Causality, the domain of thought in which we assign causes and effects in the world, is a an unavoidable morass – hence its close connection to another of our “gateway concepts,” complexity. Inside the Liberal Arts devotes a chapter to each. But like complexity, causality is a manageable morass, in which we ultimately set the terms and frame the questions. If we follow the contours of nature in doing so, it’s because we have no choice: that’s what we’re dealing with here. And if answers to these questions are elusive, at least we can understand why they elude us.
Ultimately, they are under the yoke of the human mind. Causality and complexity exist as concepts to help us to curate our relationship to something even bigger, which we like to call reality. And if all this sounds abstract, well, abstractions are simply mental keys that open more and larger doors.
Let’s briefly consider the three aforementioned features of causality: unavoidable, manageable, and a morass. First, causality is unavoidable because it is part of the very fabric of human consciousness, and of all thought. We cannot help looking for – and finding – the causes and effects of things (which we individuate as “events” or “states of affairs”), because causal understanding is essential to even the most rudimentary grasp of a world that is both coherent and in constant flux across time and space: a world of continuous but (as long as we are mentally stable) never wholly chaotic, change.
In such a world, we need to understand, as far as possible, why things are what they are – why the earth is round, why today is sunny, how George W. Bush came to be president. And all such questions involve the exploration of antecedent conditions and how they changed.
Causality is manageable, however, because we clearly have some purchase on reality: that is, we can understand and control it to some extent. Which is another way of saying: we have consciousness, and the world is at least semi-coherent to us. Without that, all bets would be off.
We are never totally conscious or omniscient, or we would be gods. And we are never totally unconscious or ignorant, or we wouldn’t be human. We’re in the happy middle where some things make sense but a lot of big questions remain unanswered. In sum: we could scarcely imagine a coherent world without causal coherence, i.e., without our ability to attribute causes and effects with a modicum of success.
Consciousness itself (however poorly we understand it) depends on such coherence and stability amid change. As infants, for example, we come to learn about the continuity of objects over time. We seek the mother’s breast because we know the result will be something we like and need: milk. Time itself (another near-imponderable) could be defined as non-chaotic change: change that we can measure and, to a large extent, explain. (The door was open; I decided to close it. Now it’s closed.)
The exact nature of such non-chaotic change is something we constantly try to better understand in order to control our environment and our lives. Such understanding is never perfect, but it’s also never nonexistent, unless we’re psychotic or comatose. Even when we’re mentally or physically impaired, there’s always some kind of processing of reality going on.
That is why causality is what I’ve designated a gateway concept of the liberal arts. It arises (i.e., becomes necessary) in every line of inquiry. What happened, how it occurred, what caused it (deterministically or existentially): we ask these questions and fumble with the ensuing dilemmas wherever we look and whatever we think about.
Causality is a morass because the causes and effects of interesting things (unlike the opening or closing of a door) are multiple, layered, and possibly of diverse origins as well, e.g., individual agency, larger and less well-defined social groups or institutions, nature, technology, spirituality, etc., all of which interact in ways that are (almost by definition) imponderable, defying our demands for clarity and specificity. It's their very diversity that makes those interaction imponderable, or at least a considerable challenge.
Hence, causality can often be more or less opaque, and causal explanations elusive, vague, circumscribed by our ignorance, and beyond a certain point, utterly unknowable. We know that Oswald shot Kennedy, but there’s much we don’t know, and likely will never know, about that event. That bothers us, and prompts some to look for tidy explanations, which are also called conspiracy theories. Wiser answers to our necessary causal questions, especially to the larger and less immediate ones, are often partial, tentative, uncertain, or permanently agnostic as between competing factors or explanations that are impossible to disentangle, whether in relation to world events or personal experience.
We know some things: e.g., that some traits (such as baldness) are strictly hereditary, whereas others (political beliefs, for example) seem largely or wholly acquired. But many characteristics of our lives and personalities seem an inscrutable mixture of nature and nurture. For what exactly can we thank or blame our parents, geography, the weather, or the Founding Fathers?
I’m not getting into the causal weeds here, because they grow in quicksand. But I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts, which I expand on in the book chapter:
First, it’s useful to distinguish between causation and causality as complementary questions. Causation is the realm of cause-and-effect in which we question what has happened in the world, how it happened, and what causes what. Causality is the larger (but intimately related) question of what kinds of causes we are looking for or finding, i.e. whether they are human or natural (the familiar debate about freedom vs. determinism). It’s clarifying to know which of these we’re talking about.
“What caused the Civil War?” is about causation. “Are we the authors of our lives, is everything predetermined, or is it some combination?” is about causality.
I argue in the book that the metaphysical question of causality is an ultimately unanswerable conundrum, but that, short of ultimate answers, we have some good workaround solutions that involve a “bifocal” view of causality. Thus, just as the problem of complexity is really a continuum between the more complex and the simpler, and we need to continually make critical judgments about that continuum, the problem of causality requires being bifocal about free will and determinism.
To acknowledge imponderables, or semi-ponderables, in the causal realm is not necessarily to be condemned to silence, per Wittgenstein’s admonition in the Tractatus (“Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent”). We can speak carefully about both causation and causality while hedge our bets on what we don’t understand (and perhaps as humans can never understand). If nothing else, it’s an invitation to a kind of epistemic humility: an acknowledgement that there are certain more or less permanent zones of uncertainty, especially in the many areas where causal forces of different kinds – such as human and natural -- intersect.