Final Remarks

No, no, not those kinds of final remarks; rather remarks about finality.

You may either express relief or horror as the spirit moves you.
Final Word




De Cart

One of the things that most confuses the modern (and therefore the post-modern) mind is the notion of finality in nature.  Ever since Descartes decreed that henceforth -- because they could not be used to produce useful products for industry -- formal and final causes did not exist, the backfill required to cover over the conceptual collapse has muddied up the picture considerably.  Today, few even understand what these meant.

Part of the problem is the supposition that a philosophy of nature is in competition with natural science, as the term is used today.  Hence, the complaint that the pursuit of natural science is not facilitated by formal and final causation.  But this is simply due to a methodological choice.  It is like deciding a priori that the only thing worth knowing of a physical body is its weight and then declaring that a thermometer tells you nothing about how heavy the body is.  The choice made four centuries ago was that only metric and controllable efficient causes were worth knowing -- because only the metric and controllable causes would further the new goal of the new science; viz., the extension of Man's Dominion over the Universe.  Hence, all other efficient causes, as well as all formal and final causes, and even material causes, disappeared from the Weltanschauung.  But that the blinders worn by a race horse do not permit seeing certain things does not mean that those things do not exist in nature.
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