Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Four Causes

In Physics, Book II, Ch. 3 Aristotle distinguishes four causes or, better, four explanatory factors that can be given in the answer to the question of why an entity changes in whatever ways it does change.

Aristotle’s Four Causes:

§Material cause = matter

§Formal cause = form

§Efficient cause = the mover

§Final cause = the end of the movement.

As Aristotle puts it:

§Material cause = “that from which a thing comes to be”

§Formal cause = “what the being of the thing would be”

§Efficient cause = “initiator of the movement”

§Final cause = “that for the sake of which”

To illustrate consider the causes of a house:

§The bricks or wood out of which it is made are its material causes.

§The way in which these materials are organized such that it is a house is its formal cause.

§The builders are the efficient cause of the house. They organize the materials into the form of a house.

§For shelter is the end or goal of building a house.

How these causes work:

The efficient cause, the builder, introduces into the matter, namely, into the bricks or wood, the form of a house, which these materials have the potential to acquire. So the effect of the builder’s movements is to actualize the form of a house in matter for the sake of providing shelter and protection for a family.

Furthermore, there are in Aristotle’s
view, 4 kinds of change.

§Of quality: alteration

§Of quantity: growth

§Of place: motion

§Of substance: coming to be
and passing away

Alteration...

Growth...

Motion...

Coming to be...

Passing away...

More importantly, Aristotle’s account of change answers the Parmenidean problem of how something can come to be.

The pivotal Parmenidean claim was that not-being, understood as anything distinct from what is, cannot be. His argument for this claim rests on the fact that not-being is inexpressible and unthinkable. That is, to assert or to think it is impossible.

From one’s inability to think or to say what is not, or not being, Parmenides infers that change, differentiation, coming to be and passing away are impossible. For all of these conditions presuppose that what is not, somehow is.

In attempting to challenge the Parmenidean denial of the possibility of change, Aristotle begins by accepting some of Parmenides’ claims.

Parmenides’ claims about the impossibility of Change, as Aristotle understood them.

Parmenides claims
that something cannot come
to be from what it is not,
since not being (or what the
thing is not) does not exist. So nothing can come from it.

But furthermore Parmenides claims:

Something cannot come
to be from what it already is,
since it already is, so it would be nothing new and then it cannot be said to come to be.

Parmenides concludes:

Change = coming to be is impossible.

Aristotle counters:

If something comes to be it must be rooted in something. It cannot be rooted in nothing. But also it cannot be rooted in itself. So it must be rooted in a potentiality that something has for a range of (opposite, contrary) properties.

For as Aristotle says (Physics, Bk. 1, 188a35-b3):

What is white comes from what is not white, and not from anything not white but from what is black or of an intermediate color, and what is cultured comes from what is not cultured, but not from anything not cultured, but from the uncultured or some intermediate state.

To solve the problem, Aristotle points out that:

Sensible entities with both positive properties and potentialities persist through a change that consists in replacing a positive property by its contrary or by some intermediate property on the same qualitative range.

Why Contraries?

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Why Contraries?

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Why Contraries?

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In other words, as Aristotle says…

“Change proceeds from opposites or intermediates—not however from all opposites (for speech is not white [but white does not come from speech]), but only from the contrary” (Met. 1069b, p. 370).

Aristotle means that:

A change occurs between 2 points on a continuum that is bounded by a pair of contraries. For nothing changes from having speech to being white even though having speech is different from and therefore is not being white. Rather, the replacee of being white is being red, or being brown, etc. Only contraries or intermediates between contraries serve as replacement and replacee properties in a change.

In sum, every kind of change
involves…

§Passing from one state
to a corresponding
contrary state by actualizing the potential for that contrary state.

§Something that persists
through the change.

There must be something
that persists through the
change because…

“There must be something
underlying which changes
into the opposite contrary:
for contraries do not change”
(p. 370).

So Aristotle solves the problem of change:

In a sense what comes to be, comes to be from what is because it comes to be from a subject that is. In another sense, what comes to be comes to be from what is not. This is because what comes to be, comes to be from an as yet unrealized potentiality in the subject of the change.

This solution to the Parmenidean problem of change is one of Aristotle’s major contributions to the history of philosophy and to western thought in general.