David Sedley, Creationism & Its Critics in Antiquity [end of year Aristotle series]
Craft and biological analogies that may explain Aristotle’s teleology
David Sedley wrote:
Chapter 6
Aristotle
… The chapter will be largely directed at a single book, book II of his Physics, which is his systematic defense of the teleological worldview against its competitors.
… Aristotle … treats the twin issues of creation and administration in strict parallel to each other. The world, along with its resident species, is not the product of an intelligent act of creation, for the simple reason that it had no beginning at all but has always existed—a thesis he defends by appeal to the essential eternity of the heaven’s circular motion. And likewise when it comes to the world’s continued functioning, there is no divine oversight, planning, or enforcement … since no divine interest in our world is invoked at any stage. But … he nevertheless holds that throughout the natural world there are irreducibly purposive structures. Pretty well everything in nature has a purpose, despite the fact that no intelligence either conceived that purpose or administers it.
This restrained teleology has won Aristotle innumerable admirers. For, it is rightly said, purposive structures are indeed basic to nature, quite regardless of the question of divine control or its absence. Never mind whether you are a creationist or the most hardened of Darwinians: you cannot avoid saying that the heart is for pumping blood, the eyelid for protecting the eye, the teeth for cutting and grinding food. Nor, for the Darwinian, are these locutions just a shorthand for some more accurate mode of biological explanation: adequate non-teleological explanations of the parts of the eye are simply not available. …
… Where did the motivation for Aristotle’s … teleology come from? … Plato had famously conceded in book VII of the Republic that for a philosopher government ranks second best to the life of pure contemplation. … Aristotle is in this regard more Platonist than Plato himself. He too (Nicomachean ethics X 7–8) holds that the kind of happiness that can come from leading a virtuous civic life, although of great value, is second best to the godlike happiness of pure detached contemplation. But he improves on Plato to the extent that he seeks to make his own theology consistent with that same ranking of different brands of happiness. God’s activity can only be the best, he argues in Metaphysics Lambda, and if so it must be pure contemplation.
… If god must be a pure contemplator, he cannot be an administrator. … In which case, the world is uncreated and functions without divine oversight. The outcome is, in short, Aristotle’s cosmology.
… [Aristotle’s] interest is far more often taken up with specific biological structures and processes and their contribution to the organism’s success …
… Desire is a faculty that, according to Aristotle, is found only in animals, yet he is explicit that plants too strive for immortality through reproduction, and that in some attenuated way even the four elementary bodies strive for everlasting actuality. Almost certainly the notion of striving will have to be interpreted reductively, as describing an inherent natural tendency. …
[The Craft Analogy]
… [In Aristotle] divine craftsmanship was ruled out by his theology, as we have seen. No natural process could be acceptably explained … as decreed by the deliberations of a world soul or of any other immanent deity, let alone a transcendent one. Such then was Aristotle’s dilemma. He resolved it, as Physics II eloquently attests, by developing his conviction that although nature is not divine craft, it is sufficiently analogous to craft in its working … So wedded is he to the craft analogy that its characteristic language is ubiquitous in his biological writings, where he frequently for example speaks figuratively of nature as an agent “crafting” …
Aristotle’s whole understanding of natural processes relies on his famous distinction between four kinds of cause.
And the first way in which the craft model comes to his aid is in enabling him to elucidate that very distinction. His preferred methodology is, as he reminds us at the opening of the Physics, to start with what is more familiar, or makes more sense, to us … and to move from there to what makes more sense in its own right… The causal processes of nature make more sense in their own right, and exhibit teleology in a higher degree, but the causal processes of craft make more sense to us, because all of us have practiced a craft or witnessed one at close quarters.
Aristotle therefore uses craft examples to demarcate the four causes (Physics II 3), before moving on to their application to nature. In a craft, it is normal for the practitioner to impose some form on preexisting matter, for example a sculptor on bronze. Here the material cause is the bronze, the moving cause (often called the “efficient” cause) is the sculptor, and the formal cause is the form he imposes on it, all unmistakably distinct from each other. In addition to these, the sculptor works with a goal in view, perhaps the completion or perfection of the statue, and this too is a distinct motivating factor in the story, the final (meaning “end-related”) cause.
