Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 50: Causes: Essential, Accidental, and the Problem of Chance

Transcript
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And then I restate the arguments of Aristotle, not doing justice to them, of course, but taking his third argument, dividing it into two arguments. And then after weighing them, I reply to the, what, arguments against nature acting for an end. Starting in the middle of page six and going to the end there, right? Now maybe, before we go into that, that's what the rest of this reading is, I want to emphasize the importance of it, you know, but maybe we can talk a little bit more about some of these other distinctions that Aristotle makes about causes, right? Okay. A little bit next time first, you know, before we go into this, right? And then talk about, Aristotle, you know, gets through with that, he talks about luck and chance, which are these obscure causes, right? And we want to talk a little bit about that, you know, a little bit about that. And then we want to talk about the misunderstandings, right? You know, we start to approach this in the custom before we start to look at the arguments. I mean, as far as determining by reason the truth of this question, it's the arguments for and against it are the meat of it, right? But as far as why people, you know, incline, I think, to the negative side, right? The arguments are perhaps less important than the influence of custom or the influence of misunderstanding, right? So I want to talk about those first, huh? Yeah. Okay. Stop, it's about five o'clock, right? Yeah, there's a grandchild here, if you haven't seen them yet, is that moved by God, see? You know? I said, well, eventually in wisdom, right, or in theology, right, you would see that in some way even the active intellect is moved by God, right? Even these active abilities are moved by God, right? See? But when you're studying the third book on the soul, the contrast is between the active intellect and the, what, possible intellect, or whatever you want to call it, right? You know? And there, they're like, agent is to matter, Aristotle says, right? You know? If you brought this other thing in at that point, you'd be confusing the, what, the student, right, huh? You know? Just like when Aristotle was in the philosophy of nature there, he distinguishes between natural philosophy and mathematics, he doesn't bring in wisdom at all, see? It's not until the sixth book of wisdom that he distinguishes all three of them, right? And it's because at that point, the distinction is, what, not necessary, right? Yeah, yeah. Natural philosophy. And so it's a little bit like, you know, it's like, you know, bringing in a discussion of what creation is as opposed to change, right? You know? When you're doing natural philosophy, which you may come at that point, right? See? You come in here in theology or in wisdom, yeah? Talking about God's godality. There's kind of, you know, kind of prudence there, right? The studies in Tom's commentary bring these things in, like the beginning of the commentary of the physics, he'll distinguish the three sciences, right? But the commentaries are to some extent written, you know, for the, what, teacher, right? He's gone through them, and now you want to see things in a more universal way, right? But for a beginning student, no, it confused him at that point, right? It's too soon. Yeah, I remember your brother Mark, I started reading the commentaries when we were doing it. Yeah, yeah. And he told me not to. Just, he said that the outlines are the helpful part, but the commentaries he said are really for someone who's already been, been through it. Mr. Confucius says, too much is as bad as too little. Mr. Confucius says, too much is the one who said that, Tom. Acts for an end, or whether end is a cause in the actual world. Let's say a few more things about causes that come up after the distinction of what kinds of causes that we saw before. One distinction that Aristotle makes, and we've seen it touched upon a bit already, is a distinction between the cause as such, and the accidental cause. The cause to itself, in Greek, kakauto, and to happening, or by happening, katasim bebekos, in Greek. It's one very important distinction to talk about. Another distinction is that within each kind of cause, you can distinguish a cause before or after, huh, or if you like latin, prior and posterior, huh? So, if the, what, locomotive is pulling a car, and that's pulling the car behind it, right? And that's pulling the car behind it, right? You have really, what, movers, right? But in a certain order, right? And if I go to the drugstore for the sake of getting aspirin, and I get aspirin for the sake of, I get rid of my headache, I want to get rid of my headache for the sake of studying, I want to study for the sake of knowing, you have many ends in a certain, what, order, right? And in the last books of natural hearing, the seventh and the eighth books, Aristotle argues, right, that such a series doesn't go on forever, right? That not every mover is a moved mover, eventually comes an unmoved mover. We're in the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, right? He argues that not every end is for the sake of some further end, then, but there must be an end that is first, huh? You could also have this material clause, right? So, to use an example from modern chemistry, maybe the proton and the electron are the matter out of which the atom is made, right? And the atom is the matter out of which the molecule is made, and