One thought on “On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence”
First, Schopenhauer’s argument would block Aquinas’ proof of God as Being Itself, but it doesn’t do anything against Aristotle’s argument to the Unmoved Mover. For even if one grants that “change presupposes an unchanging substrate”, it’s still true that the substrate’s potential to be something specific is realized by some cause, which must be distinct from itself; and therefore, if change happens at all, there must be a being that’s just actual without having any potential to be realized.
Second, there is independent reason to reject Schopenhauer’s premise that change presupposes an unchanging substrate. Ultimately that leads to a version of atomism, and an account of change as merely rearrangement of the atoms – these days those would be the elementary particles of quantum mechanics – which, crucially, are themselves thought to be eternal and unchanging except for their positions and velocities in space. But QM asserts that its elementary particles are not eternal and do change. In particle decays, the particle which was there ceases to exist and is replaced by other particles entirely; and there is no substrate that exists continuously across the moment of decay. (Several abstract quantities – energy, momentum and charge among them – are conserved through the decay, but those aren’t things, just properties of the particles.)
First, Schopenhauer’s argument would block Aquinas’ proof of God as Being Itself, but it doesn’t do anything against Aristotle’s argument to the Unmoved Mover. For even if one grants that “change presupposes an unchanging substrate”, it’s still true that the substrate’s potential to be something specific is realized by some cause, which must be distinct from itself; and therefore, if change happens at all, there must be a being that’s just actual without having any potential to be realized.
Second, there is independent reason to reject Schopenhauer’s premise that change presupposes an unchanging substrate. Ultimately that leads to a version of atomism, and an account of change as merely rearrangement of the atoms – these days those would be the elementary particles of quantum mechanics – which, crucially, are themselves thought to be eternal and unchanging except for their positions and velocities in space. But QM asserts that its elementary particles are not eternal and do change. In particle decays, the particle which was there ceases to exist and is replaced by other particles entirely; and there is no substrate that exists continuously across the moment of decay. (Several abstract quantities – energy, momentum and charge among them – are conserved through the decay, but those aren’t things, just properties of the particles.)