Harris 1

Josh Harris

Dr. Key

PHI 363

4/23/10

The Necessity of Transcendent Intentionality for Final Cause

Introduction: Aristotle, Eliminativism and Intentionalism

Much has been made in the modern era about the legitimacy of final cause as

ontologically viable. Some moderns have tried to salvage this intuitive principle while

maintaining a healthy skepticism regarding classical metaphysics in general.1 It is safe to say as a

whole, however, that final cause is little more than a historical relic of Ancient Greece for most

philosophers since the decline of the medieval understanding of the world.

Aristotle, of course, did not share this skeptical attitude towards teleology as a true

characteristic of reality. For him, final cause is one of four inseparable principles of being—

along with material, formal and efficient cause. To speak of teleology as nothing more than some

sort of anthropomorphic chimera, then, is an obviously untenable position for Aristotle. For this

reason, it is rather difficult to locate any specifically rigorous argumentation in either his Physics

or Metaphysics which aims to prove the very existence of final cause. This is not to say that he is

silent on the matter, however.

These deniers of final cause—modern and pre-Socratic alike—represent one side of an

interesting dichotomy which on either side is not compatible with Aristotle’s teleology. For the

sake of argument, we will use Christopher Shields’ label, “teleological eliminativist,”2 to refer to

these philosophers. The other side of this anti-Aristotelian dichotomy is represented by the

1
See Pierce, CITE. One of the founders of American Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, saw the concept of final
cause as absolutely essential to his functionalist epistemology.
2
Shields, Aristotle [AR]. 74.
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Western theistic tradition. While these philosophers acknowledge final cause in nature, they only

do so because they envision a transcendent Agent existing outside the system of finite reality

who assigns purpose to the universe as He “creates it and designs.”3 We shall call this position

the position of “teleological intentionalism.”4 Because Aristotle does not have a conception of

this transcendent being, he cannot accept a universe which is directed by the will of this

transcendent Agent.

This dichotomy at hand—and it is a false dichotomy, for him—Aristotle develops his

teleology as a natural, inherent quality of reality. In a sense, it is his attempt to find a “third way”

between what he sees as the two extreme positions of eliminativism and intentionalism. The

purpose of this study is twofold: first, that this dichotomy is, in fact, necessary and not false.

Second, teleological intentionalism is the more rational position of the two.

This will require first an explication of Aristotle’s own teleology, dealing especially with

his system of intrinsic purpose. Next, we will apply this conception of final cause to both sides of

the said dichotomy in an attempt to weigh the difficulties and outright deficiencies of each. Once

completed, this analysis will tend towards the two said ends of the study.

Aristotle on the Duality of Final and Efficient Causation

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes final cause as “the ‘wherefore’ and the good (for

this is the end of all coming into being and change).”5 Put simply, final cause is the principle of

being which deals with the telos or purpose of the substance in motion. It is the answer to the

question of “why?” To cite a classic example, we explore the substance or “thinghood” of a

house. A builder creates a house in an undeniably purposeful manner. Throughout the motion

3
Edel, Aristotle and His Philosophy [AP]. 65.
4
Shields, AR. 74.
5
Aristotle, The Metaphysics [MP]. 983a.
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process of building, his telos is always at hand—namely, the shelter it will potentially provide

for those living inside.

When the house is complete, then, it actually provides shelter for those living inside. This

is important to realize because it grounds final cause as essential to the substance. A house

without a purpose is not a house, after all. As scholar Henry Wang puts it, “every individual

being or substance in the world moves towards a certain end; this end is its actuality.”6 It is only

upon reaching the end of actuality that we can truly call a house a house. Therefore, final cause is

indeed a necessary component of what we understand as substance.

Along with this discussion of potentiality-actuality, we can come to a more satisfactory

understanding of Aristotelian teleology if we understand the nature of efficient cause as well. In

the Metaphysics, we learn that final cause “is the opposite”7 of efficient cause. But what is this

opposite, exactly?

Efficient cause is perhaps best understood as “‘what’ makes of what is made. . . . [t]he

agents that bring a certain motion or change about.”8 Just as final cause answers the question

“for what sake?” so does efficient cause answer the “what does it?” in terms of the motion from

potential to actual substance. Efficiency is, in a sense, the initiator of potentiality and therefore

the initiator of substance as a whole—potentiality and actuality alike. To cite our house example

again, the efficient cause is the builder himself; for he is the agent who brings about the entire

building process.

This oppositional dynamic between final and efficient causation is essential to the

Aristotelian concept of teleology because each ontological principle represents one of two poles

in one, holistic process. For Aristotle, it is impossible to have one without the other. Just as it is
6
Wang, “Rethinking the Validity and Significance of Final Causation: From Aristotelian to Peircian Teleology”
[VS]. 6.
7
Aristotle, MP. 983a.
8
Wang, VS. 4.
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impossible to build a house without a builder, it is also impossible to build a house without a

guiding telos or reason for it all. Once we understand the inseparability of these two conceptions

of causation—along with our unmentioned material and formal causes—we can better

understand the Aristotelian concept of teleology as absolutely essential to substance or being

altogether.

Aristotle versus the Eliminativists and the Intentionalists

It is then this dichotomy of eliminativism and intentionalism that Aristotelian final cause

must overcome altogether if it is to be considered a satisfactory defense and account of teleology.

Aristotle most clearly articulates his argument against the eliminativism in his Physics. He does

so by adopting temporarily the perspective of his foe Empedocles, who argues that final cause is

mere illusion:

The problem is this. What is wrong with the idea that nature does not act

purposively and does not do things because they are better? The proper analogy

might be that Zeus does not send rain so that the crops will grow: it is just a

matter of necessity.9

In his characteristically careful manner, Aristotle locates the key premise in his opposite’s

contention in order to avoid a “straw man” argument. In this case, the identified premise is the

concept of necessity. Used in this sense, necessity means simply that the mechanistic factors

which directly influence something’s motion in a compulsive manner are the only real causes of

substance.10

At this point, it is tempting to label Empedocles “necessary” conception of motion as

inclusive of only efficient cause—leaving final cause out. Teleology is, after all, unintelligible in

9
Arisotle, Physics [PY]. 198b.
10
This use of the word “substance” is for the sake of argument only. Empedocles would never consent to this
Aristotelian notion.
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this understanding. But while this labeling is true in a loose sense, it is not entirely accurate. This

is because Empedocles (and the moderns, for that matter) has a categorically different view of

causation altogether. It is important for us to distinguish what Aristotle means by efficient cause

from what Empedocles means by necessity; for they are deceptively similar concepts with two

sharply different implications.

When Aristotle speaks of efficient cause, he presupposes that “there always has to be

some underlying thing which is what comes to be.”11 This is very important to understand.

Motion, for him, cannot exist without something to “get the ball rolling,” so to speak. This

something is efficient cause, which is still very much a reference to substance in the sense that

this thing of efficient cause has being apart from other things. To retreat back to our earlier

example of the house and the builder, we understand that the builder is the efficient cause

because he is an existing substance who initiates the building process.

When Empedocles and the moderns speak of necessity, though, they do not invoke

substance. Instead, they focus entirely on “facts and events. . . . involved mainly with the

question of how certain events occur and proceed.”12 These philosophers do not and cannot

account for the cause of motion itself. Rather, they can only study and observe how things move

in reality. In this understanding, then, causation becomes a study of compulsory habits, which do

not begin with any particularly identifiable thing or principle, nor end in any particularly

identifiable telos or purpose. In this remarkably contemporary and relevant perspective, Aristotle

is correct to say that Empedocles envisions almost a neo-Darwinian account of life and

creaturehood: “creatures survived because, spontaneously, they happened to be put together in a

useful way. But everything else has been destroyed and continues to be destroyed.”13 Because

11
Aristotle, PY. 190a.
12
Wang, VS. 8.
13
Aristotle, PY. 198b.
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Empedocles and the moderns only take the question of “how?” seriously, it is easy to see why

any notion of final cause would be completely and utterly illegitimate for them. This is the

eliminativism that Aristotle aims to combat.

