Aristotle’s four causes presuppose an artisanal model of production

Evidence

Here we have evidently to do with a setting of the work in contact with economic, rather than social, reality: the coordinates of such analysis will therefore no longer be those of ideological formation, but rather of the forms of commodity production. Yet any thoroughgoing description of an object qua object has an obligation to come to terms in one way or another with the Aristotelian four causes—formal, material, efficient, and final—as an inventory of the various points of view from which an object may be understood … But Aristotle’s model derives from the world of artisanal production and handicraft; it projects a process in which an agent, imitating a given pattern, forms a certain material in order to create an object which then has some determinate use, such as a cooking pot, an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry, or a spear. It is clear that to the degree that the work of art is itself just such a handmade product, there is a preestablished harmony between the Aristotelian model and the aesthetic object which (among other things) it has been called upon to illuminate. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 750

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concise diagram of how Aristotelian causality is itself historically conditioned by a handicraft mode of production — a model instance of dialectical historicizing of a supposedly universal conceptual scheme.
• XREF: Connects to Lukács’s historical method of grounding categories in their mode of production and to Heidegger’s peasant-world model of implements in the following paragraph. — connects to: Under capitalism the Aristotelian four causes must be refracted through class and commodity structure — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 752; For Aristotle, moral reflection and association-making generate human politicalness. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 173

Broader Connections

• Under capitalism the Aristotelian four causes must be refracted through class and commodity structure #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 752
• For Aristotle, moral reflection and association-making generate human politicalness. #qualifies (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 173