Martin E. Turkis II, “Space for a Post-Critical Platonism: A Response” Tradition & Discovery, v. 51, Excerpted pp. 20-22. The full essay is Turkis’ response to comments on his book by Dale Cannon, Vincent Colapietro, Graham Harman and William M. R. Simpson and is HERE.
…it is clear that formal and final causes have been making a comeback since the latter days of the twentieth century. This can be seen in a variety of contexts, not least in the work of thinkers like Graham Harman or the Neo-Aristotelians with whom I engage at length but also in the context of emergence theory (even if, in the context of totalizing emergence theories, such causation is left hanging in midair, so to speak). We see it as well (though perhaps sometimes implicitly) in conversations surrounding movements like systems biology and more explicitly with respect to biological research such as Michael Levin’s. That is not to say, of course, that there are not plenty of detractors, but it can no longer be taken as settled that only material and efficient causation are fair game.
Polanyi’s work sits squarely at the forefront of thinking that questioned the reigning twentieth century assumption that Aristotle’s thinking on this could be safely ignored and thus forms a crucial part of the resuscitation of formal and final causation with allies in the groups I reference above. That said, I am wary of claiming that Polanyi’s work as it stands makes formal and final causation undeniable to their sceptics, though I do think that those forms of causation are undeniably central to Polanyi’s own metaphysics, even when he does not explicitly invoke them.
This is in part why I flesh out the ways I take formal and final causation to be active in the structure of comprehensive entities. As I put it in chapter 5,
…a comprehensive entity…consists of a set of meaningful relations among its subsidiary particulars which are harnessed by the entity’s being as formal cause and oriented forward and beyond by its being as final cause, issuing in the IFMs it sends out as ripples in the surrounding reality. (Turkis, 173)
So the joint meaning of a comprehensive entity which yokes its subsidiary details into their roles in the comprehensive entity’s structure is where we see formal causation. The entity acting as a final cause makes its impact on the larger surrounding reality by means of IFM creation. There are, of course, all kinds of ways in which material and efficient causation are harnessed by both of these higher-order processes. But what of the causal link between the actualized, particular comprehensive entity, let us say a particular black-tipped reef shark, and the Form which holds open the potential for the actualization of black-tipped reef sharks? What sort of causation is operative here? In retrospect I do not think what I say in my book is quite clear enough on this, though I do invoke Ana Marmodoro’s (2021, 75) use of the term “constitutional cause” (Turkis 2024, 196). An older term for what Marmodoro is getting at there, with a deeper Platonic pedigree, would be to refer to this as a paradigmatic cause. In the teachings of late Neoplatonists such as Proclus, Aristotle’s four categories of causation5 were included along with the transcendent paradigmatic causation characteristic of the Forms (Steel 2003). As I continue to think through the development of post-critical Platonism, I would formally adopt this causal schema which explicitly combines Aristotle’s four causes with the paradigmatic causation of the Forms.6
It is interesting to walk through some of this in the context of the aforementioned xenobot experiments by Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts. The xenobots (again, novel organisms which arise from the separation of embryonic frog skin cells and then go on to navigate their environment, reproduce, etc.) are immanently emergent—that is to say that the scientists did not know for sure in advance what such cells when loosed in this way would do. This marks, as Chalmers noted about consciousness, the need for additional explanation. This leads Levin, as we saw earlier, to speculate about a Platonic space in which possible morphologies exist in a state of rational relations such that one “can get something for free” by tapping into and actualizing such a possibility. A post-critical Platonist gloss on this might run thus:
Actual xenobots, comprehensive entities which come into the actual mode of being in Levin Labs rather than through the process of evolution, are only novel in the immanent sphere of actuality. They already existed as a possible stable, open system, to use Polanyi’s formulation, which is to say as a transcendent Platonic Form, ready to exercise its paradigmatic causality wherever and whenever the proper contingent conditions were met. There are possible worlds in which those conditions never do obtain and thus in which there are no actual xenobots, but in our actual world the scientists involved in the experiment set in motion the requisite scenario and actualized xenobots. Thus the scientific arrangement allowed for the transcendent paradigmatic cause to touch down in the immanent sphere, providing a paradigmatic explanation of xenobots as actual comprehensive entities. The xenobots themselves exercise formal causality in harnessing their repurposed cilia, taking in nutrients, moving about in order to continue their hazardous striving (to again invoke Polanyi), etc. They are final causes in their very existence, which makes an immediate impact on the surrounding reality in a variety of ways, from the disturbance in their liquid environment due to their motility to the surprise, fear, delight, or what have you which they induce in the range of humans who become aware of their existence.