No Infinite Regress in the Causes: The Middle, the Moved Mover, and Matter's Downward Direction

Orientation #

He says the assertions of this passage are what the third and fourth readings (Thomas’s division) will go on to prove, and previews their order. He recalls an earlier discussion (prev. lecture, not resolved by the context block) of “ground” and “mother earth” as names for cause and matter. The previous class covered the second reading (truth and wisdom) and previewed the third; the next continues with the “downward” series of matter.

The class, in order #

1. The assertion: a beginning, and causes not infinite (“There’s a beginning, and not infinite”) #

The point: at 994a (his “line nine ninety four”; Thomas’s chapter two) Aristotle asserts that there is a beginning and the causes of beings are not infinite, “neither in a straight line” (one kind of cause) “nor according to what kind of cause” (the kinds too are limited), and then breaks this up by the four causes.

• Matter: “this from this” cannot go on forever, e.g. flesh from earth, earth from air, air from fire, “and this does not halt or stop.” He notes the root of episteme in the word for coming to a halt.
• Aside on Heisenberg: he “never thought this could go on forever” (molecules from atoms, atoms from protons, protons from elementary particles…). The weak-minded say “atom” meant indivisible and “proton” meant first and neither turned out first, so maybe it goes on forever; the great scientist naturally moves against that. Everyone guesses toward a first, no one the opposite.
• Student: is this a first formed matter or a first matter simply? Answer: he need not say; he asserts only that there is a first matter, formed or not (Aristotle himself held first matter to be pure ability). Left open here.
• Why matter first: all the Greek philosophers agree there is a first matter, though they disagree what it is.
• Student on Heisenberg and quarks: he does not recall the word “quark,” but yes: the elementary particles seemed the first forms of matter, yet were not eternal and changed into one another, so there seemed an unformed matter; Heisenberg says we know matter only through the forms of matter, as Aristotle would, since it is not knowable by itself but pure ability.
• Mover: hothen (whence there is a beginning of motion) is the definition of the mover. Example: man moved by air, air by sun, sun by strife (Empedocles), “and of this there be no peras,” no limit.
• End before form: hou heneka, that for the sake of which, is the definition of the end. Walking for health, health for happiness, happiness for something else “and thus always.” Aside: Warren Murray’s colleagues at Minnesota, rejecting nature acting for an end, called Aristotle “the hou heneka man.”
• Form: “and likewise about the what was to be” [ed.: ti ēn einai]; Aristotle is very brief.

2. The plan of readings three and four, and why no direct proof for matter (“show that what he’s asserted here”) #

The point: readings three and four prove the assertions, but in an unexpected order.

• According to Thomas, Aristotle first gives a reason why there is a first mover; then, instead of proving a first matter, he shows the reverse: assuming A is first matter, B from A, C from B, D from C, this does not go on to infinite steps. Reading four: an end desired for its own sake, and forms not infinite, because of the connection between form and definition.
• A student asks why he does not argue directly for first matter, in what looks like a defense of all four. Three partial reasons (“no one by itself is fully convincing”):
  1. The first argument, though Thomas concretizes it as about the mover (Aristotle does not use the word “mover”), applies mutatis mutandis to all four causes, so matter is covered; then he shows something else about matter, “the abundance of his teaching.”
  2. All Greek philosophers agree on a first matter, so it is less urgent.
  3. Matter is the cause least important for the wise man: wisdom (Book Six) is about things that do not depend on matter for existence, either because they need not have it or cannot have it. Form is the beginning of being, and this is the science of being as being; the end is the cause of all the other causes, and (proemium) the wise man orders others, and one orders by the end, so he must know the end of the whole universe; the mover matters for the unmoved mover.
• Ranking for the wise man: form and end most, then mover, least matter. “You have to appreciate the wise man’s interest in these causes and what is being given more attention and what less.”

3. The text of the first argument (“Of those, of the middles”) #

The point: reading the words before reconstructing the argument.

• Ton gar meson: “of the middles, of which there is something last and something before, it is necessary for the before to be the cause of that which is after.”
• “If one were to say which of the three is a cause, we would say the first.” Not the last, for it is the cause of nothing; not the middle, for it is a cause of one only.
• “Very importantly”: “there is no difference whether the middle be one or many, and if many, whether unlimited or limited.”
• “If all the parts are middles right up to the now, so that nothing is first, then wholly there will be no cause.”

