8/11/2019 The four causes and the ancient.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-four-causes-and-the-ancientpdf 1/5

The Four Causes: Aristotle's Exposition and the AncientsAuthor(s): Robert B. ToddSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1976), pp. 319-322Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708827 .Accessed: 06/06/2014 11:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 2 00.16.5.202 on Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:55:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

8/11/2019 The four causes and the ancient.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-four-causes-and-the-ancientpdf 2/5

THE FOUR CAUSES: ARISTOTLE'S EXPOSITION ANDTHE ANCIENTS

BY ROBERT B. TODD

The teacher's need to simplify the complex has rarely been better servedthan by the familiar illustration of Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes. Wetake a sculptor at work on a statue; the marble block is the material cause, theaction of sculpting the efficient cause, the formal cause is the shape of thestatue, and the final cause is the purpose for which the statue is intended. Theonly problem with this illustration is that it does not appear in any Aristotelian

text; in fact Aristotle varies his illustrations of each of the four causes and usesthe case of the sculptor to demonstrate only the relation between the efficientand material cause.' Observing this disparity, R. K. Sprague, in a notepublished a few years ago,2 protested any illustration of the four causes by asingle example. On philosophical grounds her argument was entirely con-vincing and I shall not try to restate it here. However, she cited only a handfulof modern scholars as exponents of such illustrations.3 Since this did justiceneither to the ancient lineage of the most famous of these-that of the sculptordescribed above-nor to the question of its transmission to the modern lectureroom, I would like to supplement her note with some preliminary observationson both topics.

There are, as far as I know, three ancient texts in which the four Aris-totelian causes are illustrated by a sculptor at work on a statue. The earliest isin Letter 65 of Seneca where in an important discussion of the Platonic andStoic causes4 he gives a more elaborate version of the exposition outlinedabove. Next we find it in a work by the Peripatetic commentator Alexander ofAphrodisias (c. A.D. 200) who in ch. 3 of his defato, a polemic against the Stoicdoctrine of fate, employs it in almost exactly the same terms as Seneca.5 Thispassage was later quoted verbatim by Eusebius in his Praeparatio Evangelica.6Finally, there is a very compressed statement of our illustration byAlexander's contemporary, the Christian father Clement of Alexandria, in Bk.8 of his Miscellanies.7

The contexts in which these authors employ the example differ widely.

'Phys. B3, 195a 6-8; cf. Metaph. A2, 1013b 6-8. At de gen. an. B18 the statueexample illustrates just the material cause.

2 The Four Causes: Aristotle's Exposition and Ours, The Monist, 52 (1968), 298-

300. 3Sprague, 299 n. . 4Ep. 65.4-6.5Defato 3, 167. 2-12 Bruns. In describing the formal cause Seneca refers to the fact

that a statue is called doryphoros or diadumenos (the two most famous works ofPolyclitus) in virtue of its form; Alexander speaks in more general terms of a statue'sform being of a diskeuon or akontizon. Again one of the final causes mentioned bySeneca is religio, sidonum templum paravit [sc. the sculptor] while Alexander refersto eis theous eusebeia tis.

6P.E. VI. 9. 3-6, 328. 18-329.9 Mras.7Strom. VIII. IX. 28. 2. For the final cause Clement mentions he time tou

gymnasiarchou while Alexander cites time tinos.

319

This content downloaded from 2 00.16.5.202 on Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:55:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

8/11/2019 The four causes and the ancient.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-four-causes-and-the-ancientpdf 3/5

320 ROBERT B. TODD

Seneca is giving a very general account of different theories of causation;Alexander is using Aristotle's four causes in an attempt to show that an Aris-totelian theory of fate can be constructed from the notion of the efficientcause;8 Clement is providing a description of causation in which Stoic andAristotelian doctrines are being synthesized. The only common factor in thesetexts is that they each provide a schematic account of Aristotle's doctrine andare not intended as a commentary on his text. The presence of thissimplification in such contexts is as explicable, therefore, as its absence fromany of the ancient commentaries on the relevant Aristotelian works which arecontrolled by the philosopher's actual words.9

There is no great significance in the juxtaposition of Stoic and Aristoteliandoctrines in the texts from Seneca and Clement. Seneca refers to the Stoiccauses, viz. God and matter,10 while Clement cites a standard list of five typesof cause described in a highly technical terminology.11 There could hardly havebeen any rigid doxographical catalogue of Stoic and Aristotelian theories ofcausation in which the sculptor/statue illustration is employed.12 Its originscan perhaps be best understood if we assume that it was originally employedby Peripatetics. Its presence in Alexander suggests this, and there are othercases of illustrations employed by Aristotle for a single limited purpose whichwere exploited by his exegetes in more elaborate ways.

Alexander, for example, in his de mixtione13 llustrates Aristotle's theoryof organic growth (described in de generatione et corruptione A5) from themanner in which the earth could assimilate an additional and larger masswhile, like a growing body, preserving its own shape; this illustration is,however, only used as an hypothesis by Aristotle in a discussion of thesphericity of the earth in de caelo B14. Again the image of puppets on a string,employed in Aristotle's biological works with the restricted purpose of illus-trating the nature of physical motion, is converted by Alexander into a generalcharacterization of the processes of nature. 1 The illustration of all four causes

8On this see G. Verbeke, Archiv fir Geschichte der Philosophie, 50 (1968), 73-100at 77-87.

9Alexander's commentary on the Physics is lost, but this illustration is not in those

by Themistius (fourth century), Simplicius (first half of the sixth century), or

Philoponus (c.490-570), all of whom utilized Alexander's work.10These are elsewhere described as Stoic principles (archai); Aet. Plac. I. 3. 25, and

Diog. Laert. VII. 139. For other evidence: Von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Frag-menta, II, nos. 301, 304, 305, 310, 312.

