Dispositions and Final Causes
…the existence of each and every thing depends upon four causes: the efficient cause, the material cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. So this chair has a creator who is a carpenter, a matter which is wood, a form which is that of a chair, and a purpose which is to serve as a seat. Therefore, this chair is essentially originated, for it is preceded by, and its existence is conditioned upon, a cause.1
Abdu’l-Baha is here using, and in my opinion validating, Aristotle’s scheme of the four reasons why something exists. The Greek word that Aristotle used is usually translated as “cause”, but is more accurately translated as “explanation”, “reason”, or “because of which” something exists, because Aristotle’s usage tends to be rather technical and not particularly clear. He is attempting to answer the question of how or why something exists. Consider, for example, a statue made out of marble. How does the statue exist? According to Abdu’l-Baha and Aristotle, It exists because it is made out of marble, which is the material explanation or cause. If it were made out of bronze, it would be a different statue. The efficient cause is the action of the chisel, wielded by the sculptor, which shapes the marble. If the marble were not chiseled, it would not be a statue, it would only be a piece of marble.The formal cause or explanation is the shape of the statue – if it had a different shape it would be a different statue, or perhaps not a statue at all. The final cause is the reason that the statue exists, its purpose, which is that is expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty, for example.2
With the advent and success of the scientific revolution, initiated by Galileo, Copernicus, and Bacon, efficient causes came to dominate, and the other three causes lost their influence. The philosophy of causality is surprisingly complex.3 There are several schools of thought on the question, with none of them being completely satisfactory. Efforts to produce a satisfactory explanation of causation which includes all of the various kinds of causes have all failed, which has led to the proposal that causality is a primitive, a fundamental property of the universe, fundamental in the sense that it can be used to explain phenomena without itself being explainable. It is rather like “point” and “line” in Euclidean geometry: they are primitives that can be used to derive the system of geometry, but are taken as foundational axioms which can’t be justified by anything else. In the same sense, causality is primitive in that it forms the basis for all of explanations of the goings on of the real world, from physics to statistics, but the effects of a cause are not sufficient reason for concluding that causes actually exist.
Many, if not most, of the schools of thought are based on empiricism, i.e., based on the claim that only material entities exist. Empiricism claims that the only things that have true can be detected by our five senses, and anything that can’t be detected by our senses does not exist, In other words, unobservables do not exist in the external world: they are only ideas in our minds that don’t correspond to anything real. David Hume argued that because causes are not detectable by the senses, they don’t really exist, that they are conclusions in our minds resulting from, for example, the fact that when we observe event A, event B always follows. Our minds tell us that A causes B, but the fact of the matter is that our belief that B will happen when A happen is based on all of the repetitions of that sequence that we observe. There aren’t really any causes, they are simply the results of how our minds structure reality and only exist in our minds. Another example would be the observation that unsupported things fall towards the earth: the observation is that they fall, gravity is an invention of our minds to explain that phenomenon. However, Abdu’l-Baha seems to say that these realities that we infer are in fact real, although they are not sensible: “If we were to deny all that is not accessible to the senses, then we would be forced to deny realities which undoubtedly exist. For example,… [t]he power of gravity is not sensible, although its existence is likewise undeniable. Whence do we affirm their existence? From their signs.” 4
As noted in the first paragraph above, Abdu’l-Baha identifies another kind of cause that is not based on empiricism: the final cause, or purpose of a thing. He further states that God has deposited that purpose within us: “Similarly the merciful God our creator has deposited within human realities certain virtues latent and potential. Through education and culture, these virtues deposited by the loving God will become apparent in the human reality even as the unfoldment of the tree from within the germinating seed.” 5 And Baha’u’llah states in the Arabic Hidden Words that we have a destiny: “O SON OF BEING! Thy Paradise is My love; thy heavenly home, reunion with Me. Enter therein and tarry not. This is that which hath been destined for thee in Our kingdom above and Our exalted dominion.” 6
Obviously schools of empiricism cannot recognize final causes of the kind identified by Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha. There is, however, a school of thought than can acknowledge final causes, known as dispositionalism. In philosophy, disposition has a technical meaning: “a property that consists not in the present state of an object, but in its propensity to change in a certain way under certain conditions, as brittleness which consists in the propensity to break when struck.” 7 An unmanifested disposition exists as a potential which will become active when certain conditions are met. For example, a baby has a disposition to acquire language, but they will not be able to speak until they physically develop to the point where they have voluntary control over the muscles required to speak. (It should be noted that dispositions becoming actualized often do so as a process: in the case of speech and language, there is a clear progression from the language abilities of a toddler to the ability to give a speech or write a book, for example.) Another example is an infant learning to walk: it is clearly disposed to do that, but it has to wait until its legs are strong enough. Dispositions have their own causal powers, the power to speak and the power to walk are examples.
Thus a true disposionalist thinks that dispositional powers are real and inherent in an entity as its destiny. Dispositions are primitive, meaning that they can’t be broken down into parts and cannot be seen as effects of other causes. (Whether inanimate, material objects have dispositions is, in my opinion, philosophical hair-splitting in that they can be explained by efficient causes, but it should be obvious that they do apply to life forms.) Dispositions are thus, like the point and line of geometry, taken as necessary preconditions for the development of life, whether plant, animal, or human.
God has a purpose in creating us, as revealed In the Short Obligatory Prayer: “I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.” 8 Given that our purpose is to know and worship God, it follows that He has deposited within us the dispositions and powers to achieve those goals, as potentials to know and to worship, which we possess at birth, and which can be developed over the course of our lives if we so consciously chose to do so. It should be noted, however, that because we have free will, we can chose not to develop them, in which case we will not achieve what God has intended for us.
- Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, Chapter 80 (www.bahai.org/r/358668317) ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art ↩︎
- See, for example, the article on causality at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the book Causation: A Very Short Introduction, by Stephe Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Oxford University Press, 2013. ↩︎
- (Some Answered Questions) (www.bahai.org/r/731006642) ↩︎
- (The Promulgation of Universal Peace) www.bahai.org/r/058239873 ↩︎
- Baha’u’llah, The Arabic Hidden Words, number 6 ↩︎
- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/disposition ↩︎
- Bahá’u’lláh, (Bahá’í Prayers) www.bahai.org/r/636636986 ↩︎