/lit/ - Literature

>>20343589
I had written a paragraph on the notion of finality in Aristotle's thought, so let me copy it here:

>There is an idea of directionality in Aristotle's finalism. The final cause is defined in the Metaphysics as the goal for which the being whose cause it is is made. This is why we have a qualitative approach to forms in Aristotle: forms are characterized by finalities that condition the behavior of the things of which they are forms. If the plant grows when it is sown in fertile ground, it is because it is this behavior that it must adopt if it wants to achieve its end, or reach its entelechy, which is to grow to give a mature plant. The entelechy of the acorn is the oak tree. What is remarkable is that, for Aristotle, most natural beings possess their own end, which is therefore immanent. It is therefore in a way accidental that man is a moral being, and this proceeds from the fact that man is an intelligent and rational being. Since man's immanent purpose is to realize himself fully as a man, he must fully realize his potential as a reasonable, political and contemplative being, and morality is precisely a corpus of rules that allow man to move from the being he is to the being he could be if he fully realized his telos.

In MacIntyre's case, we have to look at the post-Aristotelian developments that came to reinterpret the Aristotelian teleology. After the advent of Christianity, which brings a personal, good and charitable God, philosophy will integrate that creation is a consequence of divine love, and the finality of the creature will be decentered from its Aristotelian immanence to form a great teleological chain which brings every being, or at least the human being, to a transcendent finality founded in God (which was inconceivable in antiquity). The characters of the human telos understand therefore not only that man is a political, social, contemplative, and tutti quanti being, but also that he is a spiritual and essentially religious being, whose ultimate finality is therefore the accomplishment of the thing for which he was made (in the same way that the finality of a tool is to accomplish a specific action), that is to say the worship of the unique God. To know the means and the object of worship, which are not known to us naturally, because they are beyond our intelligence in touching the mystery, we must necessarily refer to a divine Revelation, and this is the meaning of the coming of the prophets in the Old Testament and (in part) of the coming of Christ.