Aristotle’s Four Causes and Tinbergen’s Four Whys

This article overlaps astrology and culture and is posted on Garry Phillipson’s excellent website here from where it can be freely downloaded: https://cosmocritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/douglas_graham_aristotles_four_causes.pdf

It is shown that the Angular Houses of the typical birth chart deal with similar themes to Tinbergen’s Four Questions about the biology of animal behaviour. Aristotle was principally a biologist and a correspondence between his Four Causes and Tinbergen’s Whys has been noted by several writers. Although causes are closely connected with change, neither of these two quaternios involve time or form a cycle, whereas astrological charts do obviously have a cyclic component as well as a synchronic structure. In response it is interesting to review two sets of four that modern scholars have developed. One by the social anthropologist Alan Fiske claims to identify four fundamental logics of human social relationships, which he has analysed as a series of mathematical structures, similar to the well-known scales of measurement used in data analysis: these are the Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio scales.

Astrology existed well before sciences and humanities diverged, so if there is such a radical deep structure to human cognition, as Fiske claims, then it ought to be detectable in the humanities too. To test this, I examine the sets of four categories which the historian Hayden White brought together in his book Metahistory, to see if they too plausibly relate to the patterns just mentioned. I suggest that the closest connection or analogy between the humanistic and scientific structures exists at the most basic level: between the scales and the so-called ‘Master Tropes’. This term was invented by Kenneth Burke, but it derives from the 18th Century scholar Giambattista Vico. His book, The New Science (1744), was strongly influenced by Francis Bacon, and along with Goethe’s work it represented an attempt to hold together the sciences and humanities.

Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance is suggested as an appropriate context for making comparisons across a wide range of fields.