is to say that a cause has the feature that it generates in the effect “formally” in the first sort of case and “eminently” in the second sort of case.
If a cause didn’t contain all the features of its effect either formally or eminently, there would be no way to account for how the effect came about in just the way it did.
Again a cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have.
There will be more to say about the dramatic implications of Aristotle’s conception of efficient causes later.
Aristotle regards final causation—goal-directedness, purposiveness, something’s pointing toward an end beyond itself—as extending well beyond the realm of human artifacts, indeed as pervading the natural world.
Aristotle takes final causation or goal-directedness to exist throughout inorganic nature as well. The moon is “directed toward” movement around the earth, as a kind of ‘goal.” Fire is directed toward the production of heat, specifically, rather than cold.
He is not making the claim that the moon is consciously trying to go around the sun. or that fire wants to produce heat.
His whole point, in fact, is that there is a kind of goal-directness that exists even apart from conscious thought processes and intentions.
For Aristotle, our conscious thought processes are really but a special case of the more general natural phenomenon of goal-directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly totally divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence. The functions of various bodily organs (hearts, kidneys, livers, etc.) are the most obvious examples—the organs have these functions, and performs them, even though they are totally unconscious—but less complex forms of final causality are to be found throughout the inorganic realm.
Aquinas refers to the final cause as “the cause of causes,” and for good reason.
The material cause o a thing underlies its potential for change; but potentialities, as we’ve seen, are always potentialities for, or directed toward, some actuality. Hence final causality underlies all potentiality and thus all materiality. The final cause of a thing is also the central aspect of its formal cause; indeed, it determines its formal cause. For it is only because a thing has a certain end of final cause that it has the form it has—hence hearts have ventricles, atria, and the like precisely because they have the function of pumping blood.
Also, again, efficient causality cannot be made sense of apart from final causality.
Indeed, nothing makes sense—not the world as a whole, not morality or human action in general, not the thoughts you’re thinking or the words you’re using, not anything at all—without final causes. They are certainly utterly central to, and ineliminable from, our conception of ourselves as rational and freely choosing agents, whose thoughts and actions are always directed toward an end beyond themselves.
Yet modern philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals in general claim not to believe in final causality. I say “claim” because, like all normal human beings, they actually appeal to final causes all the time in their everyday personal lives, and even to a great extent in their professional lives.
Aristotle’s account of the metaphysical structure of reality, far from being empty verbiage or of mere academic interest, has dramatic implications for religion, morality, and science that will repay the effort we have put into understanding it.
