the causes

I just read this at Plastic Bodies:

“It will come down to whether or not you accept the reality of final, formal, and perhaps material cause in addition to efficient (and, for Harman, vicarious) causality.”

Strange as it may sound, I’d never before considered how vicarious causation maps onto the four traditional causes. After thinking it over briefly, I think they’re all vicarious. In other words, vicarious causation wouldn’t be a 5th category of cause, but would be the mode in which each of the other four operate.

But there are no “final causes” for me except in Heidegger’s drastically reworked sense, which is not teleological. Namely, things can be assigned to projects and these projects can (in a limited sense for me, unlike for Heidegger) define the being of the thing that is used for them.

Elder Thing

Though I’m on record as saying it’s impossible to depict Lovecraft’s monsters visually (given the way he purposefully undercuts his own descriptions of those monsters in the very moment of offering them), some attempts are better than others. And THIS ILLUSTRATION of the Elder Things in “At the Mountains of Madness” may be the most suitably grotesque rendering I’ve ever seen. No wonder the dogs couldn’t stand these creatures!

There are dozens of other Lovecraft monsters there as well. Hat tip, Tim Morton, who I believe hat-tipped Zachary St. Denys Price in turn.