Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 47: The Four Kinds of Causes and Their Corollaries

Transcript
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I say, now, what is the most known, and therefore the most undeniable dependence that the word cat there on the blackboard, green board, has, huh? What's most undeniable that it depends upon for its existence, the word cat there? Chalk. Yeah, but more closely, C, A, and T. Isn't that most obvious dependence in ass? And if someone says it doesn't depend upon C, A, and T, well, let's take away C and A and T. You see, they depend upon them anyway, right? It's altogether obvious that it depends upon C, A, and T. It would be laughable, right? If you take away C, A, and T, there's nothing left there. It would seem to be the only thing it depends upon is C, A, and T. So you're forced to admit there's that kind of cause we've called that, right? Because the word cat came to be from C, A, and T, and they are what? They're inside it, right? Inside the word cat, huh? Okay. But then when you see that there's a word like cat, which is not the same word, clearly, as cat, but it has exactly the same letters, right? Why is that the word cat and this is the word act? Is it because the letters only? Or why is this the word dog and this the word God? That's what the small G says. Same letters exactly, right? Now you're forced to say that the word cat, or the word dog for that matter, right, depends upon something besides the letters. And what is it in this case? Order. Order, yeah. Now that's the second kind of cause, huh? The one we call form, right? Form is not only shape, but it means order, ratio, right? Okay. See how you're forced to the second one, right? Now, once you realize that the same letters get into different orders, do the letters C, A, and T get into this order because they are those letters? You can't say that because sometimes they are in this order, right? Okay? The same way for this, huh? So now you're forced to say there's a third kind of cause, the one that, in this case, orders the letters, right? And that's the writer in this case, right? So now you're forced to the third kind of cause, huh? If those three letters always, you know, came in that arrangement, you might say, well, it's just natural that the letters go in that order, right? When you see that the very same letter is going to have a quite different order, then you realize that that order doesn't come from the letters, huh? And now you're introduced to the third kind of cause, the Bovermenka, the writer, in this case, myself. Okay? But now, if I put the letters in this order, because I have the ability to order the letters, I could order them in this way here, or I could order them in this way here, T, N, C, and so on, is my ability to order the letters explain why I put them in that order, rather than this order, or that order over there. In other words, my ability is for more than the orders I gave them. So why did I give them that order among the possible orders? Well, it's for the sake of talking about my favorite pet or something, right? My favorite animal, right? What's for the sake of talking about act and ability and matter and form, and how God is pure act? I want to talk about that, right? So I put it in the order A-C-T, right? So I'm forced to that fourth kind of cause now, right? That's the sake of it. It's exactly the order there, right? That you have. I can take a second example, right? Suppose we have a wooden chair there, right? Then, if you took all the wood out of the chair, and there's some metal in there too, the screws, if you took all the wood and metal out of the chair, nothing would be left, right? So obviously, and most undeniably, the wooden chair depends upon the wood, right? Okay? So that's the first kind of cause, and it's most known and most undeniable. But then, now just to what we have here, suppose the table has got the same kind of wood that the chair has. Yet the one is a chair, and the other is a table. Well, now you're forced to say that the chair depends upon something besides the wood. If the wood explained everything about the chair, then the table would be a chair, right? A wooden chair. It's wooden, but it's not a wooden chair. So now you're forced to say there's the second kind of thing involved there, right? And that would be the shape of the chair, right? And the shape of the desk, and so on, right? Okay? But now, once you realize that the same matter, that wood, can get into the shape of the desk, or the shape of the table, and so on, now you realize the need for a third kind of cause. It doesn't get into that shape because, the shape of a chair, because it's wood. Otherwise, your desk seems to move, and you have to move your desk with your chair. You have to constrain it, right? So it doesn't turn it into a chair, see? So now you're forced to a third cause, which would be the move or a maker. In this case, it would be the carpenter, rather than the what? Right, huh? And so the ability of the carpenter to shape wood explains how the wood got into the shape of a chair or a table. But, is the carpenter's ability to shape the wood limited to that shape? He can only work at slightly obtuse angles, for example. Couldn't he make a chair like this? Sure. And couldn't he make the bed, instead of this shape, couldn't he make the bed this shape? Or couldn't he make the bed, see? His ability to shape the matter, it doesn't explain why he gave it this shape. He's not limited to that