We Want Our 4 Causes Back!
/pix/aris Artistotle, a
medieval depiction.
Aristotle, in his Physics argued that there are four causes behind
everything that exists. These causes answer the question of "How" or "Why"
something is the way it is.
The Material Cause The material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of
a statue.
The Efficient Cause The external force that causes something to be made. E.g.
the artisan and his tools who make a statue.
The Formal Cause The form or plan of the thing made that define it. E.g. the
artisan's written or thought blueprints or sketch of plans for how to make the
statue.
The Final Cause The goal and reason of the thing. E.g. the purpose for which the
artisan is making the statue.
If the statue lacks any one of the four causes, it will not be made.
The Demise of the Formal and Final Causes
If you want to point your finger at a single philosophical change that defines
the shift from the Aristotelean worldview of antiquity and the Middle Ages to
the materialism of modernity, it is the rejection of the Formal and Final Causes
in the early Enlightenment.
Just ask your modern brain: "Does everything really have a purpose?" You
will probably reflexively think back "No," therefore, you do not believe in a
Final Cause to everything. The same is true of the Formal Cause, both of them
seeming to assume that there is a kind of conscious agency behind the action.
That isn't strictly speaking how Aristotle intended them, but that's how they
are interpreted through modern goggles.
You can see their rejection as early as the 1600's: Francis Bacon in Novum
Organum pushed aside the Final Cause as only being only suitable for
inter-human behavior. The Formal Cause, he dismissed merely as desperata
"hopeless." He actually dismissed the vocabulary of the other two causes as
being superficial and an irrelevant distinction too, but philosophically, they
are still retained in his philosophy by other terms.
In any case, modern people do not believe in Final and Formal Causes, or if they
do, not for everything in the cosmos. For Aquinas and others in the
Aristotelean world, the question of whether the universe has a purpose or a
formal plan is a kind of tautology. Of course it does! Everything non-random
does in Aristotelianism.
The Final Cause in Nature?
Now our post-materialist view of the Final Cause is sort of different from
Aristotle's original view. We have to remember that Aristotle viewed grammar and
cognition as something that in some way was directly reflective of reality
itself. Compare this view shared with the so-called "Speculative Grammarians" of
the Middle Ages, "speculative" coming from the Latin word speculum
"mirror", since grammar reflects reality. This common strand stretches from
Aristotle to those influenced by his work like Priscian and Bacon (Roger (who
was based), not Francis (who was p. cringe)).
Nowadays we atomize questions like "Why" to the point that even causality itself
doesn't mean anything and is a mere human cognitive convention, but for
Aristotle, the linguistic existence of "Why" questions means that there is a
legitimate logical equivalent to "Why" in reality.
Aristotle originally had argued that it is appropriate to refer to the Final
Cause of something whenever it is not due to randomness or spontaneity. The
example he uses is the growth of human teeth: there is no variance in where the
molar and incisors grow within the human mouth. Everything appears where it's
"supposed to" and we can assume that there is some kind of Final Cause behind
this.
If different shapes and sizes teeth grew in different locations of the mouth,
then it would be appropriate to talk of them as lacking a Final Cause. Things
that appear randomly and inconsistently do not necessarily have Final Causes,
but if something happens invariably, we can trust that it has a Final Cause.
Darwin "Got It Wrong" too?
So how far are moderns willing to take the rejection of the Formal and Final
Causes?
One of my old Ph.D. advisors, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini wrote a book with Jerry
Fodor called What Darwin Got Wrong. You can withhold your kneejerk
reactions; it's not a creationist book or anything, but it almost ended up being
as controversial—it's a critique of Darwinian natural selection on
"philosophic" grounds.
I will stultify one of the main arguments for brevity's sake: "How can we
reasonably talk about evolution as a goal oriented process when we have admitted
already that speaking of Final Causes is illegitimate?" Massimo and Fodor do
not use the Aristotelian terms, (instead they talk of Gould's spandrels) but
that's what they mean.
Evolution would only have been "scientific" in Medieval Europe.
Darwinian natural selection is actually a kind of cheat idea for materialism. In
order to understand how humans have arisen from common descent with other
animals, we want to have a narrative of why we speak, why we are bipedal,
why our bodies are mostly hairless, etc. etc. Natural selection offers an answer
without reference to a conscious incremental designer (God), but it smuggles
back in the Final Cause: "This evolved to do that."
But if we actually limit ourselves from talking in purpose-driven/Final-Cause
statements, the most communicative "scientific" thing we can say is "Humans
share a common ancestor with other animals, but we became different." The issue
of "Why" is dreaded "metaphysics." In truth, we actually need a Final
Cause to understand anything. The Final Cause, as Aristotle notes, is really
the most important cause, because understanding it is key to understanding
something in its greater context. Understanding something intuitively largely
amounts to knowing its Final Cause. Darwinism came to be accepted as a theory
because it cleverly smuggled in illegal metaphysics that we were having
withdrawal symptoms for. When you really think about it, this totally withdraws
Darwinian selection from the ledger of supposedly scientific topics if you took
such standards seriously (I don't).