4. The argument reconstructed: moved mover as middle; the train (“You got the engine, right?”) #

The point: a moved mover is essentially a middle, and a middle with nothing before it is a contradiction.

1. A moves B, B moves C. Which is the mover? Not C (it moves nothing in this order); B moves C only because moved by A; so A most of all is the mover.
2. B, the moved mover, is what Aristotle calls a middle: as in plot in poetry, a middle is after something and before something. A moved mover is by definition a middle: as mover it has an effect after it; as moved it has something before it.
3. There are moved movers in this world; being essentially middles, they will not be (will not move) unless there is a mover before them.
4. It makes no difference whether there is one moved mover or many; a series of moved movers is “like one grand moved mover”; and if many, no difference whether limited or infinite in multitude.
5. So if there are only moved movers, there is only the middle, with nothing before it, which moves nothing. Conclusion: no causality.

• Train example: engine = unpulled puller; wagon = pulled puller, essentially a middle; caboose = pulled, last, nothing after it. Would the wagon pull anything if nothing were before it? Three wagons, or a limited or infinite multitude of wagons, are one grand pulled puller; take away the engine and keep adding wagons and you get no motion.
• Generalized: a “caused causer,” causing insofar as it is caused, is essentially a middle; if every cause is a caused causer, every cause is middle and, by hypothesis, nothing is before it.
• Applied to the end: a means is desired for the sake of something else; whether one means or many, the whole series is “one grand means,” means to what? If everything is desired for the sake of something else, nothing is desired, so no causality of the end, since the end’s causality is exercised by others desiring it, “the good is what all desire.”

5. Student questions: infinite series with a first; is the number the problem? (“provided there is a first”) #

• Student: is there any problem with an infinite series of moved movers provided there is a first? Answer: Aristotle does not address it; he is not talking of infinite steps gone through one by one but of things moving only insofar as moved, simultaneously. He sees no reason why there could not be an infinity of wagons in between, all moving at once, so long as something is before them; you could even have “an engine in the middle with an infinite number of cars.” Likewise Thomas’s first two ways, “you can’t proceed to infinity,” mean causes acting together; father generating son is not such (you do not generate your son insofar as you are being generated by your father).
• Student: so it is not the number that is problematic. Answer: no; Aristotle says so explicitly (one or many, limited or unlimited). The whole series, even infinite, is one grand moved mover; what is essentially a middle with nothing before it is a contradiction, so “Aristotle, in a sense, is reducing to the impossibility of a contradiction.”
• Student: if infinite it would have no end, so it would lack the “last.” Answer: the point is rather that what is by definition a middle must have something before it or it will not function as a middle.
• Means again: A for the sake of B, B for the sake of C; B is desired for something else and something else is desired for it, so essentially a middle. With the exception of “the last guy in the totem pole,” all are one grand desired-for-something-else with nothing before. A student presses that you could not have infinite ends-that-are-also-means, you’d need something that is just a means; he answers that they are considering the other end of the series, the middle thing, which cannot be a means without something before it.

6. Back to matter: how matter is a middle; the “downward” direction; ground vs. hanging (“going in a downward direction”) #

• Three partial reasons restated; “maybe a more basic reason” is that the first argument covers matter.
• Student: how would matter be a middle? Water from hydrogen and oxygen, these from electron, proton, neutron: a “middle matter,” made out of a matter before it and something made out of it after. Or tree, lumber, house.
• What Aristotle actually does is the other direction; Thomas notes the phrase epi to katō, “going in a downward direction.”
• English “ground” for cause (prev. lecture): the English imagine the cause below the effect, supporting it, everything grounded in the ground. The Greeks imagine the cause above and the effect hanging from it, as in Latin “dependent” from pendere, to hang, like a woman’s pendant earring. We do not always do that: we imagine the agent acting upon the effect; but matter is undergoing, and if matter is the most known cause, “ground” fits with matter and mother earth.

7. Digression: words for cause are borrowed from human society (“Who chopped down the cherry tree?”) #

The point: names like cause, law, obedience, ability, virtue come first from human affairs and are transferred to nature by likeness.