1Strom. VII. IX. 25ff.(=Sto.

Vet. Fr., II, no.351).

Alexander refers cursorily tofour of the items on this list at defato 22, 192. 18-18 Bruns. On the details of these andrelated texts: A. A. Long, Archivfiir Geschichte der Philosophie, 52 (1970), 249 n. 10.

12In the doxography Aet. Plac. I. xii. 4 describes the Aristotelian causes withoutillustration and contrasts them only with Stoic causes characterized in very generalterms.

1316. 237. 5-20 Bruns.14Aristot. de gen. an. Bl, 734b 10ff. and de mot. an. 7, 701b 2-4 with Alexander ap.

Simplic. Phys. 311. 7-16, 30 Diels. Again the image of heaven in a millet-seed (hoouranos en te kenchro) that occurs in Aristotle's discussion of time (Phys. A 12, 221a22)

is employed by commentators to describe the general paradox of two bodies being inthe same place: Simplic. Phys. 530. 24 Diels, and Philop. Phys. 505. 24-25 Vitelli.

This content downloaded from 2 00.16.5.202 on Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:55:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

8/11/2019 The four causes and the ancient.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-four-causes-and-the-ancientpdf 4/5

ARISTOTLE'S EXPOSITION AND THE ANCIENTS 321

by the case of a sculptor at work on a statue rather than the two actuallyillustrated in this way in the Aristotelian text is, I believe, best regarded asanother form of this scholastic tinkering.

At what point in the history of the Peripatetic school such an elaborationmight have taken place is a matter of guesswork. Since the illustration was acommonplace for Seneca it must at least have been formulated in the period ofrevived Peripatetic scholasticism that followed Andronicus of Rhodes's editionof the Aristotelian schooltexts (the corpus as we now have it) in the laterdecades of the Roman republic. Seneca, we know, had known a freedman orpossibly a relative, Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, who, although a Stoic, played apart in this revival with a commentary in Greek on the Categories.15 Standard

Peripateticillustrations could therefore have had wide

currency amongother

schools. On the other hand, our illustration could have originated from anearlier period; certainly the works of Eudemus and Theophrastus, whoinitiated Peripatetic scholasticism in the first generation after Aristotle'sdeath, were still read by Alexander of Aphrodisias.

If the ultimate origins of the sculptor/statue illustration remain obscurewe do at least know when the ancient works in which it occurs becameavailable in the medieval and modern worlds. It has quite recently been es-tablished that probably between 1250 and 1280 William of Moerbeke trans-

lated Alexander's de fato into Latin;16 three Latin translations of the workwere made in 1516, 1541, and 1544.17 The first printed edition of Seneca ap-peared in 1475. Eusebius' Praeparatio was translated into Latin as early as1470 by George of Trebizond, and into Italian in 1550. Finally, there was amajor Greek edition of Clement of Alexandria in 1550 and a Latin translationin the following year by Gentianus Hervetus, himself a translator ofAlexander's defato.

It seems likely that the medieval translation of the de fato did not havewide currency.18 The safest claim to make is that a teacher in search of a clear,

if slightly misleading, illustration of a central Aristotelian doctrine could haveeasily found it in ancient sources by the last quarter of the fifteenth century.But so far I have not found evidence that anyone so availed himself. My search

among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works has not been extensive; cer-tainly the major histories of philosophy of the seventeenth, eighteenth, andnineteenth centuries do not employ this illustration,19 and I have in fact foundno earlier usage than the earliest quoted by Professor Sprague, that of H. H.

'5Simplicius refers to this work in his commentary on the Categories, e.g., 62. 27Kalbfleisch.

16P. Thillet, Alexandre d'Aphrodise, De Fato ad Imperatores. Version deGuillaume de Moerbeke (Paris, 1963); the dating is specifically discussed at 22-23.

'7F. Edward Cranz, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, ed. P. Kris-teller (Washington, D.C., 1960), I, 107-10.

'8Thillet, 27 n.4.19E.g., Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy (1st. ed., London, 1655), Jacob

Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophiae a mundi incanabulis ad nostram usque aetatem

deducta, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1742-67), and E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrergeschichtlichen Entwicklung (1st. ed., Tubingen, 1844-52).

This content downloaded from 2 00.16.5.202 on Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:55:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

8/11/2019 The four causes and the ancient.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-four-causes-and-the-ancientpdf 5/5

322 ROBERT B. TODD

Joachim in his posthumously published notes on Aristotle's NicomacheanEthics.20

Lecture notes are not of course philosophical treatises and are rarelyprinted as were Joachim's; our famous illustration could have flourished inpedagogy without necessarily surfacing in works written with close attentionto the details of the Aristotelian text. Until some evidence appears we shall notknow how influential were the ancient texts that we have discussed, or whetherdifferent generations independently rediscovered the value of extending Aris-totle's limited use of the sculptor/statue illustration to cover all four causes.But it is very hard to believe that our ancient authors were without influence.Charles B. Schmitt has shown how an ancient comparison of Aristotle to a

cuttlefish, like the sculptor example also loosely derived from an Aristoteliantext, was used widely in the works of Renaissance philosophers.21 More exten-sive research might uncover a similar popularity for a famous illustration ofone of this philosopher's doctrines. Then, although this overextended sculptorwill have long since been retired from the lecture room on the philosophicalgrounds presented by Professor Sprague, we shall at least have established forhim a lineage worthy of his longevity.

University of British Columbia.

20Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1951). The lectures date from thefirst decade of the century.

1 Aristotle as a Cuttlefish: The Origin and Development of a Renaissance Image,Studies in the Renaissance, 12 (1965), 60-72.

This content downloaded from 2 00.16.5.202 on Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:55:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions