The Four Causes Revisited

Previously I abbreviated my account of book capital Alpha of the Metaphysics, focusing mainly on Aristotle’s own remarks about the “knowledge being sought”. The other main content of this book is a discussion of what his predecessors had to say about this question. The bulk of it concerns the pre-Socratics, with mention of the poets who preceded them.

I tend to regard serious philosophy as starting with Plato. By comparison, even though they have interesting things to say, the pre-Socratics seem mostly to just make dogmatic pronouncements in a simplistic way. As Aristotle says, “[W]hile in a certain way all the causes have been spoken of before, in another way they have not been spoken of at all. For the earliest philosophy about everything is like someone who lisps [sic], since it is young and just starting out” (ch. 10, Sachs tr., p. 28).

But Aristotle’s remarks on his predecessors here — including a brief mention of Plato — also give insight into his perspective on what was most original in his own thought.

These remarks are superficially structured around Aristotle’s claim that no one before him made use of all four causes. But implicitly, this historical critique is preparing the way for a much more fundamental point about the overall leading role of that for the sake of which, which parallels his more developed argument about the nature of explanation in Parts of Animals. The treatment here could also be seen as an anticipation of related conclusions about the nature of the first cause, which will not be made explicit until book Lambda.

The very way in which he briefly introduces the four causes here at the beginning of the Metaphysics already has several important nuances:

“[One cause] is thinghood [ousia or “substance”], or what it is for something to be [what it is] (since the why leads back to the ultimate reasoned account, and the first why is a cause and source), another is the material or underlying thing, a third is that from which the source of motion is, and the fourth is the cause opposite to that one, that for the sake of which or the good (since it is the completion of every coming-into-being and motion” (ch. 3, p. 6).

“Causes” are reasons why. The what-it-is (ti esti) of things is their form, but notably he does not use the word “form” here. The word that Plato had used for form (eidos) had a more common usage for the “look” or visible form of a thing, which is nearly opposite to the sense of essence and deeper truth that Plato and Aristotle give to it.

(Hegel’s remarks on the intangibility of truth suggest a relation between this more ordinary usage of eidos and a weakness of the specifically Platonic notion of form, in which the open-ended nature of essence that Plato so well represents in his depictions of Socratic inquiry is compromised by Plato’s conflicting tendency to sometimes suggest that the form of a thing is something that could be simply known once and for all.)

The material or “underlying thing” answers to the superficial sense of “substance” (ousia) as a logical “sub-ject” of properties in the Categories. But Aristotle has already here associated ousia with the form rather than the material. This could be seen as anticipating the argument of book Zeta on the what-it-is of things, in which the “underlying thing” sense of ousia is eventually superseded by that of the what-it-is.

Pre-Socratic philosophy arose in the relatively cosmopolitan environment of the thriving trade centers of Ionia in Turkey. The Ionians formulated various theories positing a material first principle (water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, fire for Heraclitus, “the Unlimited” for Anaximander).

“Of those who first engaged in philosophy, most thought that the only sources of all things were of the species of material” (ibid). “[B]ut as people went forward in this way, their object of concern itself opened a road for them, and contributed to forcing them to inquire along it. For no matter how much every coming-into-being and destruction is out of some one or more kinds of material, why does this happen and what is its cause? … [But since sources of this kind] were not sufficient to generate the nature of things, again by the truth itself, as we say, people were forced to look for the next kind of source. For that some beings are in a beautiful or good condition, or come into being well or beautifully, it is perhaps not likely that fire or earth or any other such thing is responsible…. So when someone said an intellect was present, just as in animals, also in nature as the cause of the cosmos and of all order, he looked like a sober man next to people who had been speaking incoherently beforehand…. Those, then, who took things up in this way set down a source which is at the same time the cause of the beautiful among things and the sort of cause from which motion belongs to things” (pp. 7-9).

This may seem like a very “Hegelian” kind of argument: “their object of concern itself opened a road for them”. But in reality it is Hegel who is being Aristotelian.

