Final Cause Exists

Do I understand Aristotle's final cause, Yea Forums?

In popular consciousness, the "final cause" is the notion that everything has a purpose. "Bananas are shaped that way so I can grab them, horses are there to be ridden, plagues keep the population down", etc.

In fact, all Aristotle meant by final causality was that natural substances always behave in regular ways. For example, a stone almost always lies on the ground. A seed normally sprouts if the environment is favorable. Fire is always hot. Human beings are usually able to acquire language. Etc.

The final cause is that toward which the behavior of a natural substance tends. In many cases, the final cause of a thing is simply to be what it is, as uninteresting and tautological as that sounds. Aristotle says that in most cases the efficient, final, and formal causes are identical. For example if something is becoming hot, it becomes hot by heat, the form being actualized is heat, and the end of the change is "to be hot". A human being comes from a human being, in order to be a human being. Its formal, efficient, and final causes are identical. Final causality can become more interesting in more complex organisms (bee hives, plant structure, etc.) But regardless it is simply a way of accounting for what a thing tends to do, or always does, by being what it is instead of something else.

It's absurd to say that everything arises "by chance" - the very idea of chance contains an implicit reference to regularity. Further, the universe clearly doesn't behave that way. To do away with the final cause is to say that things behave completely randomly, which is not true.

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Nah final causes for Aristotle aren't just a prediction of the future. You can tell by his linking of final causality and morality. If following the final cause of something was morality and final causation was just a prediction of the future then it would be impossible to do anything immoral.

>shit is what it is
>why?
>because it's not something else
Very profound.

bump

>In fact, all Aristotle meant by final causality was that natural substances always behave in regular ways. For example, a stone almost always lies on the ground. A seed normally sprouts if the environment is favorable
These two examples aren't the norm. The vast vast majority of stones in the universe are floating around in space and the majority of seeds don't sprout.

There is an idea of directionality in Aristotle's finalism. The final cause is defined in the Metaphysics as the goal in view of which the being whose cause it is is made. This is why we have a qualitative approach to forms in Aristotle: forms are characterized by finalities that condition the behavior of the things of which they are forms. If the plant grows when it is sown in fertile ground, it is because it is this behavior that it must adopt if it wants to achieve its end, or reach its entelechy, which is to grow to give a mature plant. The entelechy of the acorn is the oak tree.
What is remarkable is that for Aristotle, most natural beings possess their own end, which is therefore immanent. It is therefore in a way accidental that man is a moral being, and this proceeds from the fact that man is an intelligent and rational being. Since man's immanent end is to fully realize himself as a man, he must fully realize his potential as a reasonable, political and contemplative being, and morality is precisely a corpus of rules that allow man to go from the being he is to the being he could be if he fully realized his telos.

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Nothing is immoral then

Good post

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Xtianity. In the realm there are ao many things without any cause. Our brains rejects somehow that true even if we propose it as a thesis... But they are.

How does one reason without a principle of sufficient reason?

What is the reason for God?

God is his own cause.

Man I respect Aristotle and all but this shit is so boring and a sign of decadence. I'd rather lift heavy objects, build things, play music and have sex rather than deconstruct everything down to some abstract formulae

Not circular at all.

Aristotle is the scientist of excellence par excellence. He is easily the least "decadent" philosopher IMO. I'm disappointed that he lost so much traction in the west during modernity. It seems like everybody threw him out as a knee-jerk reaction against the Catholic Church instead of building from him.

After a little more reflection, I think we have to admit two possibilities: a being is either necessary or caused. If we call God the necessary being, then it is inconsistent to try to find a cause for it.

Which answers and agrees with . There are many things without cause.

