Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6d; moderne Wissenschaft: Umdeutung d. Finalursache (Spaemann); Zweck d. Wissenschaft: Wissen an sich (Finalität d. Menschen übereinstismmend m F. d. Dinge) - Verbesserung d. Gesellschaft; wissenschftl. Revolution: Transformation aller Ursachen

Kurzinhalt: .. the Scientific Revolution, viewed specifically in relation to the issue of causality, is not that it retains only some of Aristotle's causes and rejects others, but that it retains all of them in some sense even while it radically transforms the ...

Textausschnitt: 143a Now, if one is willing to admit that modern science retains formal causality, even if in an altered form, it would seem difficult to affirm that any trace of final cause remains, not least because those in whom modern science most clearly "came to be" explicitly understood themselves to be rejecting final causality.1 While it is clearly true that one of the things that most defines the revolution in understanding we have been describing is the attempt to abolish teleology from scientific accounts, final causality nevertheless stubbornly refuses to leave. We see this stubbornness in two ways. In the first place, as Robert Spaemann has shown, even analysis carried out strictly in the terms of mechanistic causality nevertheless has to isolate causes and effects, removing them from a literally endless continuum of possibly significant facts. Such an isolation cannot occur without some reference to final causality, since causes stand out as causes only in relation to the relevant effect that they are taken to produce.2 If we eliminated even this minimalistic teleology, we would simply have no understanding whatsoever. Intelligibility of any sort always requires at least some modicum of purpose — which is a plausible way of interpreting Plato's claim that whatever we understand, we invariably understand by reference to the good.3 (Fs)

144a At a more general level, final causality remains in modern science by virtue of the fact that science is a human activity, and there is no human activity that occurs without some reference to purpose, however implicit. Thus, if final causality is removed from the inner constitution of things, it nevertheless has to go somewhere, as it were. The purpose of modern science and therefore the source of its intelligibility according to its founders is the improvement of the human estate. Scientific study and the gathering of data make sense insofar as they serve this larger goal. For Aristotle, by contrast, the purpose of science is the science itself, or in other words, it is good — indeed arguably one of the highest human goods — simply to know. What is crucial to see in relation to our general argument is that, in this case, the final end of human activity perfectly coincides with the final end of things themselves, insofar as absolutizing knowledge means affirming the intrinsic meaning of things, the simple integrity of the way things are. Conversely, there is a necessary connection between depriving things of an internal finality and subordinating them, not to the act of knowledge (because knowledge as such does not subordinate), but to human praxis: if we make the improvement of the human estate the end of science, we displace the intelligibility of things themselves, and the more we reduce the meaning of things to data to be gathered, the more suitable they become to be used as instruments of human praxis. (Fs) (notabene)

144b The point of the foregoing, in short, is to see that the essence of the Scientific Revolution, viewed specifically in relation to the issue of causality, is not that it retains only some of Aristotle's causes and rejects others, but that it retains all of them in some sense even while it radically transforms the meaning of each. What we wish to suggest is that this transformation is not arbitrary, but itself reflects a change in the understanding of being. The next point in our argument, however, is to show that the meaning of each of the causes changes, and indeed has to change, precisely to the extent that each is interpreted in abstraction from the others. More precisely — because there is a sense in which any act of understanding involves some kind of abstraction — the change occurs insofar as the causes are no longer understood as intrinsically dependent on one another, so that one would have to understand the other causes at least implicitly in order to have a proper understanding of each one individually. The transformation at issue can be described as the dis-integration of the causes. In order to see this it is necessary to consider in what sense the causes depend in each case on an implicit reference to the whole for their own integrity. We will then go on to consider, in the fourth section, what sense of being is required for an integrated notion of causality and the "conditions of possibility" for this sense of being. (Fs)