• Student: does causa have an etymology from human affairs? Greek aitia means “responsible”; perhaps Latin too, as in “accuse” (you are responsible for the murder). Hence a general definition of cause: “what is responsible for the being or the becoming of another,” what we can accuse of it. Whether “responsible” is more known than “cause” he leaves as “may be.”
• Parallel from Thomas via Avicenna: “ability” was first used in human affairs (we ask a carpenter’s or plumber’s ability to employ him), then generalized. Aristotle in the Politics: language is a sign man is a political/social animal; the other side is that language grew up to communicate about doing things together, so when natural philosophers turned to nature they had no words and borrowed.
• “Law”: needed in society; we still do not call a chemist a lawyer. Law produces regularity (drive on the right); regularity in nature is called “law of nature,” not law in the same sense. “Obey”: electrons obeying Newtonian or quantum laws, like driving left in England; no parliaments out there; the electron “follows” the regularity.
• Anaximander’s fragments speak of justice; scientists speak of “oxygen debt” and “sleep debt,” to be paid.
• “Who chopped down the cherry tree? Who’s responsible?” (to punish him); then something in nature seems similarly responsible.
• “Virtue”: Greek aretē meant manhood; Warren Murray’s plaque “much virtue in herbs, little in men”; our Lord on salt losing its ability to season (inferred: Mt 5:13); virtue in the broad sense is the quality or disposition enabling a thing to do its own operation well; Aristotle calls wealth the virtue of money (you can buy well) and poverty its vice.
• Claire: laws are not really causes; an electron obeying a law is no real causality. Answer: agreed, the word is borrowed because law produces regularity (looking down from the Tower of London at cars on the left, “the law must be different here”); it is not the cause as such, only a similarity.
• Aside: he used to kid the physicist at St Mary’s, “quantum jumps? don’t have any legs”; “jump” too is borrowed from legs.

His words #

• beginning; his rendering for the first cause in each order [ed.: archē]
• “halt or stop”; the root he notes in episteme
• first matter / pure ability; Aristotle’s first matter as unformed, knowable only through forms [ed.: prime matter, potency]
• hothen (whence there is a beginning of motion); the definition of the mover
• peras; limit
• hou heneka; that for the sake of which, the definition of the end
• “what was to be”; his literal rendering [ed.: ti ēn einai, essence]
• middle (meson); what is after something and before something, as in plot
• moved mover; essentially and by definition a middle
• unpulled puller / pulled puller / pulled; engine, wagon, caboose
• “one grand moved mover”; a series of middles taken as one
• caused causer; his generalization of moved mover to any cause
• “reducing to the impossibility of a contradiction”; the form of the argument
• epi to katō; “going in a downward direction” (Thomas’s note)
• ground vs. dependent (pendere, hanging); English and Greek images of cause
• aitia; responsible; cause as “what is responsible for the being or the becoming of another”
• aretē; manhood, then virtue; “the quality or disposition that enables a thing to do its own operation well”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics II ch. 2, 994a: the assertion that causes are not infinite, with the four examples; the first argument on middles (ton gar meson); the phrase epi to katō. Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Metaphysics II, readings 2, 3, 4 (order of the proofs); the proemium (the wise man orders).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (wisdom about things not dependent on matter).
• Aristotle, Politics (language as sign of the political animal); Aristotle on wealth as the virtue of money (locus not given).
• Thomas Aquinas, the first two ways (inferred: Summa theologiae I q.2 a.3).
• Empedocles (strife as mover); Anaximander’s fragments (justice); Heisenberg on matter and forms; Avicenna via Thomas on “ability.”

His questions #

• Is this a first formed matter or first matter simply? He need not say; only that there is a first; left open.
• Which of the three, A, B or C, is the mover? A most of all; B moves only because moved; C moves nothing.
• Would the pulled puller pull anything if there is nothing before it? No.
• Does it make any difference whether there be one wagon or many, limited or infinite? No; the series is one grand pulled puller.
• If everything is desired as a means, means to what? Nothing, by hypothesis; so nothing is desired and the end has no causality.
• Is there a problem with an infinite series of moved movers provided there is a first? Not addressed by Aristotle; he sees no problem, since they act simultaneously.
• How would the matter be a middle? Water from hydrogen and oxygen, these from particles; tree, lumber, house.
• Does causa have an etymology from human affairs? Aitia means responsible; Latin perhaps via “accuse”; he is not sure.
• Is “responsible” more known than “cause”? Perhaps, as “ability” was first named in human affairs; left as likely.
• Do laws really cause? No; “law” is borrowed for a regularity, not a cause as such.