The word you're looking for is teleology.
>Final causality can become more interesting in more complex organisms (bee hives, plant structure, etc.)
This is a discredited biological hypothesis called orthogenesis. Organisms do not progressively evolve into an objectively more "improved" state, they adapt to whatever environmental pressures they encounter.
>It's absurd to say that everything arises "by chance" - the very idea of chance contains an implicit reference to regularity.
An implicit reference to the past, which is regular. The future is rule by chance, the past by regularity. Future events are "fluid" while past events are "solid". While it's true that there is regularity, that order is gradually acquired over time rather than implicit. It represents the successive narrowing down of future possibilities into a determinate path history as the "cone" of future possibilities "funnels" into the collapsed ordered line of past actualities.

The very thought of systematic metaphysics is decadent and hostile to life.

Dreamworks face

It must be established that there are several things that are necessary. All creation is by definition contingent and caused, I see only logical and mathematical truths that can claim ontological necessity.

>It must be established that there are several things that are necessary.
This user only asked
>How does one reason without a principle of sufficient reason?
And the answer is easy with necessary beings.

>All creation is by definition contingent and caused, I see only logical and mathematical truths that can claim ontological necessity.
Nah you're missing apples. They're necessary in the same way God is. I don't have to provide a reason why since the principle of sufficient reason doesn't apply to necessary beings.

The apple is created therefore caused so it is not necessary since it could not be. All the things which do not belong to the ideal cannot even compete with the title of being necessary.

>The apple is created therefore caused so it is not necessary since it could not be.
God was created and therefore caused so it is not necessary since he could not be.

Why?

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity

If we take God as a necessary being by definition as in your take is nonsense

And if we take apples as a necessary being by definition your take on apples be created is nonsense. You understand what is happening here right? You've defined your way out of a problem but don't want to face other people pulling the same trick

Don't conflate decadence with your infantile aversion to philosophy.

>The future is rule by chance, the past by regularity.
You might say that the phrase "ruled by chance" is inconsistent because "ruled" implies order. It's more of a figure of speech however and it's important not to be fooled by language. Even randomness and chaos has an identifiable pattern , because randomness can be mathematically defined as a sequence which cannot be expressed in a more compact form by the expansion of any of its subsequences.
So mathematically speaking "ababab" is an ordered sequence because it can be expressed as ab * 3. "vjeoie" however is random because there is no subsequence that summarizes the entire sequence. As time goes on the universe gets less random because the past accumulates structure as the universe "cools" off entropically which reduces the amount of free parameters or "ways in which things can swing", as what is called "path dependence" begins to grow based on initial or prior conditions .

But it is contradictory to assume that apples can be defined as necessary since they participate in creation and we know this from our experience. To solve a problem it is the natural way to define the notions that intervene and the logical relations that link them to each other, and to forbid oneself this way of reasoning is quite simply to forbid oneself the resolution of problems in general.

>But it is contradictory to assume that apples can be defined as necessary since they participate in creation and we know this from our experience.
So God doesn't participate in creation? All the miracles were bullshit? Jesus was fake? Or by participate in creation do you mean they were created? In that case no we don't know they were created in fact since they're necessary they can't have been created.

To participate is to be part of, so God seen as creator does not participate in the creation in the way I understood it. Also as we can see the apple coming to the being, it cannot be that it is necessary because a necessary being that can come to the being necessarily exists without which it could not come to the being.

You don't see the necessary apple come into being you see an incarnation of it just like with Jesus.

It is coherent but it is unjustifiable and it comes back to redefine completely the notion of apple, and in this case it does not prevent that the incarnated apple is caused in the same way that the Christ was caused in what he had of human.

>It is coherent but it is unjustifiable and it comes back to redefine completely the notion of apple
You don't justify a definition otherwise how can justify the definition of God. The inclusion of necessary into the definition of God already redefined what was normally meant by gods prior to Christianity

>The will to a system is a lack of integrity
Why?

Philosophy is a case of infantile delusion and lack of strength. Only someone who hates life would engage in systematic philosophy

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

A man of integrity has no use for a system in the same way that a well-governed society has no use for innumerable and dense laws.

