tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126049.post1717168789296933704..comments2024-01-22T11:42:42.772+08:00Comments on FideCogitActio : omnis per gratiam: Why fertilizer?Codgitator (Cadgertator)http://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126049.post-54271669698103156992009-11-19T14:39:46.831+08:002009-11-19T14:39:46.831+08:00OK this is interesting, but I have to go to sleep ...OK this is interesting, but I have to go to sleep as a means to a certain end. <br /><br />I plan on answering fully, probably after the weekend. But here's a preview: what you are calling the corns final cause or natural end is arbitrary. I'll elaborate.GarageDragonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11399828220100913111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126049.post-33583019396433076662009-11-19T13:20:57.871+08:002009-11-19T13:20:57.871+08:00(CONT.)
Second, you either took for granted the ...(CONT.)<br /> <br />Second, you either took for granted the corn's completion of "becoming corn" or arranged your examples based on the on an implicitly teleological scale of value. In the first case, only corn which had "achieved maturity" and was harvested could end up on a theater floor, in a person's mouth, etc. Your examples rest on a fallacy of comparing apples and oranges (or grains and rats, as it were). The obscure results you hypothesize have no <i>intrinsic connection</i> with the corn's <i>own natural generation as corn</i>, if for no other reason than that corn had to reach its proper end <i>before</i> it could be involved in such cases. Only corn that had already attained its proper end could be eaten by a rat. What the corn in your examples is doing, is not "failing to be corn," but screwing up other ends, relevant to other organisms, only extrinsically related to corn itself. This is precisely why finality is not anthropocentric as critics maintain: corn would be corn “in its own way” (i.e., of it own nature) even if extrinsic human ends were not grafted onto it. (Cf. the catastrophic “banana argument” for God: we know bananas would do their own thing in nature without human cultivation because we know, via heuristic finality, that bananas have intrinsic nature only extrinsically and contingently related to human finality.) My examples about fertilizer and pesticides addressed the corn's tendency to actualize its potential, while your examples take that actualization for granted and then complicate completely different potentialities in different contexts. <br /><br />In the second case, your reference to rotten corn implies that this would refute or contradict my citing the corn's “natural tendency to ripen” qua a form of finality. If rotting on the ground is a counterexample to natural finality, it is so only because it presupposes the validity of ripening as an example of natural finality. What does "rotting" mean if not the corruption of an otherwise “smooth” principle or process? You might as well say that harvest is the "failure" of crops to "reach" their proper end of rotting. But that would be absurd, since part of our definition of corn includes its mature stage, not its corruption. If rotting were intrinsic to "what corn is," there wouldn't <i>be</i> any corn. <br /><br />I think some of your resistance to natural finality rests on a false dilemma, much as Dennett’s anti- (or at least pseudo-) teleology does. Natural beings don't need to achieve ends "perfectly" in order to manifest final causality, precisely because final causality is not efficient causality. Rather, the whole point of final causality is that it connects our formal grasp of "what a thing is" with "how the thing behaves." <i>Actio sequitur esse.</i> <br /><br />In any case, the main thrust of this post is not about crops as such, but about the importance of heuristic finality in our engagement with the world. If organisms didn’t tend to do such and such in connection with this or that, we would have no predictive “traction” as scientists (not a term I claim for myself, mind you). But we do have such “traction,” ergo, etc. <br /><br />Best,Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126049.post-36195392552211994872009-11-19T13:20:33.674+08:002009-11-19T13:20:33.674+08:00unBe:
Your caveat is well taken, but I think it&...unBe: <br /><br />Your caveat is well taken, but I think it's off the mark for two reasons. <br /><br />First, I wrote "ends" not "end." There is not a single end for corn when considered by itself. Dennett acknowledges this near the middle (?) of his comments when he says finality is relative to environment (though he doesn’t notice how this implies a complete scale of being which grounds the finality of all “nested” systems). Ends are relative to the larger context in which organisms flourish. Admitting that in now way compromises the reality of creaturely (teleological) flourishing. <br /><br />Let me ask you: are humans natural beings? Yes, obviously. Is corn ever "good (or bad) for" human interests? Clearly, yes, as your various examples illustrate. As a result, corn functions towards various natural ends in various natural contexts. As there is not one single context in which corn exists, there is not one single end towards which it exists. Precisely because humans are natural, and precisely because humans employ final causality, ergo, nature includes final causality. Cf. Aristotle's <i>Physics</i> II.8: he was well aware how preposterous a facile reference to finality looked (and specifically with reference to the vagaries of corn!). Better yet, read pages 12-14 of De Koninck's essay where he cites that passage and relata.Codgitator (Cadgertator)https://www.blogger.com/profile/00872093788960965392noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126049.post-20467817131328516992009-11-18T23:39:01.134+08:002009-11-18T23:39:01.134+08:00"it is a goal fully cognizant of the crops..."it is a goal fully cognizant of the crops' natural ends"<br /><br />Uh, no.<br /><br />A corn kernel has a multitude of possible ends. It could be eaten by a rat, be popped and swept off the floor of a porn theater, choke a child to death, decorate a table, lodge in a diverticulum leading to surgery, grow into a corn stalk, or rot in the ground.<br /><br />How do we determine which of these is "the" natural end? <br /><br />Fertilizer is used to skew the probability of one possible end occurring rather than another.<br />If you observe and compare all the likely ends, "rot in the ground" is the most likely end (I'm guessing) unless humans intervene.<br /><br />Most seeds are destroyed before reproducing. This is true of fertilized human eggs as well, throughout most of human history.<br /><br />We would probably agree, however, concerning the value of some ends occurring rather than others. But all the ends are natural. Nature is indifferent to the outcome.GarageDragonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11399828220100913111noreply@blogger.com