“So these people, as we are saying, evidently got this far with two causes out of those we distinguished in the writings about nature, the material and that from which the motion is, but did so dimly and without clarity, rather in the way nonathletes do in fights; for while dancing around they often land good punches, but they do not do so out of knowledge, nor do these people seem to know what they are saying. For it is obvious that they use these causes scarcely ever, and only to a tiny extent. For Anaxagoras uses the intellect as a makeshift contrivance for cosmos production, and whenever he comes to an impasse about why something is necessarily a certain way, he drags it in, but in the other cases he assigns as the causes of what happens everything but the intellect” (ch. 4, p. 9).

He applauds Anaxagoras for bringing intellect into the discussion, but criticizes him for using it mainly as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. To the extent that Anaxagoras has an implicit theory of the way in which intellect affects other things, Aristotle regards him as treating it as a “source of motion”. But Aristotle notes that it is completely unclear in Anaxagoras how intellect is supposed to be a source of motion. The same goes for Empedocles’ principles of love and strife.

Aristotle will retain an important role for intellect (and love too) as well as the notion of sources of motion, but he decouples these, and develops a different account of each. In both the Physics and the Metaphysics, he ends up tracing sources of motion to potentiality. But meanwhile, the source of motion is also what the Latin scholastics and early moderns called the efficient cause.

It is again vitally important to recognize the order of explanation that Aristotle employs. He explains the operative aspects of “efficient causality” in terms of the more fundamental notion of developed potentiality. He does not explain “potentiality” in terms of efficient causality, and he most especially does not explain potentiality in terms of some passive role in what the scholastics and early moderns understood by efficient causality. Once again, when he is being careful, Aristotle makes it clear that the primary model for this kind of cause is something like the art of building as a developed potentiality, not something immediate like the hammer’s blow or the carpenter’s arm.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the Pythagorean school’s teaching that mathematical things are the sources of all things. This chapter also incorporates remarks on the Eleatic school’s teaching that the One or Being is the source of all things. He treats both of these as partial anticipations of Plato, grouping them together as “the Italians”, since both of these schools were centered in the Greek colonies in Italy.

“After these philosophic speculations that have been mentioned came the careful work of Plato, which in many ways followed the lead of these people, but also had separate features that went beyond the philosophy of the Italians. For having become acquainted from youth at first with Cratylus and the Heraclitean teachings that all sensible things are always in flux and that there is no knowledge of them, he also conceived these things that way later on. And since Socrates exerted himself about ethical matters and not at all about the whole of nature, but in the former sought the universal and was the first to be skilled at thinking about definitions, Plato, when he adopted this, took it up as applying to other things and not to sensible ones, because of this: it was impossible that there be any common definition of any of the perceptible things since they were always changing. So he called this other sort of beings forms, and said the perceptible things were apart from these and all spoken of derivatively from these” (ch. 6, pp. 14-15).

“In a curtailed way, then, and hitting the high spots, we have gotten hold of who happens to have spoken about origins and truth, and in what way” (ch. 7, p. 16). “But about what it is for something to be, and thinghood, no one has delivered up a clear account, but those who posit the forms speak of it most” (p. 17).

Aristotle thinks that Plato came closer to what is needed than any of his predecessors.

“That for the sake of which actions and changes and motions are, they speak of as a cause in a certain way, but they do not say it that way, nor speak of what is so by its very nature. For those who speak of intellect or friendship as good set these up as causes, but do not speak as though anything that is either has its being or comes into being for the sake of these, but as though motions arose from these” (ibid, emphasis added).

We saw that Aristotle understands Anaxagoras as claiming that intellect is a source of motion, in some direct but unexplained way. Aristotle maintains on the contrary that intellect is a cause in what he above called the “opposite” sense of that for the sake of which.

He continues, “And in the same way too, those who speak of the one or being as such a nature do say that it is the cause of thinghood [i.e., of things being what they are], but not that it either is or comes about for the sake of this; so it turns out that they both say and do not say that the good is a cause, since they say it is so not simply but incidentally” (ibid, emphasis added).

