Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6c; Materialursache als "Offenheit" u. Potenz in verschiedenen Graden in Bezug auf Form vs. Materialu. als Stoff; Form als "Aktualisierung" vs. F. als "äußere " Kraft (Ordnung als Gefüge durch Gesetze)

Kurzinhalt: ... matter is relatively determinate openness, or receptivity, to order... "Formal" comes to mean separation from any particular content. In this case, it is of course natural, indeed necessary, to conceive of order in terms of law, or extrinsic ...

Textausschnitt: 142a Similarly, the material cause, in the older analysis, did not indicate an individual entity, but a principle, specifically that "out of which" a thing was, a principle that makes sense only in relation to an "into which," so to speak. In other words, matter was understood as potency, which for Aristotle always relates to some actuality, and the potency exhibits different levels of determinacy at different levels of being. Thus, at the higher levels, the material cause would represent a relatively formed substance, a physical body, which possesses in itself a particular nature but which is still capable of being formed (not in a separate temporal moment, but ontologically relative to a higher nature) at a higher level of being. At the lowest level, it is "prime matter," no substance at all in itself but rather the pure capacity to receive determination. Regardless of the level, in this older view material cause always has a relationship to an actuality distinct from it. In other words, it is not intelligible, and does not have its existence, merely in itself, but only as itself in relation to a determining act that is distinct from it. To put it even more simply, matter is relatively determinate openness, or receptivity, to order. This view of matter contrasts sharply with, say, the Cartesian view of "res extensa," which possesses no such openness. It is, rather, opaque "stuff"; it designates inert objects of the forces that push and pull it in one way or another. In this case, we can see that it is still possible to affirm what we did above, namely, that matter is not intelligible in itself, but only in relation to what is distinct from it — in this case, force — and yet now the meaning of this affirmation changes by virtue of the new context: while in the first case matter itself receives meaning insofar as it relates to actuality, and does so because it itself is a potentiality on which actuality depends, in the second case matter remains always outside of meaning, just as meaning remains outside of matter. (Fs) (notabene)

142b But it is not only the efficient and material causes that are carried over into the newer analysis in a transformed state. It is important to see that form and finality are likewise present, though equally changed. Regarding formal cause: in both the older and the newer understanding, form represents a kind of determination or intelligible order. The two differ most directly in the "place" of that determination, though this difference has immediate implications for the nature of that order. In the classical understanding, form determines a being from within; it is an internal principle of order, because it is "that by which a thing has existence" and that which "makes something to be actually."1 Aristotle observed that form is most directly connected to nature precisely because he defined nature as an internal principle of change and rest. Now, the association of form with actuality is crucial. There can be no act without some thing that is actualized, and that thing must possess the specific potentiality for the actuality of a particular form, a potentiality that is distinct from the form that actualizes it. There is a connection between the rejection of the subsistence of forms as such and the interpretation of them as actuality. The meaning of form as act depends on the meaning of matter as potency. Only if we understand them both thus in relation to one another are we able to affirm the determination or intelligibility that form provides as internal to the being in question. Now, because, as we have just seen, the modern view of causality no longer thinks of matter in terms of potency, it is no longer possible within this conception to think of order as anything but extrinsic to things. "Formal" comes to mean separation from any particular content. In this case, it is of course natural, indeed necessary, to conceive of order in terms of law, or extrinsic pattern or structure, which, precisely because it is no longer understood analogically, comes to be expressed in terms of mathematics. It is not accidental that Aristotle, directly after presenting his most elaborate discussion of the nature of causality in Physics II, distinguishes the one who studies the natural world specifically from the mathematician along these lines: while both study form, the latter studies it as separate from natural bodies and thus in abstraction from any relation to motion, motion being in its principal sense the activity that springs from the internal principle that defines things: i.e., their nature.2 (Fs)