[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

I get that final causality does not require the agent to be conscious in order to be directed to a certain effect, but something about directedness nevertheless does appear to imply some ultimate "goalmaker".

This to me is the most interesting part of Feser's discussion about the Four Causes. It goes against our modern way of thinking, and is especially tricky when people are already on the lookout for religious ideas sneaking in to a supposedly neutral discussion. 

One person I read has claimed that what we call Final Cause is not a pre-ordained end, but just the effect that a thing can do, depending on its potential. So the heart's Final Cause is usually said to be pumping blood, but if you're a cannibal it could also be as the main course of your dinner. 

In this sense, water has any number of Final Causes. It can make things wet; it can make boats float; it can reconstitute your instant ramen, etc. In each case this is what water is "for," though it doesn't mean that God made water with instant ramen in mind. Again, I think it has to do with the actualization of whatever potential it happens to have. 

That said, I do think it is reasonable and not mystical to say that the heart in your chest is there in order to pump blood. It evolved that way. 

I mean, imagine you're giving a beginning anatomy lesson, and you talk all about the heart without saying what it's there for. "It's a muscle; it's as big as your fist; it has four chambers; that's all you need to know." That would be silly. To understand the heart, you have to know what it is good for and why you'd die without it. And all that is true even without an intelligent designer. 

I've had people who were so adamantly against anything being a Final Cause that they insisted the heart isn't for anything -- it's just there by chance, and aren't we lucky? The fact that it is there due to natural selection and not design doesn't mean it's not reasonable to see it as Final Cause.

added a bit later: I also think the word "final" may be misleading. It sounds a bit apocalyptic or something. But the Final Cause of a thing can be enacted (e.g. the heart pumping blood) even when there is another final cause waiting for it down the line (Hannibal Lector's dinner). "Final" is relative -- the end of a particular chain, but not every possible chain.

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I don't know. It cuts both ways....

Yes, I completely agree that what I reported about love before is only one way of seeing things, and probably not how we experience it in our lives most of the time. 

I guess part of the problem is that the English word "love" has too many different associations, many of which are incompatible. So it's fuzzy right off the bat. 

If you've read Iris Murdoch's books, the kind of irrational passionate love she writes about may be close to the Platonic, but certainly isn't guaranteed to end up with a stable marriage or a non-crazy relationship. 

The analogy I like is with music. Nobody goes to college and studies four years of music theory and music history and learns an instrument and then decides he loves music. You only do that if you already love music, for reasons that you probably can't describe. The love is an irrational attraction that comes first, and we may fill in conceptual details after. 

To me, though, if a person (maybe an android) learned everything there was to know about music and didn't love it, I might say that he didn't really understand it. To know it means loving it, not just passing tests about key signatures. 

This has been my experience with art. Beautiful things hooked me at a young age and I've been working to fill in the details ever since. 

But again, yes: loving art is different from having a crazy girlfriend.