Parts of this remark apply to the Pythagoreans (the one) and the Eleatics (the one or being). All of it, including the part about the good, applies to the Platonists. For Aristotle, neither “the one” nor “being” is in its own right a true cause, because neither gives us a specific why for anything. Aristotle’s own notion of the first cause is to be identified neither with Thomistic Being nor with the neoplatonic One. On the other hand, the good is a true cause, because it does give us specific reasons why. These are expressible in terms of that-for-the-sake-of-which. But he also delicately implies that even Plato treats the Good more like a source of motions than a grounding for explanations in terms of that-for-the-sake-of-which. Elsewhere, he says that Plato treats the Good as a formal cause, rather than as that-for-the-sake-of-which. In any case, he clearly thinks that Plato treats the Good as affecting things in some other way than as that-for-the-sake-of-which. The neoplatonists explicitly represent the One or the Good as producing all things. But at this level, the specificity of reasons why things turn out some particular way is completely left behind.

Without a reason why things turn out as they do, for Aristotle there is no true cause. That-for-the-sake-of-which is more preeminently and properly a why than any of the other causes, and for Aristotle this makes it more preeminently and properly a cause than any of the other causes. That is why it seems reasonable to him that the first cause of all should be purely a cause in the sense of that for the sake of which.

The scholastics and the moderns tend to reduce all causes to the notion of efficient cause that they put in the place of Aristotle’s “source of motion”. But for Aristotle, a source of motion is principally a means to the realization of an end, to which it is subordinated. Aristotle ultimately subordinates all other causes to the operation of the good as that for the sake of which. The result is not a total determination or absolute necessity, but rather various hypothetical necessities that can each be realized in more than one way, and that therefore still allow room for genuine contributions to the outcome from secondary causes.

Aristotle’s association of that-for-the-sake-of-which with completion in the earlier quote recalls the way that he elsewhere associates it with actuality, which in the Barnes-edited Collected Works edition of the Physics is translated as “fulfillment”, and which Aristotle closely identifies with entelechy, which also implies completion. Thus, although I don’t recall him ever explicitly saying it, both potentiality and actuality are represented among the four causes, which we could now alternatively list as form, material, potentiality, and actuality. This particular conclusion is new to me, but based on the argument sketched here it seems pretty solid. This has a number of interesting consequences.

For example, with these identifications in hand, we can apply the priority of actuality over potentiality in Aristotle as an alternate reason why that-for-the-sake-of-which is prior to the source of motion.

We can also see another reason why although there is a kind of analogy between the actuality/potentiality and form/material relations, the distinction between actuality and potentiality cannot be reduced to that between form and material. Otherwise, there would be only two distinct kinds of causes, and not the four on which Aristotle insists. This distinction between the two distinctions fits perfectly with Aristotle’s other insistence that nonsensible as well as sensible things can have being in potentiality, whereas only sensible things are properly said to have material.

Next in this series: Infinity, Finitude, and the Good

The Knowledge Sought

Following the emphasis of al-Farabi on demonstrative “science”, the Latin scholastic tradition treated “metaphysics” as a completed science. Some writers attributed such a completed science to Aristotle, while others, following in the wake of Avicenna, put forward their own improvements.

With respect to being, Aristotle himself speaks of knowledge sought rather than possessed. In inquiring about being “as such”, he is exploring a question given prominence by others. Far from claiming to have final knowledge of being as such, he highlights the ambiguity of “being”. There can be no “as such” — and hence no final knowledge — of an ambiguous thing.

This is not the end of the story, however. The very first sentence of the Metaphysics is “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing. A sign of this is our love of the senses; for even apart from their use, they are loved on their own account (book capital Alpha (I), ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 1).

We are after knowledge of something. It is just not clear that that something would be accurately characterized as “being”, full stop.

“[A] sign of the one who knows and the one who does not is being able to teach, and for this reason we regard the art, more than the experience, to be knowledge” (p. 2).

“Further, we consider none of the senses to be wisdom, even though they are the most authoritative ways of knowing particulars; but they do not pick out the why of anything” (ibid).

“[T]he person with experience seems wiser than those who have any perception whatever, the artisan wiser than those with experience, the master craftsman wiser than the manual laborer, and the contemplative arts more so than the productive ones. It is apparent, then, that wisdom is a knowledge concerned with certain sources and causes” (p. 3).

