The Significance of Aristotle's Four Causes
A definitive guide for bringing order to the world around you
Imagine for a moment you have been deaf and blind from birth. Like Hellen Keller, you are unable to identify the world around you or communicate with others. Something as simple as touching a plant becomes a completely foreign experience. A lesson as important as avoiding contact with boiling water becomes immediately unknowable except through painful personal experience. Unlike a young Keller, you were not given the gift of identifying the world around you via the revolutionary communication interface of Braille. You never had a brilliant teacher like Ms. Anne Sullivan, who took the time to teach you how to identify your surroundings by the sensory perception you had access to, and communicate this via a revolutionary language device. Unlike Keller, who through perception and communication gained knowledge of the world around her, you have never been taught how to perceive, or that it is worth any of your time, or that the world around you is knowable, or worth talking about.
This existence is not only tragic, but a more casual version of it has always been found in society, since days of antiquity. People are taught that the universe, or the world, or nature, is chaotic, bears no meaning, and can’t be explained. They are taught not to trust what they can see in front of them, or touch, or smell, or taste. They’ve been taught reality is purely subjective; that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything. That the events that happen to us are simply coincidences, not consequences of change, action, or choice.
This is living a life that is handicapped. And while some still operate like this today, fortunately, thousands of years ago, Aristotle gave us a trusty series of tools to combat this chaos, and bring order to the seemingly unorderly. His principles of logic gave us a revolutionary road map to human flourishing. Let’s explore the brilliant discovery of “Aristotle’s Four Causes” below.
Classical Philosophy
The term classical philosophy has grown over centuries to cover many different great thinkers. It is often used interchangeably with ancient philosophy. And when it comes to ancient philosophy, if you’ve studied the “Big 3,” Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, you’re leagues ahead of most.
Aristotle’s contributions to classical philosophy shaped the founding of western culture. His works can be seen in everything, from films and art to classrooms and ocean shores. Not only known as “The Father of Logic,” he was also the first to classify, or categorize, plants into genus and species. Because of his meticulous empirical work studying and dissecting animal cadavers and relaying his findings, he’s also considered to be “The Father of Biology.”
As a philosopher, one of the many definitive conclusions he came to about reality is the fact that nature has an order to it. This was a charged assertion during his time (384 BC - 322 BC), because many believed nature, and therefore reality, was something chaotic and beyond our comprehension or control.
One of the ways he objectively demonstrated this actuality was through his series of “4 Causes,” four different defining characteristics of a living or nonliving entity that show you its identity, cause, and most importantly, its purpose.
The Importance of Aristotle’s Four Causes
Remember when you were rendered senseless during the first part of this article? Severely lacking in your ability to sense the world around you, everything seemed unknowable, foreign, and frightening. This was, and still is, often how people view reality. Aristotle remedied this terrifying notion.
Unlike other philosophers, Aristotle believed there was an order to things. Logic could be applied to one’s surroundings, thus allowing an individual to gain knowledge about reality and communicate that knowledge with others.
In order to do this, we have to size down from the big picture and deeply ground ourselves in the here and now.
Take a look around you. What do you see? If you’re in your room reading, maybe you see a chair, a nightstand, or a laptop.
If you’re in a cafe maybe you see shelves stacked with books, or a coffee maker.
All of these things at first glance may seem trivial, inconsequential, and disconnected. But in reality, these inanimate objects play a vital role in understanding reason, therefore understanding reality, and life itself.
Find this to be a bit outlandish? Stay with me. It will all come together.
The Four Causes
In order to understand the significance of these trivial things, we have to understand Aristotle’s four causes, which are:
Material Cause
Efficient Cause
Formal Cause
Final Cause
For Aristotle, the final cause was rightfully the most important. More on that in a minute.
Being able to identify the four causes of both inanimate objects and animate beings brings forth the reality of nature. Nature is constantly changing, and in order for it to change, it must be moved to change.
And in order to understand why something, or someone, has changed, one needs to understand its why. That is, someone needs to understand its purpose. This is how we begin to know.
And for Aristotle this was wildly important. In the very beginning of his Metaphysics book he states, “All men by nature desire to know.”
As you understand the causes of things, you further understand yourself.
Something’s material cause is rather straightforward. It simply means what it is made of. Here are some examples:
A bookshelf: wood, glue, screws
A coffee maker: Plastic, metal, glass
Something’s efficient cause is that which brings the thing into existence. Some examples of this are:
A laptop: a factory worker uses machinery and tools to fashion together a laptop
Bonus: A laptop’s material cause is the steel it’s made of, plus other possible materials like aluminum and copper.
A nightstand: A carpenter uses wood and various tools like a hammer and screwdriver to fashion a wooden nightstand
Something’s formal cause can be a bit tricky to grasp. Something’s formal cause is the point, or points, of difference that make the thing identifiable. Its essence or “design,” gives it its formal cause.
For instance, a chair has four legs and a single seat cushion to make it identifiable as a chair, something that can be used to sit on for support.
