Here I’m continuing my occasional series of philosophical posts. You can go click on “Deep Thoughts” over on the right, there, to see the recent ones.

When we use the words “good” and “bad”, there are two senses in which we can use them. A thing can be “good” in an absolute sense, or in a relative sense.

Consider a three-legged dog that can’t wag its tail, can’t bark, and hates people. We’ll call him “Fred”. In an absolute sense, Fred isn’t a much of a dog, because he lacks the perfections that dogs are supposed to have. A proper dog should have four legs, a waggy tail, should bark at cats and other intruders, and should be man’s best friend. Fred fails on all of these counts. The fact that he has dog breath doesn’t make up for his other lacks. We could call him a “bad” dog, because he’s a lousy example of the species.

But of course, that’s not usually what we mean when we call a dog a “bad” dog. Consider another dog, whom we will call “George”. George bites, he doesn’t come when he’s called, he piddles on the floor, he makes messes behind the sofa, and he stills steaks from the kitchen counter. He’s a Bad Dog. George is also a fine figure of a dog: he has a gorgeous coat, he’s usually glad to see you, his tale wags, and he barks at cats. He’s a “good” dog in absolute terms, but he’s still a Bad Dog—because he doesn’t meet the requirements that I have for a dog. He’s a Bad Dog relative to me and my wants.

Keep this distinction in mind; we’ll make use of it later.

The final cause of a tool is whatever the tool is intended to be used for. Hammers are for pounding. Screwdrivers are for driving screws. Wrenches are for tightening and loosening bolts. Every tool has a certain range of uses for which it is well-suited; and a rather wider range of uses for which it is poorly suited.

For example, you could use a hammer to mix cake batter. It’s not well-suited to the job; a spoon would be better, and a mixer better still. You could use a Phillips screwdriver to poke holes in a piece of paper so that you could insert it into a 3-ring binder; but a hole punch would work much better.

Abuse of a tool can fail in two ways: it can fail to do the job well, or in some cases at all; and it can damage the tool so that it’s no longer useful even for its real purpose. You can use a screwdriver for prying, to some extent; it’s the easiest way to open a can of paint. Anything more than that, and you’re going to bend the screwdriver. Then you can’t use it to drive screws. You can use a paintbrush to smooth concrete; but not more than once.

It’s a poor craftsman who abuses his tools.

David T. at Life’s Private Book recently wrote a series of posts about Immanuel Kant and why he has trouble with him. I dismissed Kant in a paragraph; David T. actually goes into detail. The posts, in this order, are:

D’Souza on Kant

More on D’Souza on Kant

Kant and Christianity

My Trouble with Kant

Descartes saw the mind and body as two distinct things, each capable of existing on its own. This view is called dualism, and it is the source of the phrase “the ghost in the machine”: the body is the machine, and the mind is the ghost. Trouble is, how do the ghost and the machine interact?

In this article in the New Statesman, Colin McGinn talks about “the” five positions on the philosophy of mind, including Cartesian dualism, and does a pretty good job of describing them. But all five positions, as he notes, are flawed; and he begins to wonder if he should call himself a “mysterian”, i.e., one who considers mind simply a mystery.

But I’ll note that there’s a sixth position that he’s ignored: that of Aristotle and St. Thomas, which Ed Feser among others refers to as hylemorphic dualism.

Not a bad article, though. Worth your time.

You might want to look at this and this before continuing.

The final cause is the fourth of the four causes, and it is in ill-repute this days; but I hope to see it rehabilitated. Why is it in ill-repute? Aha! There-in lies the tale.

Consider a rock perched on a cliff. There is a slight earth tremor, and the rock falls, landing at the bottom of the cliff. The material cause is the rock. The efficient cause, or agent, is the tremor. The formal cause is the rock’s new position. The final cause is…what again? The end of the change is simply the new position; there doesn’t seem to be anything special about it.

Consider a green apple that turns red. The material cause is the apple. The efficient cause is also the apple; it is its nature to change color. The formal cause is the form of redness. And the final cause, ah! The final cause is the ripened apple, or perhaps, simply “ripeness”. Aristotle called the final cause “that for the sake of which”; and surely the apple turned red for the sake of being ripe.

Consider the apple tree, which sprouts leaves. The material cause is the tree, or perhaps the nutrients the tree pulls from the soil and from which it makes the leaves. The efficient cause is the tree; sprouting leaves is part of its nature. The formal cause is a leafiness; and the final cause is nourishment, because the leaves turn sunlight into food for the tree.

With living things, we begin to have a notion of purpose: the living thing does what it does to achieve its purpose of remaining alive. Leaves are for producing nourishment. Hearts are for pumping blood.

Consider a man who makes himself a peanut butter sandwich. The material cause is the bread and the peanut butter. The efficient cause is the man himself. The formal cause is the form of a sandwich. And the final cause is eating. The sandwich is made for a purpose. It is a means to an end. The sandwich is made for eating, and eating is made for nourishment. With human action we see not only the objective purpose of a nature, but the freely willed purpose of a person. With human action we begin to see chains of means all leading to some end.

