Aristotle's Four Causes | Highlights Ep.43

This is what knowledge is. We want truth, yes. We want there to be some correspondence between what is in our minds and what the world is like. But you can have truth without knowledge. How is that? Because for Aristotle to know something is true is to know the causes for the thing. Aristotle distinguishes four different kinds of causes. The material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. I'm gonna go through each one of those. They're very important to know and I'll try and illustrate with this apple. The material cause first. That's obvious to most of you. There's matter that makes up this apple. It's a sort of thing you could study in chemistry, for example, the sort of chemical makeup of this apple. And there are some views in the modern world that the matter is all there is. That material causes or physical causes can't explain all of reality. But here's a thought experiment. Take this apple and press it down. Grind it down until it's just pulp. And then ask yourself the question, is that still an apple? All of the matter is still there, but something has changed. What? Aristotle says that's the formal cause. All of nature is comprised of a combination of material and formal causes. It's the form that makes things what they are. Aristotle uses a technical term for this. He calls it hylomorphism. The Greek word hyla means matter, morphe means form. Everything is composed of matter and form, and it's the form that ultimately explains the reality we see around us. I mentioned two of the causes. There's a third. What caused this apple to be? It didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere. It came from a tree. And the tree developed and matured and made fruit. And inside the fruit are the seeds of the apple. And then the apple fell from the tree. So the efficient cause for Aristotle is what begins the motion, which originates, which brings that apple into its existence. Now we have to get to the the final cause of the apple. And that is, notice this about this apple. This apple, if it falls to the ground and becomes properly embedded within the soil and receives enough rain, will start to grow into another apple tree. It has, therefore, what Aristotle calls the potency. It has the potency in it to become something more mature, more developed. It is then, and this is Aristotle's great innovation, what is an apple? Aristotle will tell us an apple is an immature apple tree. This is an apple tree at a very high degree of potency and a low degree of actuality. When this apple grows into a full apple tree, it is the most what an apple is. Its potency has been actualized. As Aristotle understands it, those causes go back eternally. The world eternally goes back in efficient causes. But Aristotle doesn't think that we could have that world without some kind of ultimate causal explanation. And Aristotle doesn't think it can be an efficient cause at the beginning of time because he thinks those causes can't go back eternally. So he explains it in terms of a final cause. Aristotle looks at all the changes or motions in the cosmos and he notices an order among them. Beginning with the sublunar causes in our world and then looking at the motions of the heavens, he sees them as causing the things below them. He suggests that for all of that infinite series of causation there must be some kind of cause which is not an efficient cause but which is a final cause. And it is itself not caused by anything else. Otherwise you need an explanation for that cause. He calls this cause the prime mover or the unmoved mover. And he spends extensive time explaining and defending and arguing for the fact that we need to have a prime mover to make sense of causality. How could the unmover cause the movement of everything else? Think about how the apple and the tree might move you. The apple just sits in the tree. It doesn't push you. It draws you. You see the apple and you think that looks good for food. It looks juicy. I will not add and to make me intelligent like the gods. We're not talking about the story of the fall here. We see an apple and it attracts our will and we go after it. The apple serves in itself as a final cause for the movement of our will towards the apple. And so Aristotle beautifully tells us and suggestively tells us that the highest cause, the prime mover moves all the rest of the cosmos by eliciting love. But it in itself is a self-thinking thought. It does not oversee or manage the cosmos. It exists for itself like the apple exists for itself in the tree, but it attracts all the rest of us toward itself. That is a source of intelligibility in the cosmos.