Causality reexamined
|
The trick is to extend a proposition to
something which has little or nothing in common with the matter in
question but the similarity of the word; then to refute it
triumphantly, and so claim credit for having refuted the original
statement.
|
Arthur Schopenhauer
|
It is one of the few
injustices in Bertrand Russell's History
of Western Philosophy,
that he failed to appreciate Schopenhauer's thesis for his doctorate.
But it is
really one of the seminal documents conclusively closing a debate which
had
begun with Descartes and was carried to the extremes by Berkley, David
Hume and
Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer was very much a no nonsense thinker who
felt
nothing but contempt for people like Hegel (his bête noir) or
Fichte. He had an
open mind for the sciences, yet came a bit too early for Gregor Mendel
and
Darwin. So Schopenhauer proposed his philosophy of a blind, but
all-pervasive
will behind the shifting specter of never ending changes.
There are many ways to
understand the meaning of philosophy,
but I believe Bertrand Russell had put it best: "Is there anything
we
can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown
to exist
outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge
from pure
thought to things, if not, not." Schopenhauer was
trying to answer this in his
fourfold exposition of the "principle of sufficient reason," and it is as good an
answer
as anybody possibly could give, who is putting himself under the
constrains of
Berkeley's idealism. It is Schopenhauer's refutation of Hume's
skepticism.
David Hume concluded that
causality is a common bias which
'a priory' enables us to operate on our empirical sensations, yet ”out
there”
is nothing but the coincidental proximity of recurring phenomena. (The
question
“why” and “how” did not occur to thinkers of this age. The – to us –
obvious
answer, that organisms with a different bias go extinct and therefore
our
notion of causality must correlate to something real, would have been
dismissed
as to too simplistic and beneath our dignity.) Yet philosophical
idealism does
have its merits. It directs our attention to the fact that the mind’s
projection of what is perceived to be the external world is not
necessarily a
correct representation of the empirical phenomenon as such. And if that
is so,
why does a sensibility based on the concept of causality operate so
efficiently?
Schopenhauer was a
classical rationalist of the old school.
Like his master, Immanuel Kant, instead of postulating a convenient set
of
inborn instincts or acquired intuitions, he prefers the premise, that
there is
a logical reason, an axiomatic necessity, for the way we slot and
pigeonhole
perceptions and employ our operative ideas. So how does this work?
In essence Schopenhauer
takes "perception" not to
be a product of our sensations, but of understanding. In other words,
what our
senses present to our cognition is already no longer raw data, but a
percept, a
ready to use element, crafted and shaped by the four linchpins of
common sense:
causation, plausibility, geometric features, and psychological
motivation. So
there is a chain of mental events: sensation is converted by an act of
recognition to become a perception. From this it is only one logical
step
further to Schopenhauer's first premise of his mature philosophy that
the world
is "my will and representation," because the "objective
world" which we
naively take to be given to our senses is in fact a product of
processing data
by our senses. To illustrate this point just consider how the mind
compensates
for mild astigmatism: the afflicted still perceives a correct picture
of the
object. And this is a faculty animals seem to share with us. What makes
man
different is the scope and sophistication of his percepts.
Schopenhauer is at his
best in his exposition of causation.
By shifting it from a relationship between things to a relationship
between different
states of things, he shows the fallacy in Hume's skepticism. It is not
the sun
as such that melts the snow but the absorption of heat causes in water
a change
from crystalline to liquid – two stages of the same thing. This causal
relationship between changes is judged to be necessary and not merely
to be an
incidental regularity. Our exposure to such regularities authorizes
what
Schopenhauer called a "hypothetical judgment" or in modern parlance a
"counterfactual inference."
But our absolute trust in
such judgments comes from nowhere
but from within ourselves. It is a feature of our sensibility and we
apply it
on every event we can imagine, and not just on events from actual
experience.
It forms the kind of intuition that makes us “a priory” look for things
to
happen in a certain way. Schopenhauer then continues to explain the age
old
philosophical adage, that no thing ever comes into being or ceases to
be.
We observe changes.
Matter, which always has existed,
undergoes certain transformations; it loses certain properties and
acquires
others, until, at a given point, it presents itself as a flower.
Eventually the
flower will perish but its matter doesn't simply disappear. It turns to
compost, thus feeding the seeds of new plants and so on in infinity, in
ever
changing configurations of matter. In other words, notions of a "first
cause" (and its theological implications) are dismissed as baloney. "Causation," Schopenhauer notes, "is
not like a hired cab which one dismisses once it has arrived at its
desired
destination."
Modern science seems to
be on a speeding train away from
such quaint exposition of the works of common sense. We have entered
the realm
of counter-intuitive phenomena and the facts of modern physics require
new
logical tools. These days the more respectable section of modern
philosophy
occupies itself with symbolic logic and algorithms. The rest of us is
just
satisfied that the world fits into our thoughts because we fit into the
world.
© – 5/9/2009 – by
michael sympson, 1,000 words, all rights
reserved
