asymmetry

For the month of May, along with mourning another birthday, I have promised to write an article on asymmetrical causation. In a sense, there is no theme better equipped than this one to get right to the heart of my philosophical position.

First, almost no one in the continental tradition of philosophy is talking about causation, because most of this tradition is frankly correlationist, and it’s hard to do much with causation if object-object relations are reduced to their phenomenal accessibility by humans. It’s hard to find a group of great philosophers who have less of interest to say about causation than Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, perhaps the three biggest continental icons.

Second, those few in the tradition who do have some interest in causation tend to be under the influence of naturalism. And if you are influenced by naturalism, then causation for you is going to be largely a matter of collisions between small physical things. And this implies reciprocity, no action without an equal and opposite reaction, and so forth.

You have to end up in an unusual position like mine even to consider that causation might sometimes be asymmetrical. In fact, I think it’s always asymmetrical, always a matter of a real thing breaking through the mist of merely sensual qualities in such a way as to make one-way contact with another real thing.

I’m not satisfied with my previous discussions of this theme, and will try to do a better job of it in the forthcoming article.