The funny thing is that people can easily be made to become hyper-material
anti-metaphysicians or lax on everything depending on circumstances. Fodor and
Massimo partially wrote their book as a critic of "adaptationism" and
evolutionary psychology, which were and still are bugaboos to the political left
because they seek to explain minutiae of human social life, including
hot-button issues like gender differences and race, in the light of Darwinian
natural selection. Leftists like Gould and Lewontin would dismiss such
explanations as "just-so stories," as would science-popularizers and the press,
but Fodor and Massimo argue that this is an argument you cannot avoid
generalizing once you make it. It applies to all of evolution: if it is
philosophically illegitimate to talk about human sexual dimorphism because that
reads a Final Causes into evolution, then it is equally illegitimate to talk
about any other kind of change as being purpose driven by "selection."
This book was received with mostly hostile confusion by the mainstream press and
I suspect most biologists which mostly missed the argument and were languishing
in the culture wars of the Bush Years. Mind you, I don't agree with the
book, but it's mostly because I don't care to endorse this kind of materialism,
but most people do indeed at least claim to abide by it, so these arguments
would be important to address for them.
Just a "linguistic" argument?
At the end of it, any evolutionary biologist will be tempted to throw up their
hands and say "So what‽" to that philosophical objection. After all, it sure
feels like some kind of technicality or argument from the way we linguistically
talk about evolution. And they're right! In truth, Darwinian evolution
is a useful theory specifically because it is a method of giving us a Final
Cause for gradual evolutionary changes. That's the whole point afterall. If it
didn't give us a Final Cause, it wouldn't be an explanation. Striking the Formal
Cause from scientific vocabulary is only a recipe for the typical postivistic
science status quo of denying any "metaphysics" to your science while just
tacitly assuming it all.
Return of the Formal Cause?
What about the Formal Cause? That is, what about the idea that everything must
have a form/plan behind its creation? If we are willing to concede that a
Final Cause can arise from natural selection, what about a Formal Cause?
While I'm on Fodor and Massimo's book (who again, are not talking in
Aristotelian terms themselves), they actually do end up resuscitating the Formal
Cause as well, albeit in a more purposeful way. While the book beats around the
bush, I can say that in my conversations with Massimo at Arizona, he really
does think of evolution as not being an issue of natural selection. Instead he
(and Noam Chomsky as well) has the view that complex features in biology evolve
from in-built genetic parameters whose complex interactions can also produce
fully-formed design. This is the kernel of Minimalism in linguistics.
Now in presentations, Massimo always loves to talk about those species of
jellyfish which with a single simple genetic change, develop highly complicated
proto-eyes even without a direct need. One minor genetic
development can produce structure as
complicated as a primitive eye. This is not uncommon in biology because many
complex structures are simple derivatives of simple principles. The general name
for this is emergent properties and are said to be based on so-called
Laws of Form.
Laws of Form are actually a big topic of conversation in linguistics nowadays,
Chomsky's idea approaching the idea that one single and very simple cognitive
change could be enough to produce the human language faculty. (This is totally
contrary to the pop-idea of language abilities slowly arising from behavioristic
cave-man grunting complexifying over centuries).
It should be obvious that Laws of Form, Fibonacci spirals, golden ratios,
apparent ordering and other emergent properties arise naturally from the
universe without the obvious need of conscious planning. This is not a rejection
of the Formal Cause, but states the truth that it is universal. "Form" needn't
just be a conscious plan like the sculptor's plan for a hunk of marble, but a
form that emerges from natural principles.
Even a Materialistic Universe Generates Formal and Final Causes
In trying to escape the Formal and Final Causes, modern science has really made
them more irreplaceable. Laws of Form emerge from very simple computational
operations and define the formal structure of things that arise in nature. At
the same time, any kind of selective pressure or survival mechanism like
Darwinian selection will naturally produce structure arranged to a goal.
Understanding anything is quite impossible without referring to its Formal and
Final Causes.
For the Aristotelian up until Newton (the last of the magicians in J.M. Keynes'
terms), this is us uncovering the Mind of God. While words like "God" make
moderns queasy, it's legitimate to ask why the Formal and Final Causes as
concepts should. Final Causes are by definition universal where unchecked
spontaneity occurs. A conscious human mind is not a prerequisite for them,
neither for Formal Causes.
You actually can keep even a very clumsy materialism while accepting these
traditional notions. Indeed, to understand something's Final and Formal Causes
is to truly understand it such that the Material and Efficient Causes seem like
mere details.