One can philosophically reach the conclusion of the existence of a necessary being by considering that if there is a contingent being there cannot be a regression to infinity of the causal chains and that it is necessary to reach the existence of a necessary being from which the chain begins. Once the possibility of such a necessary being is established, it is logically necessary that it exists and it is then theologically consequential to assimilate it to God who is the infinite being and who says in the burning bush I am he who is.
The path you are trying to follow with the apple is the opposite path, and by taking a being whose existence you know you are assuming a necessary form for it (which may be coherent for a Platonist), but nothing justifies that this form can be necessary, since contrary to the idea of God, the idea of an apple abstracted from the apples that we experience does not contain necessity in itself

>theologically consequential to assimilate it to God who is the infinite being and who says in the burning bush I am he who is.
But that doesn't make the concept of God contain necessity in itself. It's consequential for my argument that we assimilate necessity into the definition of apples. Theological consequentiality is not the same as philosophical necessity.

The concept of God as conceived in Christianity essentially contains the idea of necessity since one cannot be perfect and infinite without being necessary since then one would not be perfect (if one admits that existence is a perfection), and since it has been established that a possible being whose essence contains the idea of necessity exists.

And the concept of apple contained in my argument contains the idea of necessity since otherwise the argument doesn't work. Both definitions are equally valid and both contain necessity essentially.

Things like contingency, necessity and being are arbitrary mental constructions. A thing can be contingent with necessary existence or a thing can be contingently necessary. The universe could be a necessary contigency.

I could say that existence is random and without a cause and still perfect.

Aristotle doesn't seem like a little mind to me. He knew everything that one could knew back in 3rd century BC Greece, and he tutored one of the greatest conquerors in history, too. There are hardly more influential figures than him. Why not? Why can't an elegant system provide scaffolding for integrity in the same way that an elegant set of laws structures a well-governed society?

Yeah I saw someone post a ontological proof several weeks ago that called stuff necessarily contingent. When I asked how the modals worked when you started stacking them like that they got real quiet

Yes, but the fundamental difference is that it is immediately part of the notion of God that he is necessary, whereas there is no reason to suppose that the shape of the apple is necessary.

Laws don't structure a well-governed society. Laws are byproduct of poor government. They are already decadent, the more they multiply. In the same way a metaphysical system is already decadent to someone who accepts life as is.

>Laws don't structure a well-governed society.
Since when? Every society needs a handful of laws.

>Yes, but the fundamental difference is that it is immediately part of the notion of God that he is necessary, whereas there is no reason to suppose that the shape of the apple is necessary.
Why is it immediately part of the notion of God that he is necessary? You've given a definition of God that includes him being necessary and I've given a definition of apples that include them being necessary. Why is being necessary not immediately part of the notion of apples per the definition?

Thats because God is a mental metaphysical construction whereas everyone has seen apples actually existing. Still, you could posit a fictional necessary apple in the same way God is posited.

Wtf is that stupid face on the cover?

Laws imply disobedient society in the first place. They are formalized norms that people already hold, them needing to be formalized means not everyone obeys them and the more there are of them, the more poorly governed society is.

Greek theater mask. For some reason he picked the Poetics to talk about final causes.

The previous posts aimed at establishing that necessity proceeds from the definition of God as a perfect being and no longer as a necessary being since you precisely decentered the argument by applying it to the formal apple.

Thanks

Yawn. Consider apples that are defined as perfect and are necessary by consequence. Also note this is a totally different argument than we started with it's moved from a first cause proof to the ontological proof.

Again there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the absolute apple has anything perfect, while God contains, by reducing it to its simplest definition, perfection. If the absolute apple is perfect then it is identified with God and the question is irrelevant.

What if the norms need to be improved? Or there needs to be increased regularity in one dimension or another?

Norms aren't improved by laws lol

>Again there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the absolute apple has anything perfect, while God contains, by reducing it to its simplest definition, perfection
Why? If God is defined as being perfect apples can be defined as being perfect. You want to make up your own definitions but you don't like it when other people do the same.

Since when?

What do you call God then if God does not correspond to the notion that everyone has always had of a perfect being?
If the absolute apple is perfect it is God and then God exists.