Cause and effect ...

Recently I reread Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), in which is much of his sceptical writing on cause and effect. After closing the book, what's one to say but: Hume's premises, Hume's conclusions. For all his artful encomia to scepticism, he's never sceptical about his premises. They're uncritically presupposed (presupposing uncritical readers). And when these premises direct him to absurdities, Hume doesn't disabuse himself of their direction. (Therefore it can be said that he's modern philosopher.)

Hume (leaning on Malebranche?)

Where did Hume live qua philosopher? In the qualia-quanta duoverse created by the early-moderns, of course. And his causation conundra are species of a genus peculiar thereto. Remember that causal powers or forces (qua powers and forces) can't exist in the quantaverse. Their homeworld is the qualiaverse. But how, then, are the worlds to interact? Direct interaction is precluded (on pain of nonsense). The answer is: God. He's the intermediary. Hence occasionalism (most famously that of Malebranche, but cf. Al-Ghazali and Ockham), wherein there are no natural causes at all. We'd say that A causes B, but really God causes B when A (the 'occasion') is present. We'd say that the noonday sun wilts the grass, but the sun hasn't active power, nor the grass passivity to be acted upon. God wilts the grass (or 'wilts' the 'grass'). A sunburn is really a Godburn. Etc. (Note that the quantaverse is now a superfluous appendix; it's understandable that Berkeley had it removed.) Thus, as the universe became a duoverse, cause and causatum came to mean miracle¹ and miracle²; as techne drove out physis (see post on Chomsky), the miraculous drove out the natural. But to introduce God in this way (qua Deus ex machina) is to forego explanation. And Hume has at the occasionalists accordingly (e.g. Enquiry, pp. 65-66, Cambridge UP), yet he's committed to the same metaphysical premises (e.g. the same dysteleo-nominalism) that necessitated their calling upon God as explanans. (He also borrowed from T. Taylor's translation of Malebranche so liberally for his Enquiry that 'if Hume were a modern academic, he would not escape the charge of plagiarism.' [S. Buckle, Hume's Enlightenment Tract, p. 191.]) The saying goes: Hume is occasionalism minus God. That's not a bad way of putting it. He follows the occasionalists almost all the way, stopping just short of their miraculous solution, and his stop-short conclusion is: causation is 'entirely arbitrary' (Enquiry, p. 32); cause and effect are 'entirely loose and separate,' words 'absolutely without any meaning' (ibid., p. 68).

To save the causal phenomena, Humeans have retreated to regularity theories. But regularity theories (like counterfactual analyses) do not look at causation per se. To specify a regularity is not eo ipso to specify a cause. (For example, whenever bricks smash windows there are window-smashing sounds, but these are not the causes.) The analysanda here may or mayn't be causally efficacious, but if they are, they're not so qua regularities. And if we ask why there are these regularities, we're not answered.

By contrast, consider the later mediæval philosophies of causation, predicated on Aristotle's act-potency, four-cause metaphysic. Here actus and potentia are a complete division of all that is or can be. 'Potency and act divide being and every kind of being' (Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.77.1). And the famous four (be)causes—formal, material, final, efficient—are four categories of explanation which, all together, are to deliver a complete understanding of the phenomenon. (But don't put the phenomenon in the wrong drawer!) Causal principles are then built up on these foundations. For example, that nothing can go from potency to act save by that which is in act—i.e. a potency qua potency (active or passive) can't actualise itself—and that cause and effect must be proportionate (for nemo dat quod non habet, you can't give what haven't got).

Now, modern philosophers (Hume among them) proceed with a reductive efficiency-only understanding of causation. For an Aristotelian, this is no more intelligible than a reductive one-dimensional understanding of four-dimensional spaces. Moreover, efficient causes are logically late, they'd say. Actio sequitur esse, action follows being (logically). For example, an efficient cause is that which actualises a potency, but a potency is a potency for an actuality. Thus efficiency presupposes finality, and finality presupposes efficiency.

'The [final cause] is not the cause of that which is the efficient cause, but it is the cause of the efficient cause being an efficient cause' (Aquinas, De principiis naturae, 4.29).