His case against them is simple, and it has to do with a sort of inductive, probability-

based argument:

[T]he things mentioned turn out as they do either always or usually, and so does

every other natural object, whereas no chance or spontaneous event does.

Frequent rain in winter is no taken to be a chance accident, but it is during the

dog-days; a heatwave during the dog-days is not taken to be a chance accident,

but it is in winter. So if we assume that these things are either accidents or have

some purpose, . . . [T]hey must have some purpose. (199a)

The distinction between chance and purpose here is the key premise. If we have an idea of what

chance is—frequent rain in the dog-days, for example—then we can contrast that with what we

know to be purpose. According to Aristotle, it makes no sense to say that the remarkable

consistency in which most cause and effect relationships actualize themselves is just

coincidence.14 There must be some sort of telos or purpose to make sense of this consistency of

motion over time.

This argument at hand, it seems incumbent upon the rational observer to take Aristotle’s

critique of the eliminativists at least somewhat seriously. Coincidence is shaky foundation for

any philosophical discussion, after all. Final cause is not merely a naïve anthropomorphism, but

a rationally grounded, necessary phenomenon. The discussion then turns to the latter half of the

anti-Aristotelian dichotomy, that of teleological intentionalism.

14
Again, the modern problem is remarkably relevant in Aristotle. This position of habitual or coincidental cause and
effect relations is famously articulated in David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
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Although Aristotle never directly focuses an attack upon this school of thought, his

conception of ends especially in terms of living things does present a distinctly different model

of teleology than that of the intentionalists. As scholar Abraham Edel puts it, intentionalists

attribute final cause to “conscious purpose, . . . it is clearest as the root metaphor of the religious

teleologies in which a transcendent being creates and expresses purpose in the things of the

world that are brought into existence.”15 We might immediately jump to the idea of the Christian

God as the paradigm example of this notion of final cause. God, who is infinitely transcendent of

the system He has created, still maintains a true concern for the end goals of His creation. Via

His agency as an independently acting Being, He assigns final cause like film director who

moves his actors towards his desired ends. This arises out of His will—not out of some kind of

eternal mechanistic force.

So if Aristotle’s teleology is not the result of a grand Creator or Designer, what is it? The

answer, according to scholar John Herman Randall, is in Aristotle’s status as “a thoroughgoing

functionalist.”16 With special emphasis on his biological works such as De Anima and De

Partibus Animalium (On the Soul and On the Parts of Animals, respectively), he argues cogently

that Aristotle derives his knowledge of living things directly from their functions. Interestingly, it

seems that his conception of natural teleology is not at all far from the “teleological and

functional concepts of evolutionary thought. . . . For the ultimate function of every organ and

arrangement for Aristotle is the ‘survival value’ . . . process of natural selection.”17 Although this

is not quite the typical contemporary view due to its insistence upon final cause as a real

principle, it is somewhat agreeable because of its explanative naturalism. Nature, for Aristotle,

bears its own purpose in itself. Because he has no conception of a transcendent agent, this idea of

15
Edel, AP. 67.
16
Randall, Aristotle [A]. 226.
17
ibid
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intentionalism is foreign to him. Instead, final cause is merely understood as a foundational state

of nature—without any need for definition or analytical explanation.