shape. He's able to give it this shape or that shape, huh? He could give it the roof of the house, instead of this shape, he could give it this shape, right? A V instead of that. So why did he make this at a slightly obtuse angle? He's not limited to that obtuse angle. It's for the sake of what? Sitting, right? If it was acute angle, the back, he had a lot of back problems. It's supposed to be sitting, right? If the bed had this shape here, you'd be rolling off the bed all the time, see? Just standing here, you'd have a rather rocky sleep, huh? If the house had this shape here, it would not keep the rain and snow out, you'd have to think. In Shrewsbury there, they built a new drugstore right up in the center of town. And one winter, you know, it had a lot of snow, and all of a sudden, everybody else is sitting here and everybody's running out of the drugstore. And the roof claps. So you can imagine that when they rebuilt the drugstore, they didn't make such a flat roof, huh? Before George, they had this, you know, inverted V, a V-er-shaped thing. You'd have a, you know, you could pick the roof that way, right? There was one in South Dakota. Yeah? They had it side-by-side like that, the place we were looking at. So see how you're forced from one cause to another, right? Exactly the order that Aristotle gives them, huh? So this is both the historical order and the order in which reason can best be forced to admit there are indeed these four kinds of causes. Now, no one has been able to add another kind of cause to these four kinds of cause since Aristotle did this in the fourth century B.C., huh? And even in the most famous discussions of causes, say, in modern times, like the one by Hume, right, that influenced Kant so much, huh? He doesn't even see all of these causes, right? And Hume actually begins with... or the third clause right so he begins with the what less known right huh so he knows less kinds of cause than aristotle does and he knows what he does know out of order it doesn't say too much for the moderns but that's it's life in the modern world okay but no one has been able to add another clause to these huh okay so any question about the four kinds of cause um yeah is is there any um i don't know what we call it the uh the third cause is there any how are we referring to it with matter forms the third thing oh the third cause the mover or the maker yeah okay can you have a mover or a maker that's who's not a person or is it intrinsic that has to be a person you could have move for a maker you know the fire could what melt the butter right oh just that phrase what was to be yeah that's aristotle's hang-up you know he always calls that way but i think he's because he's thinking of the fact that uh you start with the matter right here huh and then what was to be would be at the end of the generation right so he started with wood and what was to be was a chair or a table or something right so i suppose he's contrasting there you know okay i mean sometimes you speak of the definition is is really of what is right but i think it's because he's begun with the matter and he wants to contrast it's at the end of a generation yeah um it's quite to the four causes but you said in passing something earlier you say something more about that nature is more form than matter yeah going back to the definition of nature right that's a cause of ocean rest in that which it is first as such and not by happening it can be a cause in the active sense or in the passive sense let me give an example of what i mean here i take the the believer mother here who has an inquisitive little boy right and notice out in the yard you have a tree and you have a stone right and as the years go by and so on the rock stays the same size but the tree what grows right okay mommy the little boy says um why does the tree grow why doesn't the stone grow right and they're asked mother says well it's not the nature of the stone to grow right it's the nature of the tree to grow right now you could say in one way she's not really answering his question right right see but is she completely ignorant when she's the word nature as the cause right well the point is everything on the outside for the tree and the stone are the same they're both in the same soil right with the same nutrients they're both rained upon by the same rain right they both have the same sun shining on them and so on right they both have the same air around them right everything on the outside is the same right so it must be due to something within the stone right and something within the tree that the one grows and the other doesn't grow right okay and that's what we call nature right okay now take the second example though suppose um daddy puts a log in the fire right and the little logs burn up you know and turn to ashes and the little boy takes a rock and throws it in the fire right and that doesn't burn up mommy why did the log burn up why didn't the stone burn up and the poor harassed mother says well it's the nature of wood to burn huh it's not the nature of the stone to burn well you say again she's not really answering in any complete way this child's question right but is that word nature saying anything about the cause of the log burning and stone not well again the outside is the same right you have the same fire or flames licking the wood and licking the stone so the outside is the same right and yet the one what burns up and crumbles and the other doesn't huh so it must be due to something within the law right that