A book has pages with ink printed on them housed inside a hard cover that separates it from, say, an ebook.
The formal causes of coffee makers differ. The drip coffee machine I mentioned is made of mostly plastic, which is a separate chamber from the glass coffee pot. This makes it different from, say, a french press, which is a singular apparatus of mostly glass that uses no electronics, and therefore a completely different mechanism (force, instead of electricity) to create coffee from ground beans and water.
Something’s final cause reveals its why, its purpose.
A chair is built to be used as something to sit on.
A laptop is bought for school, or for travel so someone can watch movies while on an airplane.
A coffee maker is of course constructed to properly brew coffee and provide the beverage to consumers.
A book is made to be read.
Remember earlier when I mentioned Aristotle viewed something’s final cause as its most important? That’s because the 4 causes can also be applied to living beings as well. Humans, like all others, have 4 causes.
And a human’s most important cause is his why.
Man’s material cause is bone, tissue, blood, and organs. The things vital to his living body.
Man’s efficient worldly cause is his parents, who created him and birthed him.
Man’s formal cause is the thing which sets him apart from others, more specifically sets him apart from animals. This is his ability to reason. Man is the rational animal.
Man’s final cause is himself. This sometimes controversial statement is proven by the fact that man, through gaining knowledge, takes self-generated, goal-oriented action towards staying alive. Not only that, if man lives to the fullest of his abilities, he not only takes action to stay alive, but he gains knowledge needed to take self-generated, goal-oriented action to flourish.
This is his final cause. This is his why.
A ship’s “why” is to sail. A car’s “why” is to be driven.
For all the billions of people on earth, there are billions of different “whys.” Billions of different purposes. And according to Aristotle, this is the most important thing for man to discover.
But unless you have a proper grasp of the four causes not only as it relates to the world around you, but to yourself, you may never figure out your why.
The Law of Causality
These four causes are rooted in Aristotle’s rule of logic, the Law of Causality, which states that this principle “is the law of identity applied to action.” (AR Lexicon)
Once you are able to properly identify the world around you via the four causes, you are able to understand the law of causality, which takes what you’ve identified and applies it to the change, or action, you see all around you. By doing this, you can see that changes are caused by entities taking self-oriented action. And these entities act according to their nature.
Understanding these laws and principles gives man a guide in helping him understand his proper nature. While animals and plants operate on instinct (hunting when hungry, conducting photosynthesis for nutrients), man has to work to understand his proper nature for prospering as rational animal, as human being.
When this happens, we see that man is capable of not just hunting for food like in ancient times, but of harvesting crops, economizing his harvest, and using the market’s division of labor to get fruits, vegetables, and meat into grocery stores around the world.
Through these principles and laws we see man doesn’t just have the ability to seek the shelter of a cave when it rains, but to build rows of houses with solid foundations and beautiful architecture that will shelter families from storms and outside conditions that once caused a terribly high mortality rate.
Without a proper understanding of the role sensory perception plays in conceptualizing and gaining knowledge, and without an understanding of the order of nature, and how man uniquely differs from animal, none of this progress and human flourishing would have been, and would be, possible.
Classical Artistic Works
Understanding Aristotle’s work with logic as it applies to reality, humans, and our surroundings is vital to the progress of civilization. His philosophy paints a heroic picture of man, which is exemplified not only by history but a proper integration of concepts and reason.
Classical philosophy, or ancient philosophy, is rooted in virtues that stem from man as hero. Courage, honor, civility, and beauty are all constants in classical literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to the Romantic era works of the 1800s.
It is impossible to separate artistic works from philosophy. Doing so means a detrimental severing of all the causes, from material, form and efficient cause to final cause.
Understanding classical philosophy, such as Aristotelian philosophy, will not only give you a deeper understanding of classical works, but will give you a proper understanding of these works when you analyze poetry, literature, music, and art.
Reality is knowable. The human spirit is courageous. Life is not a finite march towards death but a gift to be fully embraced and fulfilled. And most importantly, man must lean towards introspection and reflection. Man must experience the world around him. Man must go out and find his why, and then, live out his days striving towards his purpose.
These themes are evident in classical works like Michelangelo’s David, which depicts the ancient king and warrior as he’s first laying eyes on Goliath, courageously stepping into battle, instead of portraying him as he’s already won the war, Goliath’s head hanging lifeless from his enclosed fist.
These themes are evident in Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” which fuses together science and nature. It’s one of the earliest works known to man inspiring the viewer to ponder layered, abstract questions regarding the philosophical branch of metaphysics, or “first principles,” which deals with the very nature of reality.
All of these themes are mainstays of classical artistic works, and classical philosophy. They are deeply inspiring and nourishing to the soul and human spirit. Which is why, after thousands of years, these works are still so sought after today. While trendy schools of thought and modern artistic techniques come and go, these works have always been and will always be, timeless.
Exercise: Make it a habit of identifying the four causes of things around you whether at home or out in public. Notice, the Law of Causality is everywhere. Doing this helps you realize how independent and interconnected things are, and how nothing is insignificant.