Aristotle uses his theory of art in order to further this point of natural explanation. He

makes the case once again in his Physics:

If a house were a thing generated by nature—if it grew—it would be produced in

the same way in which art now produces it. If natural things were not produced by

nature alone, but by art also, they would be produced by art in the same way that

they are produced by nature. Each stage leads to the next.18

In this fascinating argument, Aristotle claims that there is no essential difference in a final cause

manifested by a human agent (in this case, the builder of the house) and one manifested by

unconscious, natural process. In what actually measures out to be a modified Platonic conception

of human creative ability, Aristotle claims that the artist’s aim or purpose is precisely to imitate

nature. If this is indeed true, it is not difficult to see why he would natural process as the ultimate

source of final cause in all things—even in the creative endeavors of human agents. After all, “if

art is for an end, so is the nature it imitates.”19

Either-Or: Eliminativism or Intentionalism

Aristotle, then, stands outside this oppositional dichotomy of teleological eliminativism

and teleological intentionalism. He certainly cannot accept the former due to its wild adherence

to a purposeless, random motion process. He cannot, on the other hand, accept the latter because

he finds the idea of a transcendent agent utterly foreign. In these terms, Aristotle’s final cause is

a “third way” between Empedocles and the theist. As has been already expressed in the

introduction of this study, we contend that Aristotle’s teleology is an unsuccessful attempt to

18
Aristotle, PY. 199a.
19
Randall, A. 188.
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transcend this necessary positional dichotomy. The eliminativism-intentionalism debate is, in

fact, ultimately the “only game in town” when it comes to an adequate formulation of

teleological system. But why?

In regards to the eliminativists, the choice is intuitively obvious: either final cause is an

ontological, real principle of motion, or it is not. If we take the position of Empedocles and most

of the modern metaphysical tradition, we do indeed unabashedly deny the reality of final cause.

If we accept the intentionalism of the Western religious tradition or even Aristotle, we contrarily

take the position that final cause is real and ontologically viable. There is no way to find a “third

way” between these two contraries without succumbing to the disaster of suspending the law of

non-contradiction.

Eliminativism, then, is one defined position in terms of our teleological discussion. The

question is, though: can both the Aristotelian and theistic perspectives exist as legitimate options

as well? To find our answer, we are well-served to retreat to the aforementioned distinction

Aristotle makes in his Physics between “chance” and “purpose.” If we remember the prior issue

of his argument against Empedocles in favor of his naturally-defined final cause, we see that

there are such things. The consistency of cause and effect in “purposeful” things—like rain in

winter—is itself evidence of purpose. Upon closer examination, however, this distinction

between chance and purpose is actually an illegitimate one if we are to stay true to a purely

natural account of final cause.

Aristotle seems to grant that nature is an explanation in itself in the sense that the

Unmoved Mover is also a part of the system.20 But if this is true, how are we to adequately

discern what is “chance” and what is “purposed” in this self-explaining system? Rain “in the

20
See Aristotle, MP. 1072b. Here, Aristotle gives a cryptic account of his “Unmoved Mover,” which appears to be a
part of the naturalistic system as “pure actuality.”
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dog-days” may or may not have a purpose according to nature’s inherent structural teleology.

We cannot know it truly because we are not nature. In fact, once we begin to impose upon nature

our own conscious intellect as agents, we are the ones who actually create the purpose.21 It is the

work of a rational agent to determine the validity of a certain final cause because he or she is the

one who realizes the purpose at hand. It seems that in a truly naturalistic account of teleology,

one of two options is available to the honest inquirer. First, there is indeed a final cause inherent

to nature, but there is absolutely no way to know it due to our status as only a part of nature and

not nature as a whole. Second, we are somehow “in tune” with the natural order insofar as we are

able to locate the difference between chance and purpose.

Now, barring the weird natural mysticism of our latter possibility, it seems that this

uncomfortable skepticism regarding final cause is our only option if we are to take Aristotle’s

explanation of teleology seriously. It is for this reason that Aristotelian final cause does not seem

to be an adequate position.