This concern with sources and causes, with the why, is the true subject matter of the Metaphysics. This is emphasized again at length in book Epsilon (VI).

“Since we are seeking this knowledge, this should be examined: about what sort of causes and what sort of sources wisdom is the knowledge. Now if one takes the accepted opinions we have about the wise man, perhaps from this it will become more clear. We assume first that the wise man knows all things, in the way that is possible, though he does not have knowledge of them as particulars. Next, we assume that the one who is able to know things that are difficult, and not easy for a human being to know, is wise; for perceiving is common to everyone, for which reason it is an easy thing and nothing wise. Further, we assume the one who has more precision and is more able to teach the causes is wiser concerning each kind of knowledge. And among the kinds of knowledge, we assume the one that is for its own sake and chosen for the sake of knowing more to be wisdom than the one chosen for the sake of results” (ch. 2, p. 3).

“Now of these, the knowing of all things must belong to the one who has most of all the universal knowledge, since he knows in a certain way all the things that come under it; and these are just about the most difficult things for human beings to know, those that are most universal, since they are farthest away from the senses. And the most precise kinds of knowledge are the ones that are most directed at first things, since those that reason from fewer things are more precise than those that reason from extra ones” (p. 4).

For long I struggled with this last statement. How could a knowledge of first things be the most precise of all? In the Topics, he says that first principles can only be investigated by dialectic: “[T]his task belongs properly, or most appropriately, to dialectic; for dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., p. 168).

Some commentators — influenced by al-Farabi and the subsequent tradition’s overwhelming emphasis on the place of demonstration as opposed to dialectic in Aristotle — have considered it a puzzle or a defect that the Metaphysics and other Aristotelian texts do not seem to consist in demonstrations as described in the Prior Analytics. The answer is that the Metaphysics and the others generally do follow the model of dialectic articulated in the Topics, as the Topics itself says they ought to.

Returning to the Metaphysics, Aristotle has already stressed that the most universal knowledge is also the most difficult. Also, he standardly distinguishes between how things are “in themselves” and how they are “for us”. The knowledge of first things would be most precise in itself, not necessarily for us in our relative achievement of it.

To anticipate, I think the final conclusion of the Metaphysics will be something like “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. The qualification “ultimately” is essential to making sense of this.

(For Aristotle himself, all becoming and terrestrial motion are grounded in — though not in detail determined by — the entelechy or entelechies of circular celestial motion. The stars are a kind of everlasting living beings endowed with superior intellect, and are directly moved by love of the first cause. This might seem quaint to modern people. I find the love part beautiful in a poetic sort of way, but think Aristotle’s theoretical astronomy in general and his views of the special status of celestial objects have relatively little impact on interpretation of the rest of his work — particularly with respect to the teleology affecting earthly things and the discussions here in the Metaphysics.)

Plato says that the Good surpasses all things in ancientness and power. He represents Socrates as provocatively arguing that all beings desire the good, regardless of how confused they may be about what the good really is. No one deliberately and self-consciously desires what they recognize as evil. That is impossible, because it is logically self-contradictory. For the same reason, there also could not be a “principle” of evil. This is a tremendously powerful thought, of unparalleled importance for ethics. It sets a fundamental tone of charitable interpretation, in diametrical contrast to the kind of point of view that says those people over there are just evil.

Aristotle, however, says that Plato does not clearly explain the mode of activity of the Good, or how it acts as a cause. According to Aristotle, when Plato does gesture in this direction, he lapses into treating the Good as either a formal cause or an efficient cause, or both. But speaking in terms of formal or efficient causality loses what is most essential about the good — what many contemporary philosophers would call its normative character.

Aristotle considered his own contribution in this area to be a thorough account of how all things are ultimately moved by that for the sake of which, and of how the Good indirectly influences things just as that for the sake of which. This, once again, is what Kant called “internal teleology”.