Thus four distinct causes—material, moving, formal, and final—are clearly exhibited by craft, and it is only once we have mastered them and their interrelation in this familiar guise that we are ready to look for them in nature.
In nature, the four causes are much trickier to disentangle from each other. Take the development of a pig, and to begin with, its material cause. The pig’s matter—its flesh, bones, and the like—is certainly a causal factor helping to constitute its nature, but is not nearly as readily distinguishable from the pig’s form as the bronze was from the shape of the statue it constituted; for one thing, there never was a time in the pig’s history or pre-history when all these specific materials existed without already having the form of pig, in the way that before the statue was made the bronze was there to be inspected. For an analogous reason the pig’s formal cause, that is, its essential form as a pig, is not at first sight fully distinct from its matter. Third, take the moving cause of the changes the pig undergoes. This lies initially (according to Aristotle’s theory of animal generation) in its father, and hence is external to it, as the sculptor was to the bronze, but during its lifetime its active moving cause becomes an internal one, since this role of mover is taken over by the pig’s own soul, identifiable once more with its essential form. Nor is the final cause of its growth, that is, the end or goal governing the process, any more straightforwardly distinguishable from its form, because that goal really just is its fully developed form as a pig, towards which it is striving.
Nature, then, is difficult. But if we start from the causal distinctions that craft clarifies we can aspire to understand it. And there is a further reason why we should hope to progress from craft to nature. A craft, according to Aristotle, is an extension of what nature already does. [ref. Epicurus]… A craft takes over where nature leaves off, imitating and completing nature’s work. For this very reason, he argues (Physics II 8), we can work out that nature already embodies goals or purposes, because that is the only possible source of the goals which crafts adopt. For instance, since medicine is a craft that aims to help the body regain its health, that goal of regaining health can be seen to have already been governing the internal natural healing processes, which the doctor intervenes merely to facilitate and complete. …
… [The] fact remains that for Aristotle, as a practicing biologist, … there are virtually no exceptions to his generalization that if anything recurs on a regular basis it must be for the sake of something. …
The first and most obvious difference between craft and nature, in Aristotle’s eyes, is that in craft the moving cause is regularly external to the matter. Carpenters are external to their wood, cooks are external to their ingredients, doctors are external to their patients. It is precisely for this reason that the crafts teach us, more clearly than nature can, that the moving cause acting upon the matter really is a distinct factor in the process. Yet even in craft the moving cause is not essentially external, Aristotle points out, and here the gap between craft and nature can be narrowed: if a doctor treats himself, the change in his own body from illness to health results from an internal moving cause. That is very much like a natural process. …
… Without the admission of a creative or productive intellect operative in natural processes, how can purpose exist in nature? And how can the craft analogy be of any assistance?
Here is Aristotle’s enigmatic remark on the question (199b26–28):
It is ridiculous for people not to believe that something is coming about for a purpose if they do not see that the moving cause has deliberated. Yet craft too does not deliberate.
Craft does not deliberate? But of course it does, at least in our everyday experience of crafts on which Aristotle’s methodology leans so heavily. Scholars have, in my view, generated unnecessary difficulties over the interpretation of this admittedly dark remark. It is regularly suggested that Aristotle has in mind an idealized picture of the craftsman. This ideal practitioner’s skill has developed to such a high degree that he no longer has to ask himself how to perform a particular operation, that is, to deliberate: he just goes ahead and does it.
The trouble is that to the best of my knowledge nowhere else in the Aristotelian corpus has such an idealization of craft yet been found. … Aristotle himself again and again depicts the operations of craft precisely in terms of deliberation. Deliberation is how we choose the best means to a given end, and the presence of deliberation in a process is therefore a salient sign that it is end-directed. And yet, for reasons we have yet to discover, Aristotle says in the quoted passage that crafts do not in fact deliberate.
For a more satisfactory understanding of this puzzling remark, I am convinced that we must go back to Aristotle’s causal theory. …
… One example that he repeatedly invokes there is that of the moving cause of a building (oikia). To answer the question, “What is the moving cause of this building (oikia)?” by saying that it is a builder (oikodomos) is an excellent answer.
Nevertheless, even to refer to the moving cause of the building as “a builder” falls short of the ideal answer, it turns out. Near the end of chapter 3, Aristotle writes (195b21–25):
One must always seek the ultimate cause of each thing, as in other matters. For example, a man builds because he is a builder, but the builder builds in virtue of the building craft. This cause, therefore, is prior.
… This admittedly unintuitive refocusing of our causal language serves a vital purpose in Aristotle’s metaphysics. Form, he holds, is eternal. In nature, an organism’s form preexists it, typically by being already present in its father, who according to Aristotle was the organism’s original and external moving cause. … To throw light on this, Aristotle compares the preexistence of form in nature to the way that in a craft the artifact’s form preexists the artifact itself, by being already present in the mind of the craftsman. The form of some particular building, for example, existed before it was built, namely in the mind of its builder. …
Vitally, the building craft is the immaterial form or essence of the building, resident in the builder’s soul before he imposes that same essential form on the bricks and mortar.
In the light of all this, we can return to the enigmatic pronouncement of Physics II 8, “It is ridiculous for people not to believe that something is coming about for the sake of something if they do not see that the moving cause has deliberated. Yet craft too does not deliberate.” Aristotle does not mean to deny that the craftsman deliberates. But the craftsman is not, in the strictest sense, the moving cause. The ultimate moving cause is, as we have seen, the craft itself, identifiable with the essential form of the product resident all along in the craftsman’s soul. And that ultimate moving cause does not do any deliberating.
Seen in this light, Aristotle’s strategy is not, as often thought, to deny that deliberation is on the one hand present in crafts but on the other hand absent from nature. His point is rather that, when you strip down to its hard core the causality by which in each of the two domains the moving cause operates, the deliberation that occurs in craft becomes a strictly ancillary factor. In craft and nature alike, an essential form serves as a moving cause which brings about its own imposition on the relevant matter. The form of the building, present initially in the builder’s soul, prompts the movements which end in that same form’s being fully present in the bricks and mortar. The form of pig, present originally in the piglet’s father and later progressively in the piglet itself, prompts the movements which end in that same form’s being fully realized in the mature adult pig.
… Differences undoubtedly remain between the two processes, and the fact that deliberation plays a part in craft but not in natural processes is one of these. But such differences in Aristotle’s eyes should not be allowed to mask the underlying isomorphism between the two causal processes. And pointing out that in neither case does the ultimate moving cause, namely the essential form, do any thinking helps to confirm how deep that isomorphism runs. This is why the causal structure of craft really does enlighten us about the causal structure of nature.
[Conclusion]
We can now return to the question how Aristotle’s teleology developed from but also innovated on its background. His man-dominated natural hierarchy [puts] all the emphasis on the realization of organic life forms rather than on the purification of detachable souls … On the other hand, in his detailed scientific investigations of the parts of animals as functionally serving the whole, he is developing the teleological approach to biology…
His momentous innovation on that heritage lies in his theologically motivated decision to insulate god from any requirement to intervene in nature, either as creator or as administrator. The result is that, while Aristotle’s world retains all the positive values—both functional and other—… associated with divine craftsmanship, these are now explained by on the one hand phasing out the divine craftsman as moving cause, and on the other representing nature as so closely isomorphic with craft in its structure as to be capable of producing its results even in the absence of a controlling intelligence. Much of the illuminating brilliance of Aristotle’s biology derives from this initial parsimonious decision. …
Aristotle is no creationist. …
The Source:
David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, University of California Press 2007
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