If this is true, though, what can teleological intentionalism offer us that Aristotelianism

cannot? It seems intuitive to think that a creating agent should be the author of a substance’s

final cause. After all, it is ludicrous to think somehow that there is something else more

responsible for the house’s final cause of shelter then the builder’s mind itself. He is the one who

aims to build the house, so his building process bears with it the entire teleological process—

from potentiality to actuality—in his mind. The intentionalist, of course, applies this concept of

conscious intent to the entirety of the natural system of motion. Because he accepts the existence

of a transcendent Agent who assigns purpose to the whole of His creation, the intentionalist is

21
This is not meant as some kind of Kantian critique of Aristotle. Rather, it is an attempt to point out the absurdity
of actually locating a final cause as inherent to nature without imposing our own rational constructions.
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able to account for the apparent consistency there is regarding cause and effect relations in the

world.

A possible objection arises, though, in the form of the following question: how can we as

finite beings come to understand anything about so-called purpose if it is all the product of an

infinite agent? Does this not run us into the same skepticism of Aristotle’s naturalistic system?

The critique seems convincing, but the intentionalist does retain a certain advantage over the

Aristotelian naturalism—namely, the fact that we are, indeed agents.

The intentionalist cannot pretend to know the comprehensive nature of the transcendent

Agent’s assigned purpose to every existing substance in the universe. This is beyond pretentious

and perhaps even blasphemous—depending upon the intentionalist’s likely religious views.

However, because we as existing individuals are agents ourselves, we do understand what it is to

create something with purpose. To deny this is to deny the entire creative history of mankind.

This knowledge is vital because it places the discussion of final cause firmly on familiar grounds.

Although we might not know the precise nature of the transcendent Agent’s purpose for some

substances, we do know what it is like for an agent to assign purpose to a creative process. The

house is not the builder, and it is because the builder is separate from the house that we are able

to make sense of the fact that the builder aims to create the house for the sake of shelter. The

same principle applies to the transcendent Agent’s status as separate from his creation of

substance.

So, then, we have our two options in terms of an adequate metaphysical position of

teleology: eliminativism and intentionalism. Because Aristotelian naturalism seems to waffle in

its description of the source of final cause as explanative of itself, it is far more consistent to
 Harris 12

assume the position of intentionalism—that is, if we wish to salvage the concept of final cause at

all.

Conclusion: The Legitimacy of Final Cause

We have thus explored the necessary dichotomy of eliminativism and intentionalism in

our discussion of final cause. Aristotle does seem to locate an inconsistency in the Empedoclean

a-teleological system. The randomness of undirected process is indeed curious when compared

with the consistency of cause and effect relations that we observe on a day-do-day basis. For this

reason, Aristotle’s contribution to the discussion is both original and invaluable. However, due

perhaps to his underlying tethers to the presupposed datum of the non-transcendent god of

Ancient Greece, it becomes difficult for us as honest inquirers to take seriously his natural,

holistic system in which nature has an end in itself. More than anything else, it is Aristotle’s

slippery ideal of the Unmoved Mover that presents the crypticism in the context of this

discussion of teleology.

In conclusion, then, it is safe to say that there are really only two basic options for any

discernable notion of final cause: namely, eliminativism and intentionalism. There are certainly

no deductive reasons for each contrary position’s claim to truth, but as we discovered there

seems to be an intuitive reality to final cause as real rather than illusory. Aristotle’s observance

of consistency is the primary reason for this, and it is here where the discussion must lend itself

to the unproved, a priori presupposition of choice for the philosopher. It is for explanatory

power’s sake that we must give the edge to intentionalism.

Works Cited

Aristotle, Metaphysics. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.

Aristotle, Physics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.

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Edel, Abraham. Aristotle and His Philosophy. Chapel Hill, CN: University of North Carolina

Press, 1982. Print.

Randall, John Herman. Aristotle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Print.

Shields, Christoper. Aristotle. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Wang, Henry. "Rethinking the Validity and Significance of Final Causation: From the

Aristotelian to the Peircean Teleology." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce

Society 41.3. (Summer2005): 603-625. Academic Search Premier, EBSCO (accessed

April 18, 2010).