Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6h; Aristoteles: Ewigkeit d. Arten - Thomas: Schöpfung; Substanz: absoluter Bezugspunkt für Verständnis d. Ursachen (Beispiel: Frosch unreduzierbar auf Teile); Dilemma: Ganzheit d. S. - Möglichkeit v. Evolution

Kurzinhalt: In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes ...

Textausschnitt: Substantial Meaning

153b To respond to this nihilism, we must ask what understanding of being is necessary for an integrated notion of causality. As we have seen, each of the causes has its proper meaning only in relation to the others. But this interdependence would seem to create a logical difficulty: if A cannot be A without B, but B cannot be B without A, then it would seem to be impossible to have either, for each would await the other to attain to its own meaning, which entails an infinite regress with no absolute place to start. But if it is true that one could never move sequentially from A to B, or from B to A, insofar as the two are reciprocally dependent, it is possible to have both of them at the same time, or in other words to take as the starting point the reality of a whole in which A and B are reciprocally dependent as constitutive parts. And here we are brought to the sense of being required for an integrated notion of causality: as Aristotle saw, the essential meaning of being is substance; what are absolute are concrete, natural things, the most basic of which are organisms, and the most derivative of which are in some sense elements and in another sense artifacts.1 A substance is a whole, which is simultaneously complex and irreducibly one. A substance cannot be divided, properly speaking, without ceasing to be the substance it was (homogenous elements come closest to this possibility, but for that very reason are the least deserving of the name "substance"). In it, the constitutive principles — efficiency, matter, form, and finality — interweave in a reciprocally dependent and asymmetrical manner, as we described above. They exist together in some respect "all at once." (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität, Substanz) (notabene)

154a Now, the complex unity of substance has a difficult implication, which could scarcely be entertained today, but which follows from Aristotle's view with strict logical necessity: it is impossible, according to this understanding of the interdependence of causes, for new forms to come to be. Aristotle affirmed the eternality of the species, and it should be clear that he could do nothing else. A whole that is in the strictest ontological sense greater than the sum of its parts cannot be "cobbled together" from those parts. Take a frog: an organism of this sort represents the integration of causality to such an extent that the efficient, formal, and final cause are in this case one and the same (it is the frog, the what of the thing, that moves itself, and it does so in order to be a frog in the fullest sense it can). The material cause, though not in any genuine sense identical to form, nevertheless remains intrinsic to it so that there never exists frogness "as such," but only as individual frogs. Because of this integration, it would be impossible to assemble a frog in the manner of Frankenstein's monster, and to the extent that one could approximate such a thing, it would inevitably serve an extrinsic purpose, which means it would not be an "entelechia," as properly befits an organism. In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes are relative, it is the essential reference point for the understanding of each. Thus, for Aristotle, substance must be eternal, a frog cannot be produced out of something more basic, but can come only from other, already actualized, frogs. If it did come from something more basic, it would be reducible back to that or those most basic things, which would then represent eternal substance themselves. In this case, what appeared to be the reality would not be the genuine reality.2 Strict novelty, in any event, is impossible for Aristotle; even the creation of apparently original artifacts is the expression of forms that have been derived from other more basic forms, and cannot be said to have been generated from nothing. (Fs) (notabene)

155a We thus appear to stand before a dilemma. On the one hand, we have an integrated causality that represents the condition of possibility for all intelligibility, but to affirm this would require us to accept the eternal reality of substances, for any whole greater than the sum of its parts cannot simply be constructed step by step out of its parts. But this is an essentially "static" notion of the cosmos; it denies development, and very clearly denies the possibility of anything like an evolution of species. It would seem to deny, moreover, the possibility of creation, if one thinks of this divine act as an alternative to the eternality of species. There thus appears to be good reason to reject this understanding of being. On the other hand, actually to do so would present an even more obviously problematic implication: it would entail the dis-integration of the causes, and therefore a purely mechanistic conception of the universe and all things in it, coincident with the loss of any foundation for intelligibility, so that, if there is to be meaning at all, it is forced to fix its outer limits at the hermetically sealed borders of self-enclosed reason. What, in this situation, are we to do? (Fs) (notabene)

156a One might anticipate that it was precisely the worldview brought by Christianity that undid the integration of Aristotle's eternal substances, insofar as the doctrine of creation means that all things in the cosmos "come to be," at least in some respect. But this would only be the case in principle if indeed the sense of being entailed in the doctrine of creation were incompatible with the absoluteness of substance. As Thomas Aquinas shows, there is no contradiction in principle between the world's being created and its being eternal. As he indicates in the short treatise On the Eternity of the World, it is a mistake to think that efficient causality can operate only according to temporal succession.3 While it is true that efficient causality implies a "before" and an "after," he explains, these terms need not indicate an order of time (as they essentially do in Hume, and "before" him in Galileo), but can also indicate an order of nature.4 In other words, the causality of creation does not necessarily imply an event in time, but can simply mean absolute metaphysical dependence — even, in principle, of eternal things. In this respect, Aquinas affirms that the Platonic notion that the world is both eternal and wholly dependent on God is not offensive to reason. (Fs)