Answering an Objection to Hume’s Critique of Causality

David Hume, who along with Berkeley remains the profoundest of empiricists to this day, made a very famous argument against causality.  Essentially, we see events happening one after the other and simply assume necessary connection between them, even though we have no sense impression of such necessary connection in the form of causality.  Causality is a concept we impose on our experience, not something we actually experience.

When we see a billiard ball roll across a table and strike another billiard ball, we see the one ball touch the other ball and then see the other ball roll, but we don’t actually see the causal connection between these events.  The balls could be moved in a similar way by magnets under the table, and in that case the movement of the second ball would not be caused by it’s being struck by the first — yet, the phenomenon would be similar to that that would obtain were the first ball to actually strike the second.  Thus, we cannot actually get any sense experience of causality.

Hume also says for those things in our heads that we have never experienced, such as unicorns, there is an explanation inasmuch as they can be described as composites of other impressions we have experienced.  An objection to Hume’s rejection of causality is that the idea of causality could not have been constituted from a combination of other ideas, that there is no reasonable explanation for why we should have such an idea if we have never had any experience of it (granting Hume’s premise that knowledge comes through experience).

I have a counter-objection to the protest that causality would not even feature in our thoughts if we did not experience it.  Such an objection begs the question by demanding a causal explanation of the presence of the idea of causality in the mind.  It assumes that which it is trying to prove, that there must be some causal reason for the presence of the idea of causality.  It is a meaningless objection therefore.  If causality is an inapplicable concept, which follows when we accept Hume’s premise that knowledge is gained from experience, then there need not be a causal explanation for why the idea of it arises.

The best attempt at salvaging the idea of causality was made by Kant, who described causality like space and time as a category of thought, existing prior to all experience, which allows us to make sense of the raw phenomenal data we perceive.  Again, though, one must presume the necessity of causal explanations, and, thus, the applicability of causation to our understanding of reality, in order to accept this Kantian account.  I would argue an empiricist like Hume, or other phenomenalists such as Nietzsche, need not do this.

Speculation on Being, Becoming, Fate, and Striving

“This is our purpose: To make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.”

~ Oswald Spengler

When we step outside pure analytic philosophy and examine not only our own experience, but that of all other living organisms in our experience, certain facts come to mind.  The following constitute a little bit of speculation, linguistic arrangements organized in such a way that a glimpse of the ineffable may be had, with some effort.  I am not aiming at Truth, but rather wisdom.

• We possess no being, yet we strive for it. There are many interpretations of Nietzsche’s assertion that life is Will to Power, as that perspectivist philosopher might have expected. One such interpretation may be that living things — perhaps best analyzed as biological complexes of drives, urges, and wills — are not “beings” per se but rather becomings, striving continuously, dynamically toward Being.  Life struggles against all that would contain it in a desperate, and ultimately fatal, attempt at permanent impression ever outward from itself.  Degeneracy, a physiological weakness, comes about when the striving toward Being takes the form of attempting to reach Being by means of destroying the self, that an immaterial and permanent “Being” might be attained — denial of the world into which life is thrown.
• “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist,” wrote Nietzsche in a passage published in The Will to Power after his death. Nihilism is a result of physiological degeneracy, judging the actual world of Becoming as inferior to, or a shadowy reflection of, a sublime, non-spatiotemporal Realm of Forms, Ideas, Being. Thus Platonism, and Christianity, point toward nihilism in their rejection of Becoming, of the Flux that is necessitated by a general “absence of essence”.
• If we are to accept as a premise that there are no such things as “essential qualities”, we may take one of two routes, as far as I can see.  The first option is that nothing — in the sense of “no [particular] thing” — exists in the sense of having Being, full stop. The second option is that all ephemeral things are essentially identical in that they share the one and only essential quality, that of Being.
• Democritus, the atomist, was the Laughing Philosopher because he understood that we humans are lumps of matter that cannot admit they are matter.  Heraclitus, the flux theorist, may well have been the Weeping Philosopher because he understood we are Becomings constantly seeking after an individuated Being that cannot be realized, insisting against all evidence that we are the same that we were a second before, tragically fated to fail at attaining our ultimate task: Permanence.
• We humans seem to be the only living species the members of which understand they will perish.  We know that the Being we — as living things — seek after is elusive, that the task before us is utterly impossible, Sisyphean.  Yet we continue to strive toward it, either toward a sense of Being or toward a cessation of the Becoming we experience, by means of creativity, procreation, or religion in the first instance, or suicide in the second.  Both routes ultimately take us to the same place, nothingness.  What this suggests is that we can never change our ultimate destination, but we can change the ways of Becoming by which we reach it.

Nothing particularly profound has come out of this discussion, but it is interesting to see what one does with the thoughts floating around in one’s mind.  Heraclitus and Nietzsche, two of my favorite philosophers, have put all the ideas here better, but one has to start from somewhere.

Before we can make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us, as Spengler tasks, we must make as much sense as possible of this life that has been bestowed upon us.  With tools we know will fail us at the crucial point — nouns, verbs, words that refer at once to everything one can refer to, but also nothing, since they are not strictly connected with reality or, more accurately, experience — we set upon the parallel to the fatal task of striving toward Being: We try, desperately and with perfect knowledge of the impossibility of the project, to describe how it is that a continuity of experience can possibly obtain in a world of Becoming, or if such continuity is merely a “spook in the mind” (with thanks to Stirner). Is there any way out of skepticism, solipsism, nihilism?