it can be acted upon by the fire in this way and something else in the stone whereby it resists being acted upon that way right so nature can be a cause in an active sense like the cause of the tree growing right or nature can be a cause in the passive sense whereby it can be acted upon some way as we say nature the nature of the wood to burn an ordinary what fire right now that passive sense of nature is really that of matter because matter is what is able to be formed right able to be acted upon therefore and the active sense of nature would be the what form okay and a sign of that is that things are not able to act in this or that way until they have their what form right now um nature you could also say is that by which a natural thing is a natural thing right but by matter you have a natural thing only in what ability or by the form you have an actual and actual thing right so form is more in nature than what matter yeah but it's matter and form now in the genus of what substance okay okay because nature is what is first in the thing right just like in artificial things right you can say wood is this artificial thing called a chair only in potency or in ability right it's actually a artificial thing called a chair to its what form yeah so which is more retained art in a way the matter or the form or the form yeah well it's like that analogously with nature right the matter which is able to be a man or a dog or a tree or some other natural thing is one of those things only in ability to the form it's actually one or the other right so through the form it's actually a natural thing therefore form is more in nature than what matter okay now after aristotle has distinguished the four kinds of causes starting in the first paragraph in the bottom of page one and the first two paragraphs in the second page next three paragraphs he's going to distinguish what we sometimes call corollaries to borrow a word from geometry some statements that at least the first two of which follow upon the distinction right of the four kinds of cause and recognizing the four kinds of clause okay let's take these corollaries here the first corollary corollary in geometry is something that kind of what falls out right from what's already been seen right you know the first corollary is that there can be many causes as such of the same thing now when he says s that's supposed to accidental right okay you For example, the house builder happens to be a pianist, right? Then you could say the cause of my house is a house builder, right? You could say the cause of my house is a pianist, right? But the pianist as such is not a cause of my house. But because there are many kinds of causes, in fact as many as four, there could be many causes as such of the same thing. So the wooden chair, for example. The wood as such can be a cause of the chair, right? And the carpenter as such can be a cause of the chair. And sitting as such can be a cause of the chair, right? And the shape of the chair as such can be a cause of the chair, right? Here, it's possible to have more than one cause than as such of the same thing. Cause is being said then in many ways, these four ways to begin with. It happens that there are many causes of the same thing. Now this doesn't mean, when you say, or so this happens, he's pointing out that not everything has all four causes or even more than one cause. In geometry, I might talk only about the, what, formal cause. But because there are these many kinds of causes, it can happen that there are many causes of the same thing, not by accident, not by happening. As the sculptor's art and bronze are causes of the statue, but the bronze is matter, and the sculptor's art is the mover or maker. Not according to something other, accidental, but as statue, right? Yet, not in the same way, but the one is matter, and the other is whence the motion. Now it's important in understanding the corollary to not let someone make a false dichotomy or make a false choice, right? A stock example, I said, suppose a student is walking across campus towards Taylor Dining Hall around noontime. What's the cause of his motion? Is it electrical impulses and muscles contracting? Or is it eating his lunch? Which is the cause of his moving across campus? Yeah, yeah. In other words, you shouldn't say, try to choose one rather than the other in this case, right? You can say nerve impulses and the contraction of his muscles are a cause that is moving across campus in the third sense of cause, the mover or maker, right? But eating his lunch is also a cause, what's going across campus, especially at this time, right? In the sense of what? For the sake of eating his lunch, he's going across campus at this time. You see that? Okay. So people who don't understand the four kinds of causes in this first corollary, they sometimes make the most serious mistake of trying to decide which one is the cause. It's that they couldn't both be causes as such of the same thing. Okay? Now the second corollary, I think, is the most interesting one. The second corollary is that two things can be causes of each other. It sounds at first sight crazy, huh? Two things can be causes of each other, but by different kinds. It wouldn't make too much sense to say, I am your father, and you are my father, right? Okay? But, if a man, let's say, is exercising for the sake of his health, right? Is exercise the cause of health or strength? Or is health or strength the cause of his exercising? But exercise is a cause of health or strength