Four Causes

In his Physics, the original systematic study of the topic, Aristotle introduces, as the ingredients in any occurrence, Four Causes--Material, Efficient, Formal, and Final. For example, in the making of a chair, wood is the Material Cause, hammering and sawing the Efficient, the rectilinear shape that guides the latter, the Formal, and to be sat upon, the Final. For him, the Final Cause is the most important, not only because it seems to bind the other three, but he construes all processes as actualization of potentiality, leading to a terminal resting. In contrast, starting with Newton, Physics formulates, in mathematical laws, the connection between two successive events, in which the first imparts force to the second. Hence, modern Physics focuses so exclusively on Efficient Causality that the qualifier has become superfluous. Final Causality, on the other hand, gets restricted to the sphere of purposeful human action, e. g. Morality, though it does surreptitiously slip back into Physics in the guise of 'frame of reference', i. e. a terminal point with no further efficacy. Meanwhile, Formal Causality disappears for centuries, until the notion Form assumes a central significance in Kant's philosophy, though he never quite characterizes it as Causal. The closest that he comes is in his Aesthetic theory, when he concocts a notion of 'purposeless purposiveness', which on closer examination, is just the imparting of shape to material, as if for some purpose, though only so for its own sake. Many of Kant's followers, e. g. Cassirer, likewise restore Formal Causality to a prominent role, but perhaps the more significant post-Kantian development is the re-emergence, with a vengence, of Material Causality. Marx' Dialectical Materialism, Schopenhauer's Will, Nietzsche's Dionysiac, and Santayana's Matter, are all dynamic forces that qualify as Material Causes. At the same time, such theories tend to characterize Consciousness as an inefficacious epiphenomenon. Perhaps if they were to use the Aristotelian scheme as a guide, they might recast it as a Formal Cause.