so on, right? So, you have to work your way back ultimately to the first cause, huh? Each kind of cause. And in the second book of wisdom, Aristotle shows that there are first causes in each kind of cause. But in the other parts of philosophy, you sometimes see this to be true about one or another particular kind of cause. So, about the mover in natural philosophy, or the end in ethics, or the form in logic, huh? And the matter, again, in natural philosophy. And that's different from what was exemplified before, where you have before and after not in reality, but a more general, more particular understanding of one and the same cause in reality. So, the obstetrician delivered the baby. The medical doctor delivered the baby. The man of art delivered the baby, right? Not three different men in reality, right? Okay? But he calls it jain of these things, right? This is made out of oak. This is made out of wood. This is made out of matter. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. This is made out of wood. Very general, right? Okay, you can speak that way too, but it's more important to see this other one where you have an order, not just in our mind, in understanding more generally or more in particular one and the same cause, but in reality you have many causes, okay? So, in a sense, the Pietas was made by, what, Michelangelo, right? But he might have used a hammer and chisel or something, right? And so they are, in a sense, causes too of the Pietas, huh? In so far as they were, what, moved by Michelangelo's hands, which they were moved by something else in sight of him, huh? Okay? So we speak of causes then before and after, right? And Thomas would distinguish those two, huh? His commentary there. Before and after, simply in our knowledge, right, of one and the same cause, or before and after, in reality, that's much more interesting, that second one, huh? Okay? So why did I hit you, huh? Because I was angry with you, right? Well, I was angry with you. You can try to work your way back to the first cause. Now, the other distinction that's very important is between the cause as such and the accidental cause, and sometimes they will distinguish the accidental causes by, in two ways, huh? Or into two, they would distinguish them. When something happens to the cause as such, right, what happens to the cause as such is also sometimes said to be a cause of the effect, huh? So, for example, if the house builder, the man who possesses the art of building houses, if he builds a house, the house builder is the cause as such of the house, right? Or is the cause, as it says in Greek, kak al tour, in Latin per se, through itself, huh? What does that mean? It means a house builder through being a house builder, right? Through possessing the art of building houses is a cause of the, what, house, right? But now, if the house builder happens to be a pianist, huh? If to be a pianist is something that happens to the house builder, right? And it doesn't even belong to him as a house builder, he used to be a pianist, right? But he could happen to be a pianist, right? I could say that a pianist built my house. Would that be false? No, no. But you'd have to say that the pianist is an accidental cause of the house, right? Because the pianist who built my house in this example is not as pianist that he built the house, right? It's not through being a pianist, to use the other way of speaking, huh? It wasn't per se, huh? Okay? It was through being a house builder. It was a house builder that he built it on, okay? So that's accidental, right? On the side of the cause itself, right, huh? Okay? Now to take the stock example, right? If I'm a gardener, right, and I'm digging in the ground, right, in order to plant, huh? I'm digging a hole for a plant, right? That's what gardeners do, as such, right? They know how deep to dig the hole and so on, right? Okay? But suppose in digging a hole for a plant, he hit something, he says, oh, one of these darn rocks that you always have in lingon soil, right? As he starts to see how big a rock it is, that's not a rock at all. It's something else. That's a what? Looks like an old chest, right? Why not that is, huh? I wonder who buried that there, right? And so he gets out his crowbar or something and he forces open the chest and, hey, maybe this is worth something, right? And let's say he's got a, what, treasure there buried by some pirate or somebody years ago, right, huh? But now you can say his digging a hole was, what, the cause of his becoming wealthy, right? But was digging a hole in the ground to plant something as such a way of becoming a millionaire and so on? No, no. It's something that happened, right? And furthermore, you can say it doesn't happen most of the time, let alone all the time, right? Otherwise, people would be digging in the ground all the time, huh? And this is the kind of cause that we have in mind, the kind of accidental cause we have in mind when we talk about luck or chance, huh? Okay? It's a cause of what happens, what, rarely, right? As a result of an action done for some inner purpose, right? When something happens accidentally, right? Okay? When I was in Quebec, I was going across the Cary de Ueval for the sake of Egypt. I was going to be eating a meal in the Montcalm restaurant at that time, which had a student reduction. I think they lost money on us. And as I'm crossing in front of the cars at a stop there, somebody yells out, Perkwast! Somebody hasn't even been 10 years, right? Okay? Well, he had come to Quebec with his wife for a little minification, and