Side note: The mediæval doctrine of finality was not well understood by early-modern thinkers, whose eisegesis was that it projected conation onto that which had no mind and could not be subject thereto (e.g. onto inanimate substances, like salt). Whereas, in fact, the Schoolmen (who lived in a universe, not a duoverse) had believed that re agentibus naturalibus final causation was non-mentalistic, non-conative. Thus Aquinas: 'It should be understood that, although every agent [...] intends an end, it does not follow that every agent knows or deliberates about the end ... In the case of natural agents, the actions are determined ... [They] intend an end without deliberating about it. And this intending is nothing other than having a natural inclination toward something.' (De principiis naturae, 3.16.) Example: salt (sodium chloride) 'naturally intends' to dissolve in water, in the literal, Latinate senses of the terms nature and to intend. Sodium chloride qua sodium chloride (formality) is in these circumstances directed at this outcome (finality)—that's what it is to be salt.

Hume also presents a (false) disjunction in the Enquiry (which he 'borrowed' from Malebranche): cause and effect are connected either with absolute necessity or with arbitrary contingency. (And they aren't connected with absolute necessity. Therefore, etc.) But causation is neither/nor. The former necessity is too strong and the latter contingency is too weak. Don't forget, actio sequitur esse. It isn't that A must cause B, but that A precisely qua A is directed at or tends toward B, so that A will cause B ceteris paribus.

Hume's arguments are further premised on the belief that cause and effect are discrete events in temporal succession. But disunite cause and effect in this way and you needn't hope to reunite them afterwards. The fateful move has been made, and you're foredoomed to absurdities. The Aristotelians would say that the (proximate) efficient cause has to be simultaneous with its effect. Thus Aquinas: necessarium est causam et causatum simul esse, 'it is necessary that the cause and the caused exist at the same time' (DPN, 5.43). Plus, a cause is not an event. Suppose there's a baker. He's kneading dough (active); dough is being kneaded by him (passive). He moves his hands like this (cause) and the dough is moved like that (effect). These are not (pace Hume) 'entirely loose and separate' successive events. There's but one event (that of kneading) twice told. (Thus Aquinas [in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics]: ‘Action and passion are not two changes but one and the same change, called action in so far as it is caused by an agent, and passion in so far as it takes place in a patient.’) And, besides, not all examples of causation are examples of events. There's causation in books leaning against each other, such that they don't fall over, but this is a state, not an event.

Look at these colourful events!

We could keep going—we could talk about Hume's conflation of concepts and images or about his performative self-contradictions (e.g. 'All knowable propositions concern either relations of ideas or matters of fact')—but enough's enough. The message in all of this isn't that the mediæval philosophers were right. The message is: slow down. (Wittgenstein: 'This is how philosophers should greet each other: "Take your time!" ') Are you lost? Bethink yourself, for maybe you took a wrong turn, or maybe your premises misdirected you. Even Hume says as much, almost writing an epigram upon himself as he animadverts against occasionalism:

'Though the chain of arguments, which conduct to it, were ever so logical, there must arise a strong suspicion, if not an absolute assurance, that it has carried us quite beyond the reach of our faculties, when it leads to conclusions so extraordinary, and so remote from common life and experience. We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.' (Enquiry, p. 67)

Well, well. With fairy-land friends like him, Modernskyism doesn't need enemies.

For Sarah R. ('Too much the daughter of Hume.')

PS: It's amusing that scientistic 'sceptics' nowadays adulate Hume. Had the Humeans their way, science would be done for, and scientism would be an even bigger joke than it already is. (But Daniel Dennett will wear his velvetine headpiece notwithstanding.)

A.N. Whitehead put it this way (in 1926):

'Since the time of Hume, the fashionable scientific philosophy has been as such as to deny the rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume's philosophy ... If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of Hume's philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain ... [Therefore science] has remained a predominantly anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naive faith ... It has never cared to justify its faith or to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume.' (Science and the Modern World, pp. 4-5, 20.)

Whitehead also propounded an answer to Hume:

'We must recur to the method of the school-divinity as explained by the Italian mediævalists' (Ibid., p. 55).

PPS: Herr Nietzsche understands:

'We reason, "this and that must precede for that to follow"—but we haven't thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a "miracle," as does every locomotion; no one has "explained" the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist—with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture—our picture!' (The Gay Science, §112.)  

' "Cause and effect." In this mirror—and our intellect is a mirror—something is taking place that exhibits regularity, a certain thing always succeeds another certain thing—this we call, when we perceive it and want to call it something, cause and effect—we fools! As though we had here understood something or other, or could understand it! For we have seen nothing but pictures of "causes and effects"! And it is precisely this pictorialness that makes impossible an insight into a more essential connection than that of mere succession.' (Daybreak, §121.)