So what is the final cause of that rock falling to the ground? I’ve often heard it said that in a case like this, the final cause is simply the formal cause: the ending position of the rock, perhaps described as a point of minimum gravitational potential. There’s no purpose to the ending position of the rock, not like there is for ripeness or for leaves or for the peanut butter sandwich.

And yet there is—for the rock is part of creation, and creation was created to glorify God. Merely by being a rock, in all the simplicity of its nature, the rock joins in creation’s choir of praise. Merely by falling by force of gravity, it is operating according to its nature and glorifying God. It is a means to that end.

Here, of course, we’ve gone beyond philosophy and into theology; and we’ve seen several reasons why final causes are in ill-repute.

First, because in non-living systems you don’t seem to need final causality to explain them. And the paradigm of science is based on physics, which is all about non-living systems. (But just because physics isn’t interested in final causality doesn’t make it false.)

Second, because final causality is seen as being about purpose, and especially the purpose of a person; and this is seen as leading to theism, which is also in ill-repute in some circles. But I’ll note that in biological systems, i.e., organisms, we clearly see purpose at work. The apple ripens for its own purposes. The heart is clearly for pumping blood. Not that either one is a moral agent on its own. If you’ve heard people talking about teleology, this is ultimately what they are talking about. But the same people who dislike final causes also regard teleology as the statement that God designed everything himself (in the Intelligent Design sense); but philosophically the notion of final causes is much more modest. (Acceptance of final causes does lead, ultimately, to theism; but it doesn’t presume theism on the face of it.)

There’s a third reason, too. The final cause, or end, doesn’t exist when the change begins. How can we call something a cause of a change, when it doesn’t yet exist? Interesting question.

Last week I talked about the four causes: the four things you can find in any change. The last of the four is the final cause, which you can think of as the reason for the change; and I said I’d talk about that next. But I’ve changed my mind; I want to say a little more about change, first, and how Aristotle looks at it.

Every change has a beginning, a middle, and an end. First, consider a rock perched on a cliff. There’s a slight earthquake (the efficient cause) and the rock is shaken lose. It falls to the ground below, bounces, and comes to rest. We begin with the rock in one place; it moves; we end with the rock in another place. The rock itself is unchanged; but it has lost one form, its initial position, and gained a different form, its new position. Next, consider a green apple that in the course of time turns red. It was green; it changes color; it is now red.

There are a couple of things to note, here.

First, in every such change of this kind the thing loses a form and gains a form, and they have to be two distinct forms. (If they were the same form, no change would have occurred.) These forms are frequently referred to as contraries, because they can’t both be true at the same time. The rock might be here, and it might be there, but it can’t be in both places at once. The apple might be mostly green, or it might be mostly red, but it can’t be mostly green and mostly red at the same time.

Second, Aristotle isn’t concerned with time, with how fast the change occurs. It took me a long time to really wrap my head around this. When we think about physics, time is everything. If drop a ball, how long it will take to hit the floor given the acceleration of gravity? We take a change, and we divide the time it takes into the tiniest possible increments, and we look at just exactly how everything moves during each increment, and we devise a mathematical model (such as Newton’s Laws of motion) that describes the movement that we see.

Aristotle wasn’t doing that. He wasn’t trying to understand the exact progress of a particular change over time, but rather he was asking how change is possible at all? What does it mean to say that the apple turned red? What is involved?

I promised a couple of days ago to talk about Aristotle’s view of causality.

Remember that Aristotle was responding to earlier philosophers, who tended toward two viewpoints: everything is One, and change is an illusion, or everything is in flux, and stability is an illusion. Aristotle brought it down to human scale and noted that we do see things change and we do see things stay the same; and then in his usual fashion thought it all out in extravagant detail. What, he asked, is involved when something changes? He reduced it down to four things, which he called “causes” or “principles” of change.

First, you have to have something to begin with, something that changes. This is called the material cause, or simply the matter. If I throw a ball, the ball is the matter. When an apple changes from green to red, the apple is the matter.

Next, you have to have something that makes the change happen. This is called the effective cause, or sometimes the agent. If I throw a ball, I’m the agent. That’s clear enough. But what about an apple that changes from green to red? It depends. If the apple changes color because I painted it, then clearly I’m the agent. Normally, though, the apple changes from green to red all by itself; it is the apple’s nature to do so, and the apple itself is the agent. In one case, the agent is external, and in the other it is internal. This is part of what it means for something to be natural: it arises out of the thing’s own nature.

Next, there’s how the matter changes, what’s new about it after the change. This is called the formal cause; in Aristotelian terms, the matter receives a new form. Form is not simply shape. When I throw the ball and it rolls into the corner, the ball has a new position; it has the form of being there in the corner, rather than here in my hand. When the apple turns green, it now has the form of greenness.

And finally, no pun intended, there is the final cause, also known as the end. Final causes probably need a whole post to themselves; for now, I’ll simply say that the end is where the process of change stops. As such, it is often the same as the formal cause. Suppose a breeze blows a ball off of the table, and it rolls into the corner. The change ends when the ball stops moving; its new position is the terminus or end. The final cause can also be thought of as the reason for the change: change stops because the desired end state has been reached. But more of that anon.