was I going to the Cary de Ueval there to meet him? No. But my going to the Cary de Ueval for my dinner was the accidental cause, now, of my encountering this man, huh? Okay? And so, someday what we call an accident, right? You're going through the intersection, you've got the green light that's in your favor and so on, right? And you're going to the grocery store and somebody comes on too, right? You're in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say, right? So you're going to the grocery store as a cause of your getting, what? An accident, huh? It doesn't happen most of the time. You go through the green light and somebody plows through, right? Okay? They'll do it all the time, say. Now, the difference between chance and luck, huh? Chance is a little broader in meaning than luck. Luck is chance in human affairs. And some of you say the Latin word, to fortune, which is chance in human affairs. But you can have chance even in the, what? Natural world. And the stock example is that of the mother lion, or whatever it is, has lost her kitten, her cub, right? And she's chasing some other animal for her dinner. And that other animal happens to run by where the little cub in wandered off. So she recovers her little one, right? Not that most of the time you do that when you chase another animal. And that wasn't done for the sake of recovering her little thing. It was done for the sake of dinner, right? But her chasing this other animal was the cause of her finding her little one. So that's an example of chance in, what? Nature, huh? The English word, to make a little footnote here, the English word happiness, right, actually comes from the word hap, meaning what? Luck, huh? And happy-go-lucky means almost. It's almost three numbers originally, huh? Happy-go-lucky. And that corresponds to what you have in Latin, where they speak of bona fortuna, good fortune, right? And they have a similar word in the Greek, huh, that Aristotle uses in the book on the Poeticarta, eutuchia, okay? But it kind of reflects a popular understanding that happiness is a matter of being lucky, right? And if people think, you know, that I was in the right place at the right time, that's why I got a good job, or I got the right job. thing, you know? But maybe that's not what happiness really is, right? But in the origin of the word, it comes from hap, huh? You can see that in Shakespeare's The Two General of Rona, huh? That used the word hap, going back, huh? But the original use of the word, huh? So hap and hap, they're actually etymologically related, right? Related to the word for luck, huh? Now there's another kind of accidental cause, which is quite different from luck or chance, but it's also on the side of the effect, huh? But here there's a kind of necessary order for what happens, huh? And the stock example, of course, is that of there's a pillar holding up the roof, right? Okay? Now, if I knock the pillar down, what happens? It falls down. Yeah. And you'd hold me responsible for the roof coming down, right, huh? Am I really the cause of the roof coming down as such? In this case, it's something else that brings the roof down, right? What did I have to do with it? Well, the pillar was impeding or preventing, right, the roof from coming down. And so this kind of a cause is called the, in Latin, removens, pokey bands, right? The one removing or taking away what prevents something, huh? Okay? But notice, huh? If I'm out, let's say, practicing with my gun, right, and we've got a target out there in the backyard and so on, and I'm shooting at the target, right? And you're out for a walk, you know? And you're thinking of philosophy and not paying too much attention to where you're going. And you happen to end up walking down the other side of the target, right? And I shoot and drop down from behind the target, you know? Would you hold me responsible for your injury or even death? You happen to be behind the target, right? Didn't know you were even thinking about philosophy, you weren't thinking about where you're going. See? So are you responsible? Am I responsible for your death in this case? We'd say it's bad luck, right, huh? You happen to be behind the target, right? But if I, Samson or something, if I knock the pillar down and the roof comes down, you probably hold me responsible, right? That's interesting, huh? The word responsible means what? It means a type of the word cause, as I mentioned in Greek, right here, right? So here's an accidental cause where you're in a way of responsible for what happens, huh? Suppose you park your car on the hill there, and the brakes aren't too good, so you put on the handbrake, huh? As people do sometimes, right? And I reach inside your car and release the handbrake, right? And your car goes rolling down the hill and into the lake, huh? Well, I think you'd hold me responsible for your car being ruined there in the lake, huh? See? But did I pull your car down the, what, hill? Was I the cause as such of your car going down the hill? No. But I am the causa removens, prohibens, huh? The cause removing what prohibits or prevents, right? Your car from going down. And so you'd hold me responsible, right? Still it's considered to be a, what? An accidental cause, huh? But it's much different from the kind of accidental cause of luck or chances, huh? When they define luck or chance, they say it's a cause of what happens rarely, right? As you solve an action done for an end, right? And it's not intended, therefore, right? In the case of the causa removens, prohibens, it doesn't happen, uh, rarely, right? That