After the horrors of the 20th century, many people have lost faith in the fundamental goodness of life. This is basically an emotional response. The indubitable factuality of horrendous evil in the world is not an Aristotelian or Hegelian actuality, and does not touch actuality. The factuality of evil does pose a roadblock for common interpretations of particular providence or “external” teleology, but not for Aristotelian or Hegelian teleology.

But how could a knowledge of first things be exact? We certainly don’t have knowledge of the first cause in itself. But coming back to my formulation “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”, this does meet Aristotle’s criterion of simplicity: all things are said to be ultimately moved by one thing (even though more directly, they are moved by their own love of whatever they do love, which seems good to them within the limits of their understanding).

We have exact knowledge neither of the first cause in itself nor of the particulars we encounter in life, but perhaps we can after all have exact, certain knowledge that “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. This is the kind of thing I think Aristotle is suggesting. (See also Aristotle on Explanation.)

Next in this series: The Four Causes Revisited

“Why” by Normative Pragmatics

Brandom’s normative pragmatics can be seen as providing a general framework for answering “why” questions. Pragmatics is initially about the practical use of language, and normative pragmatics is about good use, which for Brandom especially means good inferential use. Thus, normative pragmatics ends up being broadly concerned with good informal reasoning in life, i.e., with the quality of our ethical and other judgments.

In my view, this concern with the goodness of reasons and judgments also ends up emphasizing the ethical dimensions of judgment in general. There is really no such thing as “value free” judgment. Even what is called mathematical “intuition” is really an acquired practical skill having to do with judgment of what next step is contextually appropriate.

Classically, “why” asks for reasons, or about the goodness of reasons. Taken far enough, this leads to questions about ends.

Aristotle, too, typically framed inquiries in terms of what is well “said of” something. This is a kind of analysis of language use, with a normative or ethical intent, that ends up being inseparable from questions of what is right and what is true. This general approach is actually a form of what Brandom would call normative pragmatics. Brandom would tell us that semantics — or the investigation of meaning — depends on this sort of inquiry. My ascription of a fundamentally semantic orientation to Aristotle carries a similar implication.

What and Why

I want to say that questions of what and why of the sort asked by Plato and Aristotle are of vital importance for all ethically concerned people. These are questions of interpretation, and of what I have been broadly calling meaning. For the moment, I’m leaving aside obvious questions of what to do, in favor of these broader questions that implicitly inform them.

What something is and why it is the way it is — or should be the way it should be — are deeply intertwined. Aristotle provides many good illustrations of this. Also, at any given moment, our thinking about why depends on many assumptions about what we are concerned with that may call for review. Conversely, our thinking about each what implicitly depends on many more detailed judgments of why.

It is not practical to question everything at once, so we do it serially as the need arises, striving to be deeply honest with ourselves in our assessments of the relative levels of such needs. We seek the appropriate best balance of considerations, as well as a good balance between thoroughness of questioning on the one hand, and practical responsiveness or needed decisiveness on the other. (See also Context.)

The question why is quite open-ended. It asks for reasons or causes — and then potentially for more reasons or causes behind those — sincerely seeking to explain or justify, in the spirit of Hegel’s notion of a faith in reasonableness without presupposed truths. It arises in ethical deliberation, in general dialogue, and in many other practical circumstances, as well as in more broadly philosophical considerations. It always involves a dimension of explicit or implicit judgments of value and importance, and often interrelates with questions of fact or interpretation of fact. We should pursue it in a spirit of mutual recognition and expansive agency. Brandom’s normative pragmatics provides a good outer frame for why questions, and valuable technical tools for addressing them. (See also “Why” by Normative Pragmatics.)

The question what honestly faces the provisional character of our implicit and explicit classifications and identifications of things. As Kant might remind us, the what-it-is that we “immediately” apprehend depends upon complex processes of synthesis. Every what encapsulates many judgments and inferences. That does not mean our apprehensions are necessarily wrong — far from it — but it opens another huge space of questions an ethically concerned person should be aware of as possibly relevant, and should monitor for potential warning flags. As with why, questions of what also interrelate with questions of fact or interpretation of fact. Brandom’s inferential semantics provides a good outer frame and technical apparatus for approaching what questions. (See also “What” by Inferential Semantics.)