Aristotle: Life as Self-Creation

This chapter focuses on Aristotle’s theory of the four causes and the way Aristotle applies this explicative framework to living beings. Their material cause is the body parts, the functional units from which their bodies are composed. The efficient cause is identified with the father, or rather father’s form (species). In the course of embryogenesis, this cause is internalised and the nascent organism itself becomes the cause of its vital movements, including the movement of self-formation. The formal cause is to be understood dynamically, as a complex of vital movements in which a particular, species-specific manner of life takes place. This form of a living body is its soul, i.e., its propre animation. Thus understood, the form merges with the final cause. Finality, or the aiming at a predefined final state, is characteristic of embryogenesis as the ontogenetic movement which (normally) leads to offspring that resemble their parents, both individually and in terms of species. The final cause of the body parts is the function they have in the body; they develop in order to exercise their vital activities. The whole organism does not serve an external purpose: its finality is to be itself, to fulfil its own form.