Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6b; ontologische - dynamische K.; Hume: Ursache - Wirkung (3 Elemente); Aristoteles: K. ein analoger Begriff; aitia: keine Verbalform; neues Seinsverständnis - Neuinterpretation d. Usachen; Formalursache; Wirkursache

Kurzinhalt: In Aristotle's sense, a cause is not an event that produces a subsequent event, but is rather anything that accounts for a thing ... They describe the complex and unified ways that things are, and not in the first place how they happen.

Textausschnitt: Ontological and Dynamic Causality

139a In a succinct account of the argument he first presented in the Treatise on Human Nature,1 David Hume claims that the "cause-effect" relation possesses three essential elements: first, contingency in time and place (i.e., cause and effect must be immediately "adjacent" to one another, both temporally and spatially); second, priority in time of the cause to the effect; and, third, the constant conjunction of the two, that is, the unvarying experience that "every object like the cause, produces always some object like the effect."2 For our purposes, the first thing to notice about this description is that it takes for granted the essentially "dynamic" character of causality. In other words, it thinks of the causal relation as an event that takes place in time, and indeed is defined precisely by its temporal succession. It is significant that what Hume presents here as the paradigm of such a relation is the collision of billiard balls. His view of causality reflects a change that occurred perhaps most decisively with Galileo, as we saw in the previous chapter, even if the seeds of this change go back much earlier.3 In this change, a dynamic sense of cause came to take the place of the classical view, which, as we will explain in a moment, could be more properly characterized as an "ontological" sense. The word "dynamic," here, is meant to capture two features of this new interpretation of cause. In the first place, it indicates that this view conceives of cause principally as a kind of motion; secondly, if the content of this relation is motion, that which brings it about, as we saw in the previous chapter, is simply a producer of motion, i.e., it is force.4 In the context of this notion of cause, "explanation" comes to mean the identification of the agent or agents that initiate the event of change, and the circumstance under which it or they thus operate. An explanation is complete if all such agents for a particular change are identified, and it is called "exact" precisely to the extent to which the amount of force can be quantified and thus rendered in the form of mathematical formulae. (Fs) (notabene)

140a It is commonly said that the essential difference between the modern and classical notion of science is that the ancients pursued four causes in their search for understanding, while the moderns cast aside final causes — which Aristotle had taken to be primary — as a hindrance to the progress of the knowledge of nature, and, in doing so, lost the formal cause that always accompanies it. According to this interpretation, modern science limited itself to the material and efficient causes, conceiving of the natural world as constituted by extended matter set in motion by extrinsic forces, in the manner we described a moment ago. While this characterization is evidently not altogether false, it does not get to the heart of the matter. The reason for the change is not simply, as it were, a reduction or limitation of attention to some factors in the explanation of a reality to the exclusion of others. As we intend to show, the redirection of attention is itself due to a change in understanding. (Fs)

140b We contrasted the dynamic view of cause with what we called an "ontological" sense. What does this mean exactly? One of the first challenges a person tends to face in teaching undergraduates Aristotle's notion of causality is the difficulty students have in thinking of the term "cause" as referring to things rather than to events. Indeed, the Greek term that is translated as "cause," namely, aitia, has no verbal form that would mean what we mean by "to cause," namely, "to make something happen." In Aristotle's sense, a cause is not an event that produces a subsequent event, but is rather anything that accounts for a thing — what, how, or why it is. Moreover, it becomes immediately evident in Aristotle's presentation that cause is an essentially analogous term, which is to say that the term covers an essential diversity within unity or unity in diversity: the four causes that Aristotle describes are all the same in the sense that they all serve to account for the reality of a particular thing, but they do so according to orders so basically different as to be irreducible one to the other. As we will elaborate in a moment, the causes are principles that, while absolute in respect to the particular order they designate, nevertheless subsist in interdependence on the others according to a more general determinate, asymmetrical order. They describe the complex and unified ways that things are, and not in the first place how they happen. This is what it means to speak of causality in Aristotle as ontological as opposed to dynamic. (Fs)

141a We are going to argue that the bracketing out of formal and final causes is a natural result of a more fundamental shift, the dis-integration of the causes from one another, the isolation and thus absolutizing of each of the respective principles in itself. This shift coincides exactly, as we will see, with the loss of the primacy of things in favor of a primacy of extrinsic relations, so that formal laws or patterns become the basic residence of intelligibility rather than what Aristotle called the ?????. In order to understand how this shift was not simply an exclusive focus on two causes, but in fact a reinterpretation of all of them on the basis of a new sense of being, it is helpful to see how even the efficient and material causes that the new science affirms underwent a transformation that stripped them of the richness they enjoyed in the earlier conception. (Fs)

141b As Kenneth Schmitz explains it, whereas efficient causality originally indicated an ontological principle, so that it would be defined as the communication of being—in Aquinas's words, "A cause is that from whose being another being follows"5 — it comes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "to mean an active force or impulse that initiated change by transference of energy to another, resulting in displacement of particles in a new configuration and with an accelerated or decelerated rate of motion among the particles."6 In both cases, the notion of efficient causality indicates a relation between two entities. One of the ways we could describe the difference between these two characterizations of efficient causality, however, is that the newer understanding "exteriorizes" this relation. A communication implies — as we will explain further in relation to formal causality — a sharing, which means that there is some (identically) one "thing" in common uniting the two sharers. What the two are individually includes, then, the reality in which they are united. In the modern conception of efficiency, by contrast, there is no sharing: force is precisely an extrinsic imposition of determination.7 (Fs)