the roof falls in when the pillar is removed, right? If that's what's holding it up, right? And so I'm responsible much more for the roof coming down or your car going down the hill than I am for you getting shot behind that thing. Do you think? It doesn't seem to be an accident in the same sense. I mean, it's not an accident of pushing up a thing like, uh, like penises next in a house building. Yeah, yeah. See, this here, this here seems to be, in some sense, is very accidental, right? See? Because the art of playing the piano doesn't seem to in any way contribute to the building of the house. See? Here, my digging in the ground for, um, uh, to plant something, right, has something to do with the discovery, obviously, of the thing, right? Because it was buried under there, right? Okay? But still, I didn't know it was buried under there, right? I wasn't digging for the sake of that, right? And most of the time it's not going to happen if you dig in the ground, huh? Okay? But here, you have something accidental where the connection is, seems to be necessary, right? We saw something like that back in the first book of the Actuary, right? You are necessarily ignorant before you learn. But the ignorance as such is not a cause of your, what? Learning, right? You see that? So the accidental there can be, in some way, what? Necessary, right? Seems to be less accidental in that sense, right? But still not, as such, what's making the car go downhill. If you, you know, stopped your car, you took the other car and forgot to put the brake on, all of a sudden, there it goes. You see? Something other than me, right, that's really causing it to go down the hill as such, huh? But that brake was preventing it from doing what it would tend to do, right? Okay? You know, people don't usually intend the bad as bad, right? If I robbed the bank, I don't rob the bank because it's unjust to rob the bank. Is that why they robbed the bank? No. They robbed the bank because, as this one famous bank robber said, that's where the money is. So, when Thomas is discussing in the commentaries in the Epistle of St. Paul, the way in which pride is a cause of deception, right? See? Well, a man doesn't intend to be deceived, does he? No. But he says that pride causes a man to be deceived. There's a cause of deception in two ways. And one of the ways he mentions is that it makes us not want to, what, believe or listen to another man, right? Even a man who's wiser than we are, right? So, listening to Thomas or Aristotle or somebody like that prevents you from many mistakes, right? Or even calls you back from mistakes that you might have fallen into. And as it teaches it, you know, when you explain something in class, the students automatically, someone's going to get it wrong, right? You see how prone we are to make mistakes without a teacher. And so, pride removes what would prevent you from making a mistake. So, that's kind of a necessary order, right? Almost to what you're being deceived, given the weakness of our mind. Now, the other way that pride is a cause of deception resembles more this other way here, but it's different in a sense, huh? Thomas says that the proud man, overestimating his ability, right, will apply his mind to judging something he's not able to judge, right? And therefore, he's apt to make a, what? Mistake, right, huh? Okay. But again, is he intending to be deceived and applying his mind to some great question? No, he's, what? Seeking the... Excellence of being the judge of these matters, huh? But in a sense, his seeking the excellence in something that he's not capable of is, it seems like, an accidental cause in some way of his being, what, deceived, huh? So, the consideration of accidental causes is important for many reasons, huh? And it's important, as I say, for understanding luck and chance, which is one kind of those causes, but it's very important for understanding the causes of the bad. Those are some of the things that Aristotle takes up. He takes up luck and chance, you know, and they seem at first to some people to be simply names for ignorance, right? Well, no, they're not simply names for ignorance. There really is such a thing as luck and chance, and some things do happen by luck or by chance. But luck or chance are obscure because they're a kind of accidental cause, huh? And if you go someplace, you know, all kinds of things could happen to you there, right? Saramak went to Florida to make his peace with, what? President Roosevelt, right? Because he had opposed him in the convention, right? And he got the bullet intended for Roosevelt. Okay? So I think it happened to you going for some, he didn't go to see Roosevelt to, what, get the bullet intended for Roosevelt, huh? He went there to make peace because he'd opposed him in the convention. This guy now had the nomination, right? So you better cozy up to him, right? Instead, he got the bullet that, you know, happened to be between the man with the gun and he got the bullet, you see? So I mean, anything good or bad could happen, right? When I go to the store, who knows what could happen when I go to the store today, right? I might get a bullet, I might, you know? Truckster in Centertown when, remember winters ago, collapsed until the roof fell in, you know? So you never know what's going to happen when you go to the truck store. So you might be robbing the store, right, huh? You see? Or you might meet an old friend, or you might, you know? There's a story in the paper that I always tell the students about where the guy, you know, hit a car in an