If you agree that the primary unit of reality is Beings, then there are no "causes".
If beings are the reality, then the first step in anything is the freedom of some Being as expressed spiritually; and that is not "a" cause. It can be thought of as some kind of action of their "self", their ultimate nature.
This can't be explained, because it is the ultimate. If it could be explained, it would not be ultimate.
"Causes" are abstractions, they are the product of some consciousness drawing lines around some chunk of living reality, of detaching something specific from a reality that is not thus divided.
Beings are alive and always-living, and their "actions" are dynamic and a totality. If we divide the living behaviour of a Beings into causes, or events, or actions; then this is (just) a model of reality.
The boundaries of the cause (its definition) are artificial and not really-real.
Since we communicate by models, and by abstractions, this might seem like meaningless hair-splitting; but regarding causes as if they were real discrete entities has been the reason for much incoherent, confusing, and even demoralizing philosophical reflection, over centuries, perhaps millennia.
People draw lines around causes, and do the same for "effects" - on the assumption that these are ultimate and real categories - on the assumption that these models are instead reality; and then they find that they can't understand freedom, or creation, or love, or anything fundamental when using these models.
The confusion is caused by the (false) assumptions of the models, and it is therefore mistaken to infer that the confusion is as aspect of reality.
I try to remember this when I find myself reasoning about causes and effects; but it isn't easy - because the cause and effect way of thinking is built into our assumptions...
To the extent that we use cause and effect reasoning to try and explain Beings - when reality is in the opposite direction!
Note: These notions were stimulated by some aside-comments by Laeth. Although I am confident of the reality of what I am saying; I'm aware the above points are hard to follow. The best I hope for, is that something of this will lodge in your mind, and you will think it through for yourself - next time you find yourself wresting with the paradoxes and contradictions of cause and effect thinking.
4 comments:
I wanted to read more on your posting but the link to "aside-comments by Laeth" does not work, coming up with a blank page.
@AF - Link fixed.
Berdyaev argued that freedom precedes being. I still haven't been able to truly grasp what he meant there (he wasn't referring to Beings -- just being), but his thinking did help me focus on the vital significance of freedom and how the whole cause and effect arguments sorely miss the mark in that regard.
The primacy and ultimacy of Beings is the only way I have been able to square freedom in my mind, with freedom as an uncreated, innate, essential, and inseparable part of Beings. For me, freedom dissolves and becomes meaningless once abstractions like causes and effects are put forth; however, as an innate part of Beings, it becomes far more comprehensible and closer to my lived experience.
@Frank - "being" seems like an abstraction. My assumption is that Beings are eternal, so nothing precedes them. As an assumption this can't be proved! But I can't make sense of anything else.
Interestingly, it was while a scientist that I *began* to recognize the way in which all cause and effect reasoning requires a primary qualitative division of the world into entities, causes and effects - and this should not be taken for granted as self evident. All normal science comes After these divisions have been made.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9474352/
Another thing that made me think about it was Rupert Sheldrakes morphic fields - and the question of how you knew what was a field, and what was not. He never addresses this, and indeed could not do so from a scientific paradigm.
Exactly the same point can be made about Thomism-Aristotelian philosophy - it all happens After the main qualitative distinctions have been assumed. But where do they come from?
My answer is that the true ones are built-into us by God, so they are innate - which is why I have such a bias in favour of a child's eye view of metaphysics.
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