An Interdependent Reality — Epoche B2
The Odd One Out: Matter's Place in Aristotle's Four Causes A list that is not a list of four equals Aristotle's four causes are taught as a set [1] : to explain anything, give its matter, its form, its efficient cause and its end. The bronze, the shape of Hermes, the sculptor, the honouring of a god. Presented that way the four are parallel — four contributions, four answers, one object. This essay argues that the parallel is false to Aristotle's own text [2] , and that the odd member is matter. Two passages in Physics II settle it [3] . At II.7 Aristotle says that three of the four regularly collapse into one another; matter is never among the three. At II.9 he explains what kind of necessity matter imposes, and the answer subordinates material explanation to the end. Taken together these show that the schema is not a partition into four co-ordinate factors. It is a ranked structure in which form [4] , end and mover explain what a thing is and why it is as it is, while matter states what had to be available given that answer. The claim is deniable, and there is a substantial case against it drawn from Aristotle's biology, which I take up below. There is also a well-known reading from a quite different tradition that levels the fourfold deliberately, and it is worth seeing why it has to. The schema as Aristotle sets it out At Physics II.3 (194b23–195a3) Aristotle answers the question of how many ways we say "because". One way is to name that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists in it: the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl. A second is to name the form, which he glosses as the account of what it is to be that thing. A third is the primary source of the change — the one who deliberated, the father of the child. A fourth is that for the sake of which, the end: health, in the case of walking. Two features of this presentation are worth fixing before anything is built on it. First, the Greek aitia is broader than the English "cause": Aristotle is enumerating the kinds of answer that a "why" question admits, which is why an essence and a purpose can appear on the same list as a sculptor. Second, he is explicit that one thing may be assigned several of these, and that the same item can be given under more than one description. Line references here follow Ross's revised text. The three that collapse Four chapters later Aristotle draws the consequence that this essay turns on. At II.7 (198a24–27) he says that the last three often come to one: the essence and that for the sake of which are one and the same, and the primary source of motion is the same in kind as these — for a human being generates a human being. Unpack the example. Ask why this human being exists. The efficient cause is the parent. The form is the human essence. The end is a mature human being. But the parent is a human being, and what the parent transmits is the form, and the end towards which the developing organism moves is that same form realised. Three questions have converged on one item under three descriptions. Matter does not join them. The flesh and bone are not the essence, and the essence is not made of flesh and bone in the way the animal is. Aristotle never suggests otherwise, and the omission is not an oversight, because the whole point of the passage is to say how far the collapse extends. Whatever the fourfold is, it does not consist of four items each doing an equal and independent share. What kind of necessity matter carries The second passage says what matter does contribute. At Physics II.9 (199b34–200b8) Aristotle asks in what sense necessity is present in natural things, and answers that it is necessity on a hypothesis. If there is to be a house, materials of a certain sort must be available and put together in a certain way; the wall does not come to be because heavy things naturally sink, though heavy things do naturally sink. The necessity runs from the end to the matter, not from the matter to the end. This is a claim about explanatory direction, and it is the reverse of what a modern reader expects. The saw must be of iron because a saw must cut; it is not the case that cutting occurs because there is iron. Aristotle's contrast is with Empedocles and the atomists, for whom the arrangement of matter is the whole story and apparent purpose is an artefact (II.8, 198b16 ff.). Against them he does not deny that the material conditions must obtain. He denies that stating them answers the question that was asked. Put the two passages together and the structure is clear. The three that coincide answer "what is it, and why is it like that?". Matter answers "given that, what had to be there?" — a question whose very formulation borrows its terms from the first answer. That is subordination, not partnership. Jonathan Lear's account of Aristotelian explanation puts the same ordering at the centre [5] : what one grasps in understanding a natural thing is its form, and the material conditions enter as what that form requires. Why the levelled reading has to level The most influential twentieth-century treatment of this passage outside classical scholarship reads it in the opposite way. In his 1954 essay on technology [6] , Martin Heidegger takes Physics II.3 and argues that the four are not causes in the modern sense at all but four modes of being responsible for something's coming into appearance, illustrated by a silver chalice: the silver, the form of chalice, the rite the vessel is destined for, and the silversmith who gathers the other three. On his account the four are co-equal ways of occasioning, and the modern reduction of causality to efficient causation is the distortion to be undone. The reading is a real engagement with the text and not a paraphrase of it, and it is useful here for a specific reason. Heidegger needs the four to be co-equal, because his purpose is to recover a notion of bringing-forth in which craft and nature share a structure that instrumental thinking has flat