in the third kind of cause, huh? It's a mover or a maker. Health or strength is a cause of exercise in another sense of cause. It's that for the sake of which he does this, huh? Okay. Make a little different example here. Say to students, if you go down Main Street and you ask somebody, is intercourse the cause of the baby, or is the baby the cause of intercourse? What would he answer? Obviously, intercourse is the cause of the baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knows that, huh? But notice, he says that because that cause is a cause in the sense of the mover or maker, right? And it's what? More known to us, that cause, right? Okay? But if they had intercourse for the sake of a baby, then the baby would also be a cause of intercourse, but a cause in the sense of in, that for the sake of which, right? Okay? Or I say, the student studies, right? Okay? Let's take the bad student, huh? He studies to pass the exam, okay? Now, is studying the cause of his passing the exam, or is passing the exam the cause of his studying? Studying is the cause of his passing the exam, you'd probably say, right? But if he studied for the sake of passing the exam, then passing the exam in another kind of cause would be the cause of his studying, right? See how subtle that is, huh? Take more from the discourse of reason there, huh? If you wanted to know the area, let's say, of a rectangle, right? What do you do? Well, you measure the length and the width, and you multiply the length by the width, right? So multiplying the length by the width of a rectangle is a cause of your knowing the area. It's cause, is knowing the area, though in some way a cause, you're multiplying the length by the width. Why did I multiply the length by the width? For the sake of knowing the area, right? So knowing the area was in some way responsible for my multiplying the length by the width. When you think of the syllogism, you know, we think of the premises as a cause of the conclusion, right? When I define reasoning, I say it's coming to know or guess a statement, right? Through other statements, right? And when you say through other statements, you mean not just from other statements, but because of other statements, right? So we naturally think of the premises as being the cause of the, what? Conclusion, right? Okay. But if you think of the fact that in order to draw the conclusion, you have to bring the premises together. Now, is the bringing the premises together the cause of your seeing the conclusion, or seeing the conclusion the cause of your bringing the premises together? Or could both be true, see? Well, my bringing the premises together is a cause of my seeing the conclusion in the sense of a mover or a maker. It produces that excite of the conclusion. But the reason why I go around putting together premises, statements, is for the sake of, right, seeing conclusions, huh? So there's all kinds of applications of this, huh? There's a prayer that goes something like this. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, right? Now, is she full of grace because the Lord is with her? Or is the Lord with her because she's full of grace? What do you think? Or could it be both? You could say her being full of grace is like a disposition to receive the Lord, right? And disposition is reduced to the material cause, does not matter in that strict sense. But again, you could say the Lord being with her, the Lord is the efficient cause, right? of grace, right? So, a lot to be thought about there. It's very interesting, that second corollary, right? And see, when people see but don't understand this second corollary, when they see that this is the cause of that, they reject the idea that the reverse could be true. But now when you come to something like the good, we define the good as what all desire, right? And then we ask the Socratic question, is it good because we want it, right? Or do we want it because it's good? And the answer is we want it because it is good. And it's not good because we want it. So, in that case, you have one is the cause of the other, but not vice versa, right? But what I say is exercise, as he says, for the sake of strength. Is exercise the cause of strength or strength the cause of our exercising? Well, in that case, both, but by different kinds of causes, huh? Not really the same kind of cause. I think that's a very interesting corollary, and it especially brings out that there are different kinds of causes. Now, the third corollary, and I think he puts in third because it's not so tied up with the distinction of the four kinds of causes, but it's kind of interesting. Further, the same is the cause of contraries, right? And this, in a way, is a modification of the rule we gave before. It seems to be a probable statement, to say the least, that contrary causes have contrary, what? Effects, right? And vice versa. Contrary effects have contrary causes, right? We talked about that when we were reading the studying Empedocles in particular, right? And you had, what, earth, air, fire, and water coming together, right? And then you have the opposite, they're being separated, right? So you see contrary effects in nature, and you say, well, it's the same thing that brings them together and separates them? See? One would reasonably guess that it would be, what, not the same thing, but contrary ones, right? And if we saw that butter sometimes becomes hard, and other times that butter becomes soft, right? And hard and soft are contrary, would you think that what