Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6f; "dynamisches" Verständnis v. K. (Hume): Verlust v. Intelligibilität; Überzeitlichkeit v. Form, Substanz (Billardball) als Voraussetzung f. Wissen

Kurzinhalt: ... the reduction of cause to an event not only precludes the possibility of knowing the necessity or even probability governing the relations between things, but it eliminates the understanding of the things themselves at all, since no "thing" ...

Textausschnitt: The Unraveling of Intelligibility

148b There would be other ways to show the interdependence of the four causes, but the brief account given already establishes the principle that the causes cannot be understood in isolation from one another, so that to separate them is to distort them. Before we raise the issue of what understanding of being is required in order to be able to affirm an integrated notion of causality, we will first consider the implications of this distortion with respect to the intelligibility of things more generally. We have suggested that the modern view of causality did not so much eliminate some of the causes as it did reinterpret them in a dynamic, rather than an ontological, sense. We wish to argue now that this reinterpretation in fact undermines their intelligibility more radically than is typically acknowledged. (Fs)

149a As we saw at the outset, Hume affirmed the dependence of knowledge on causality, which he in turn described as the regular succession of contiguous events in time. Having described things thus, he points out that the mind has no access to any necessary connection between the two, but only to the one event that precedes and the other that follows. This exhaustively "dynamic" notion of causality is, we might say, a paradigmatic expression of the dis-integration we have been describing. Unities are always supra-temporal — which does not mean that they do not exist in time, but only that their existence in time does not account for the whole of their reality. An identity, which is a type of unity, remains numerically the same over the course of a multiplicity of moments, which means that its reality transcends each one of those moments and so cannot be reduced to it. To define causality in strictly temporal terms is not to show that there is no basis for knowledge, but in fact to take the absence of that basis for granted at the outset, which is of course to beg the question. (Fs) (notabene)

149b It is interesting that Hume does not link knowledge to essences or forms, or to intrinsic teleology, all of which imply a unity, but rather to the physical interaction between things, an event. As a merely physio-temporal event, this encounter — if the word is appropriate at all in this context — is wholly extrinsic. Nothing about the interaction reveals the meaning of either of the things involved, or bears significantly on that meaning. Indeed, it is wholly a matter of indifference what the cause and effect are in themselves, but only that they happen to connect at this point in time and space: there is no communication (of form), which means that the effect tells us nothing about the nature of the cause. Now, it follows directly from this that there can be no essential necessity to this relation. If the two things relate to one another in a wholly extrinsic fashion, their interaction will be altogether accidental, or in other words arbitrary in relation to the meaning of things, regardless of the empirical reliability of the law to which they appear to conform. In this case, the regularity of their interaction — should it happen indeed to exhibit some regularity — is simply a matter of probability, a likelihood that always only asymptotically approaches necessity as something extrinsic to itself. Given Hume's definition of causality, he cannot but deny any essential difference between what we call knowledge and the belief based on custom and constantly reinforced by experience. (Fs) (notabene)

150a But Hume did not draw the full implications of his starting assumptions; more needs to be said here. It is not merely the necessity of the connection between cause and effect that gets lost the moment we reductively temporalize the relation and see them therefore as wholly extrinsically connected, but intelligibility itself founders at its root: we are in this case not simply unable to predict things with the absolute certainty that necessity offers, but the very possibility of any sort of understanding is undermined as well. As we mentioned above with reference to Spaemann, even a wholly "positivistic" view of causality derives whatever intelligibility it possesses from an implicit affirmation of teleology. One cannot distinguish a cause from the essentially infinite number of conditions preceding the effect without some minimal reference to final causality: this reality differs from the others in that it acts "for the sake of" this effect; its activity has the purpose of producing such and such an effect. If there is nothing but wholly extrinsic relations, it would make no sense to distinguish a "post hoc, propter hoc" fallacy from a valid analysis of a causal relation, because there would be only "posts" and no "propter." Thus, not only would we lack a basis for attributing any necessity to the connection between cause and effect, but we would in fact have no way of identifying any causes, which means we would also lose the ability to identify something as an effect, insofar as doing so depends on identifying a cause. Along with necessity, there would be no such thing as probability. (Fs) (notabene)

150b At an even more fundamental level, the reduction of cause to an event not only precludes the possibility of knowing the necessity or even probability governing the relations between things, but it eliminates the understanding of the things themselves at all, since no "thing" whatsoever can be a "thing" unless it is an intelligible whole. If there is no form as an internal principle of unity that identifies a thing as what it is and distinguishes it from everything it is not by gathering up the multiplicity of parts and aspects and ordering them around a center, then the mind seeking understanding has, as it were, no place to go in its relation to things. It is interesting to note that, addressing the question of the possibility of knowledge, Hume immediately speaks of the connection between things, and considers whether it is possible to affirm necessity of this connection. But he does not first raise the question of our knowledge of the things themselves that connect. He evidently takes it for granted that we are able to identify the first billard ball, and then the second, even if he rejects the claim that we can identify anything in experience that we could call their causal connection. It is only later that he introduces the issue of substance, and of course denies that we can have knowledge of it, since our experience of things is limited to their accidents: our relation to things is, indeed, just as extrinsic as the colliding billiard balls. For Hume, the mind seeking understanding is drawn outward, away from things and toward their external relationships. (Fs)

151a The implications of this turn however extend further than Hume seems to have realized. He denies substance, and speaks instead of accidents; he denies knowledge, and speaks instead of experiences and impressions that give rise to belief of varying degrees of compelling power. But isn't an accident also an object with its own form, a meaningful whole that is not merely the sum of its parts, and couldn't we say the same for any experience or impression, not to mention the notion of knowledge or belief? The strictures that Hume demands would render unintelligible the very language in which he demands them. (Fs)