If you're trying to understand something, one of the most important things to ask is,
what is it for?
St. Thomas Aquinas following Aristotle, speaks about this as the end or the finality of a
thing--that for the sake of which it exists.
This is sometimes given a more modern name, teleology, drawn from the Greek word for,
"an end," telos.
It's easiest in talking about this to start with artificial things.
A car is for the sake of transportation, a clock is made to keep time, and we cannot fully
understand these things unless we understand this end for which they exist.
Now, Aquinas would argue that teleology or being ordered to an end, that this is found
everywhere.
He thinks it's a universal truth that everything that acts, acts for an end.
This may be confusing to some people today and might even seem doubtful, but we quite
naturally think along this line.
For example, your eyes are made for seeing and your teeth are made for chewing food.
That's why teeth are made of such hard material.
That's their material cause and why they're shaped as they are.
That's their form, and this is why it's a bad idea to open a beer bottle with your teeth.
They're not made for that.
If you show up at your dentist office with broken teeth, he will probably tell you this
with a kind of strong moral disapproval.
Now, Aquinas thinks that there's a kind of directedness in all things, even in inanimate
things.
In the world of plants, a tree seeks to grow upwards towards the sunlight.
And in the world of inanimate things, a stone resists being broken apart.
While on earth, it has a tendency, a kind of directedness to fall towards the earth's
center.
A match has a directedness to generate heat.
St. Thomas in talking about things like this, does not mean that a match is conscious of
a desire to generate heat.
The match isn't thinking about anything.
Aquinas is thinking of the reliable pattern that things like matches insofar as they are
matches, do precisely this--
they generate heat.
Even contemporary science in a certain way presupposes this.
Science aims to understand reality, which means discovering whatever is intelligible in it.
Even where we might at first think we see chaos or randomness, science is often able
to show us that there is in fact within it a dynamic system with ordered rules and systematic patterns.
In other words, there is an intelligible order that our minds discover already existing in
the universe and we detect it wherever there is a reliable pattern of cause and effect
as in the theories of the Big Bang or evolution or in quantum physics.
St. Thomas argues that this order ultimately must come from an intelligent source, which
he calls God, who is the ultimate end of all things.
There's one further and important conclusion to draw from this.
If things have a natural tendency or inclination, if as the kind of things they are, they're
directed towards something, then they will be most perfectly what they are when they
are most perfectly doing what they're directed at doing.
It's bad for your eyes to be blinded.
It's good for them to see.
Attaining to the end or the goal is thus, more than just a description about your eyes.
It also tells us something crucial about what is good for a thing and what leads to its
flourishing.
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