Cause
“Aristotle speaks ex professo of final causes and sets them up as the true principle of the investigation of nature. Indeed, every good and normal mind, when considering organic nature, must hit upon teleology; yet unless it is determined by preconceived opinions, it will not by any means hit on either physico-theology or the anthropo-teleology censured by Spinoza”-
Arthur Schopenhauer, the World as Will and Representation vol 2
What Schopenhauer is talking about in the above passage is referred to in philosophy as teleology; the study of purpose or intention taken as a general principle underlying nature and existence, both personal and universal.
Under the influence of Aristotelianism, European philosophy took there to be an intelligible rationale or cause which ran through and guided the world of experience, and further conceived of it in line with a theological idea of a divine mind, assumed to be very akin to the human mind. Therefore, the Aristotelian scholastics regarded every phenomenon in nature and nature itself to be comprehensible in the way that a human crafted object would be, in terms of ‘causes’. The two important causes for us here are the efficient cause and the final cause. The efficient cause is that by which something comes to be, and the final cause is that for which something comes to be. The efficient is therefore something that, in terms of time, is behind a phenomenon, the final is before it. .
What Schopenhauer, after Kant, proposes is that our intellect conditions the world as it appears to us. The activity(ies) which we subsequently call sensing, or the reception of data through the senses is organised by apriori structures of consciousness. These apriori structures, or forms of understanding are the conditions which make perception of the world possible. While any specific phenomenon or group of phenomena can be imagined as either existing or not, that is to say, while any phenomenon can be imagined away, nothing can appear in consciousness that is not represented spatially, temporally and within causality.
Schopenhauer insists that the law of causality concerns only objects, never the subject. This is because causality is subordinate to the very first form of representation, the condition which all subsequent forms of the principle of sufficient reason presuppose – namely the form of presentation of the world as object for a subject. Therefore whether the phenomenon of causality is solely to be located in a particular brain or a brain in concert with the rest of the phenomenal world from which it is inseparable or world as representation of which it is a phenomenon does not damage his insight that the inner nature or being-in-itself of the phenomenal is outside of space, time, and causality these being subordinate forms of the world as representation to the basic subject-object form.
The only access to knowledge of the inner nature, or being-in-itself of the world is through ourselves or rather through experience of our body-existence. In our experience of our body we have at once a phenomenon like any other as well as that which is for us not mere phenomenon. We experience our body from the inside so to speak, as something through which (and as which) is made manifest, or objectified, or enters into the world as representation our intents, motives, choices in other words, our will. Will is therefore strictly speaking, neither subject nor object but only appears in these forms through the structures of consciousness. However, as the being-in-itself of our phenomenal subjectivity, it could be named the pure Subject, or absolute identity of all things that appear in and as the world and ourselves.
What Schopenhauer argues is that because in our experience of bodily existence will and motive are coincidental (he considers our bodies themselves as manifestations of will, so that our intention in moving, the movement of the body, and the body itself are all united in experience) we tend to focus on looking for the final cause, or motive/intention, when looking at a natural phenomenon, much more than at the efficient cause. Schopenhauer doesn’t dismiss final cause, but says rather that motive becomes apparent only with intelligence. The intelligence manifest in way other organic phenomena operate may be a collective one, like with bees and ants
When Schopenhauer appears to side in the above passage with Aristotle over Spinoza (who regarded our concepts of causes as mere fabrications) it is only in particular way; he would, like Spinoza, hold that causes are, in a sense, mental ‘fabrications’. But since these mental fabrications belong to the world as representation, subordinate to the basic condition for representation, namely, subject object bifurcation, they are phenomena of the same will, to look for ‘causes’ and motives in natural phenomena is simply the will regarding itself through the conditions of human knowledge.
Just because an individual human sees in the operations of an ant colony an intelligible motive (or final cause) to which the individual ants themselves may be oblivious, doesn't negate the validity of ascribing cause to the whole phenomenon. But as he states elsewhere, “The law of causality finds application to all things in the world, but not to the world itself, for this law is immanent to the world, not transcendent”