The 4 Causes - An Elaboration

This post is a take on Aristotle's 4 Causes. At least going by the traditional accounts, I believe that its scope has been underestimated, and, I believe, due to the West's bias toward the static, this is especially so for the efficient and final causes.

I will not be explaining Aristotle's views here, as I only have second hand accounts and am not the best read, only my own. If my ideas are far from Aristotle's, so be it; take the ideas independently.

The key idea I seek to explain here is that the 4 causes can be applied to some given thing with an 'inside' or 'outside' perspective. In the accounts I have always read, each of the causes has been explained with only one of these perspectives.

1. Material Cause

The material cause is the principle of separation. In usual accounts, it is taken to be 'that out of which something is made'. In other words, the material cause accounts for the way in which an object or event can be explained by reference to its parts. Other terms that we might use to refer to this concept are matter or substance.

One can understand a house in terms of bricks, mortar, wood, and so on. One can understand a human in terms of eyes, nose, mouth, hair, skin, bone, muscle and so on. The manufacturer of a car, a computer, or any other machine, only understands the final product partially because they understand the individual parts that make it up. This is the internal interpretation.

But this then misses the external interpretation. In this interpretation, rather than understanding the thing in question by what it is separated into, but instead what is separated from. In other words, the material cause also accounts for how the phenomenon is separate from other things. Perhaps more tellingly, we might say that it is set apart from others. So if, like in the former example, we were take a house, the 'external material cause' of this house is that it is this house, and not another house.

2. Formal Cause

The formal cause is commonly considered something like the shape or arrangement of a given thing - hence the word 'formal', from form meaning 'shape'. This seems to get a primarily internal interpretation, which I believe refers to the arrangement of a thing's material and their various proportions. Where the material of the house is the bricks and other materials, the form of the house is how all those materials fit together. 

Key to understanding the external interpretation is to expand the sense of 'form'. What sets a shape is partly that it is separate; a circle, triangle, or square has defined limits, which separate them from what is not the circle; a circle drawn on the page is truly made of the lines that mark it out. What then is beyond shape that makes shape possible? The answer is space. And I mean space per se, much like the previous was matter per se.

With this, you can now understand the external formal cause: the thing or event's location, distance, and orientation relative to other objects.

3. Efficient Cause

The efficient cause is the principle of change. Explanations I have seen firstly to favour the external, and with that tend only to explain this change flowing in from the past; the house's efficient cause is the builder. Firstly, to complete the external interpretation, we must add the abilities or powers of the object. A house can block wind, for example. In this, it is much more useful to speak of life forms, an inherently more dynamic entity. Humans can push, pull, blow on, smash, and so on, in other words, they can effect change on other things, just as much as they can have change effected upon them.

Now, however, we can consider the internal. Again, this is very difficult to do with anything other than a living being, as they are defined in large part by their motion. To sum this up, though, the internal interpretation of the efficient cause is how it works. What makes a bicycle is not just the wheels and frame, nor even just how they are arranged, but also how those parts causally interact with each other (in the modern English sense of 'cause'). This causal interaction is actually an aspect of what makes a bike, just as anabolism and catabolism are key to what makes a living human being.

To correspond with the previous two, matter and space, I attribute this cause to energy.

4. Final Cause

The final cause is the most difficult to understand, and I believe, therefore, the most underappreciated. It deserves much more explanation, but I will leave that to another time.

The traditional interpretation is external. The 'final cause' in this lens is the purpose of the given phenomenon; what it's good for, and perhaps also, what it's bad for. It's worth noting that there is not necessary a single purpose for a given thing (in fact, I think there's usually a lot of them - but again, I'm leaving that).

The internal interpretation is fairly odd. I like to use the word 'spirit' to refer to this; the internal final cause is the way in which a thing's parts, shape, and internal mechanisms have as their purpose the thing in question. So you, as a whole, are the 'purpose' of your organs, cells, physical morphology (shape and structure), and the interactions that occur on this basis. Things do not merely 'happen' in a life form; all the happenings, and even parts and shapes, conspire together to mutually regulate in a way that gives rise to you. It may be difficult to attribute this cause to many things internally, 'spirit' is a somewhat quintessentially animate (living/alive) phenomenon, and objects are, by definition, not alive.

The mysteriousness of this cause yet again prevents me from explaining the following, but I shall do it for the sake of completeness. The final cause, as it fits into the terms provided for each, corresponds to time. Maybe you will note a kinship between matter and space, and thus a similar one between energy and time.