accident, huh? And this is before no-fault insurance. And so the person he hit, you know, sued him, right? But she was a woman, he was a man, and they had to see each other an awful lot before the thing came up because these things were so long. They fell in love. They were engaged with the time. I said to the guy, I wouldn't recommend it. You see a nice girl in a car, you want to marry her. Or don't go and smash into her car. I don't think that's the, that's such the way to get her in her favor, right? But, so I mean, anything can happen, right? You see? You know, one thing can lead to anything, huh? So when they talk about, you know, the sin there of Adam and Eve, right, huh? Some say that they wanted to, what, be able to, what, avoid these accidental things, right, by their own reason. You really depend upon God, right, for those accidental things, huh? Because there's an infinity of things could happen, right? So it escapes our mind, huh? Anything could happen, really, as a result of something that you're aiming at. You may ask, is it St. Thomas the one who goes into that particular point? Or would they want to avoid the accidental? Would the fathers go speak about that? Or can you think about that? Well, I think both of them would talk about it. I mean, the fathers would talk about it to some extent. But Thomas, you know, knows very clearly, explicitly about what luck and chance are, right, huh? And the other accidental causes that Aristotle talks about at different times, huh? So that's important when you talk about the bad, right? So then there would be, like, a broad, on the side of the effect, many things would be accidental, but they wouldn't all be by chance or luck. In other words, they distinguish these two, right? The chance or luck, on the one hand, and the cause, right, removing the, what prevents something, right? Because there you have kind of a necessary order, right? So Samson, right, when you push the pillars down, right, it's kind of a necessary order between that and we're falling in, right? But it's not really the, what, the move of the pillar that pulls the roof down and something else causes the roof to go down, right? But the pillar was preventing that from happening. And so we move that, and therefore this happened, huh? Okay? Let's say, like, I built the house, and it was the fifth house on the block. Yeah. But I didn't intend to build the fifth house, but that one, would you say that was even by chance, or it wasn't luck, or, I guess it was... Well, if everyone doesn't talk about much, then it's just something good or bad happens, right? Yeah. But notice in Shakespeare's play there, Romeo and Juliet, huh? There's a lot in there about luck, huh? Or fortune is the word used, huh? And so Romeo says, I am what? I am fortune's fool, see? You know, he marries Juliet secretly, right? And he wants to be, therefore, friends with the family, right? And there's a squabble between, what, Mercutio and Tybalt, right? And he goes out to try to, what, stop the fight, right? Kind of, you know, putting down Mercutio's sword, and then Tybalt stabs, right? So, what he intended didn't happen, right? See? In fact, something terrible happened, right? As he saw him trying to, you know, restore peace or make peace between his family or his relatives and Julius, right? He's now, what, the unintended result was the death of Mercutio. And the moment he loses his head, and he kills Tybalt, and now he's exiled and so on, right? And I'm fortune's fool, right? So, a lot of references to fortune there in those plays, huh? Let's come back now to the question here about whether end is a cause in the natural world, huh? And just review for a second the importance of the question, right? And I say this question is important, first of all, for natural philosophy. Because what's most important in anything is its, what, end or purpose, right? And the end or purpose of natural philosophy is to know the causes of natural things. And that there are four kinds of causes, and this is a question now about one of the four. So, it's a question that pertains to the very end and goal of natural science. is part of understanding natural things to understand their end or purpose, huh? Is part of understanding, for example, the eye to know this for the sake of seeing, right? Or the ears for the sake of hearing, or the teeth in front for the sake of biting, and the teeth in back for the sake of chewing, and the heart for the sake of pumping blood and other things, right? Or is that not part of understanding it, right? So, it's most important for natural philosophy, right? Because nothing is more important than the end or goal of a science, right? It's just part of the end or goal, to understand natural things, which means to know their causes, huh? Okay? And you can say, secondly, that among the four kinds of causes, this is a special importance, this kind of cause, because where it is a cause, it seems to be the cause of the other causes being causes. It seems to be primary, right? So, sitting, it's for the sake of sitting or having something to sit on that the carpenter makes the chair, right? So, the carpenter's making of a chair, his causality as a maker, depends in a way upon sitting, doesn't it? And the carpenter, in turn, by shaping the wood, is a cause of the matter becoming the matter of a chair, right? And therefore, being a cause in a way of chair. And he's also responsible for the form, which makes a chair to be a chair intrinsically, getting into the wood, right? But he does all this for the sake of sitting. So, the end...