Aristotle, the Four Causes, and Frankenstein

A little additional information about Shelley's Frankenstein. Victor, as a young student in university, is concerned with the line, "...not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary (third) grades were utterly unknown to him...." Now you may have skipped over that part or maybe briefly wondered - if at all - what that was about; however, you will probably come across that concept of the "four causes" in your future readings, so perhaps we should go over it now. We touched on this a bit last semester when we read some excerpts on Aristotle. Aristotle, as a philosopher, was concerned with the nature of reality and being, and with the classification and categorization of all things, including humans. Plato, who was Aristotle's teacher, believed that in a realm outside of time and space, the perfect ideal forms of everything (dogs, cats, chairs, trees, people, etc) reside, and that the pale, decaying copies of these ideal forms can be found in this ephemeral realm in which we reside.

Aristotle, however, believed that we needed to understand this world and this reality in which we live, not some idealized otherworldly state that may or may not exist. To help with understanding this world, he sought to categorize things, objects and animals according to forms and causes. Form is that which causes something to be the thing it is. To analyze the nature of things - what causes things to come into being - he devised the FOUR CAUSES:

Let's use a marble statue to illustrate the four causes. The first cause, or the MATERIAL CAUSE, is the substance which the object, in this case, a marble statue, is made of. If we were using a tree, let's say, as the object in question, the material cause would be the bark, the leaves, the wood which make up the tree.

The second cause, or the EFFICIENT cause, is the what-brings-this object-into-being. In the case of the marble statue it would be the hewing and the hacking by chisel and hammer that brings it into being. In the case of the tree it would be the seed, the water, the sunlight and the nutrients in the soil that bring it into being.

The third cause is the FORMAL CAUSE, the what-is-the-thing-that-gives-it- the-shape-by-which-it-is-identified. Although a modern sculptor may disagree, according to Aristotle, a marble statue randomly hacked at is not a statue of anything. The formal cause of the tree would be the shape and the appearance of the tree by which we identify this green thing as a tree.

The first three causes have to be called into operation in order to realize an intention. The intention is the fourth and final cause.

The fourth and final cause is the FINAL CAUSE which is the ultimate-reason-for-the-object's-existence. The statue exists because it is the will of the sculptor to take up a hammer and chisel and create this statue of a horse or a man or whatever out of marble.

The formal cause of the tree that has grown from its seed is also its final cause. The ultimate shape of the tree (formal cause) is also the final cause of its existence. The point of the seed is to produce a tree; the tree grows according to the genetic code imprinted in its cells and it grows according to the genetic plan encoded in all the other trees it looks like, which is how we identify the object as a tree, and more specifically how we identify the tree as a fir or a pine as opposed to a sycamore. The second or material cause would be the earth, the rain, and the sun which nourishes the tree into growth and sustenance. (Of course, Aristotle didn't know about DNA but he knew there was some spark that caused life to form and grow according to some plan or pattern.)

So this is something that fired the imagination of many philosophers and scientists who wanted to understand the material, efficient, formal and final causes of things, and this is what obsessed Victor Frankenstein.