How Complicated: A Cake

Let's say on a counter you have flour, butter, water and sugar. Is that a cake? Not yet it isn't. But if I intend to make a cake, can we call those things a cake? No, not yet.

What if I showed you those four things sitting on a counter and insisted it was a cake?

To practice being clear let's take it from start to finish with Aristotle. Those things sitting on the counter could be a cake some day, or they could be something else, or they could stay the same. The image or form of the "cake" he calls a formal cause. This is required. Without an idea of a cake, how would you make a cake? You wouldn't know what a cake is.

What trips up most philosophers and what is of most interest is the "agent." Who or what makes the cake? In this case, me. I am the agent who takes the four things and changes them into a form we call "cake." This brings up the most important "cause," the efficient cause. What makes the pieces come together into the form? Interestingly enough Aristotle does not believe it is the individual (in this case me) but the artistry. The rules or truths of the art make the cake move from ingredients to cake. Without the artistry, the ingredients would probably stay ingredients and not much more.

The goal of the whole thing? The cake. That is the final cause. The end I am trying to reach when I buy flour and butter and so on.

So when the philosophy teacher puts raw material on a counter and asks what it is, be prepared to understand that Aristotle means that all four of the causes (material cause is the first, the actual ingredients) work together to supply a complete (philosophical) picture of what it means to cause a cake.

It is also good for advanced students to realize that the complexity lies in the efficient cause. The art. As art students (or as philosophy students, etc) one needs to form an understanding of (like always) the confusion between subjective and objective. I guess what we are saying is this: Am I the art, do I contain the art? Or do I borrow the art, is it already out in the world and I go get it and learn it?

1. is the art in me? a part of me distinctly and essentially? (subjectivity)

2. or is it in the world and I go get it? (objectivity)

This distinction is at the art of many of the complex questions that make up the best practice and thinking exercises in history, including Rand's objectivity, Plato's cave, and Socrates' Euthyphro.

ps: subjective and objective have dramatically different consequences for theories of reality and for epistemology, the study of knowledge. What CCS is doing lately is analyzing these two historically to show a picture in which the "atomism" of conventional philosophy is aligned with the subjective outcome and "stoicism" of forgotten theories is aligned with objective outcomes. The former is aligned with postmodernism and the latter with objectivism and realism.