makes butter hard makes it soft? No. And you would look for contrary causes of the butter becoming hard, and of the butter becoming soft. And so for the butter becoming hard, we eventually say, well, the cold makes it hard, right? And the hot makes it soft, right? But hot and cold are contraries, right? So you get the idea that you have contrary causes for contrary effects and vice versa, right? But here and now, this isn't trying to go against that, because there will be a kind of contrary idea here. But sometimes we can hold the same person, let's say, an example, are responsible for contrary things. And the example he gives there is that of the, what, the captain of the ship, or the steersman of the ship, right? He can be responsible for the safety of the ship, if he does his job and pays attention, and so on. And he can be responsible for the, what, how responsible for the ship going on the rocks, or, you know, that thing happened in Oregon, or I mean, Oregon happened in Alaska there, right, where the guy wasn't doing his duty really, and he let some neophyte, you know, take over, you know, and then they had all this oil spill and so on, right? Okay? Now, in a way, there's a contrariety there, because he's present or absent, right, or by himself or not. But it's the same person who's being held responsible now, in one case, for the safety of it, and the other for the, what, destruction of it, right? So in one case, you might be praising him, because he's a cause of our getting safely through these dangerous waters, right? In another case, he might be only responsible for the shipwreck, right? Because he was drinking or whoever it was, right? So if I'm on guard duty, you know, guarding the camp, and I still alert and awake, and I see the enemy coming, and I notify the camp, and they give them a warm reception, as they say, I'm the cause, in a way, of the safety of the camp, right? But if I decide, you know, to catch up on my sleep, or go have a beer or something, right? Go see my girlfriend or something, and the camp is surprised, I will be held responsible for the destruction of the camp, right? So in a way, one is, the same thing is, is capable of contraries, right? You can be held responsible for contraries. But there's some contrariety, nevertheless, because in one case, he's doing his duty, and then they're applying himself, and in the case, he's not, right? But the students always apply this to their knowing, right? The student, by his presence, and, well, sense of presence, presence of mind as well as of body, is a cause of his, what? Learning something, right? The student, by his absence, and either sense of absence, is a cause of his own, what? Ignorance, right, huh? So I can hold you responsible, right? That's the third corollary, right? I'm interested in that third corollary. It doesn't seem to be as clearly tied, right, to the distinction of the four kinds of causes as the first two are explicitly, right? And I think that's the reason why Aristotle always had last, right? Right? Because it's not, the fact that there could be many causes as such of the same thing is because there are many kinds of causes, right? But there could be two causes of each other is because they can be causing each other in different kinds of cause, right? But this third thing is a little bit different, huh? Now, what is he doing in the last paragraph, right? Is he just, well, he's coming back in the last paragraph to the four kinds of causes, but he's going to do something different here. What does he add here in this last paragraph when he comes back to the four kinds of causes that we didn't have before? He says, all the causes just now spoken of fall into four most manifest ways. He's coming back to the four kinds, right? Is it a judgment of which is best? No. Notice what he does here with the first kind of cause for undivided sounds of syllables, and that's an example of the material cause, right? And the matter of vessels, examples he took earlier there of the cup and so on, right? And now he takes some examples from natural things because for the Greeks, earth, air, fire, and water were causes of bodies, right? And then he says the parts of the whole, right? He's in a way generalizing the first kind of cause, right? That in a way any parts that compose a whole has some aspect of that first kind of cause. Because you could say that any whole that is composed of parts, it's from those parts in some way, and they are in it. Okay? And therefore even in immaterial things, you might speak of this kind of cause, huh? But then you're making a very broad sense, right? And so immediately after he says the parts of the whole, he adds what? And the premises of the conclusion. Okay? Now, sometimes Aristotle speaks of the premises of the conclusion being the mover or maker. And usually we think of that. But here, he speaks of, in a way, the premises containing the matter of the conclusion. But even in the formal syllogism here, huh? When we studied it abstractly, every B is A, let's say, and every C is B. And you apologize that every C is A, right? Now, the conclusion has C as a subject and A as a, what? Predicate. Every C is A. So the subject and the predicate are like the parts of the, what? Conclusion, right? And C and A, the parts of the conclusion, are already found in the premises. So, in one respect, the premises are like the, what? Parts of the conclusion. They contain the parts of the conclusion, right? Okay? 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