causality and reciprocity : A Hegel Dictionary : Blackwell Reference Online

causality and reciprocity

Subject Philosophy People Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

German has two words for causality: (1) Kausalitt, with the adjective kausal deriving from the Latin causa; causa was also used by some German philosophers for cause, but not by Hegel except in discussing other philosophers. (2) Ursache is the native German for cause, and derives from ur- (from out of, hence original) and Sache (thing, matter, originally case in dispute, legal case); like causa, it was originally a legal term, for the original occasion for a judicial action, but was generalized to mean cause. Ursache gives rise to the adjective urschlich (causal) and the noun Urschlichkeit (causality), but the verb verursachen (to cause, occasion, produce) rarely occurs in Hegel's accounts of causality. The correlative of Ursache is Wirkung ((an) effect), from the verb wirken (to work, cause, operate, act (on), affect). But Wirkung is ambiguous: it can mean either what is effected or produced (gewirkte), or the effecting of it, efficacy, action (Wirksamkeit). Hence it is also used in the expressions Wirkung und Gegenwirkung (action and reaction) and Wechselwirkung (reciprocity, the interaction of two or more substances). Hegel's usual term for a cause's producing an effect is setzen, to posit, but his use of it is not restricted to causality. Hegel makes no distinction between Kausalitt and Urschlichkeit. But like other philosophers, he distinguishes them from other, similar relations, such as that of Grund and Folge (ground and consequent), Bedingung and Bedingte (condition and conditioned) and Kraft and Ausserung (force and its expression). Both Grund and Bedingung, e.g., have a logical, as well as a real use: they refer to the entailment of one proposition by another, as well as to the dependence of one event on another. Moreover, Grund, in Leibniz's usage, includes the purpose, or final cause, of a thing, while Ursache does not. (Hegel occasionally uses Endursache for final cause, but he distinguishes this sharply from the efficient or mechanical causes which form the subject-matter of his account of Ursache.) Both of these relations are thus, on Hegel's view, of wider application than causality. A force, unlike a cause, is conceived as general rather than as a particular event, and as underlying or hidden rather than overt: my flicking a switch causes a light to go on, while electricity is the force which underlies, makes possible, and is expressed in, the production of this effect, but which is also involved in many other events of diverse types. In his Logic, especially SL, Hegel develops the concept of causality out of that of SUBSTANCE: the substance, the original thing or matter (Ur-sache) passes over into its accidents, and thus produces or posits an effect. But cause and effect are implicitly identical. For there is, Hegel argues, nothing in the cause that is not also in the effect, and conversely nothing in the effect that is not also in the cause. Thus what was first the efiect is itslf a cause, and has an effect of its own; while conversely what was first the cause is itself an effect and has a further cause of its own. Hence we move from the single substance producing its accidents to an endless series of causes and effects. Another route by which he reaches the same conclusion is this: when the cause produces its effect, the cause disappears entirely into the effect. The effect is thus not simply an effect, but is itself the original matter, that is the Ursache or cause which produces an efiect. The ambiguity of Wirkung, denoting not simply a passive effect, but also activity or production, also plays a part here, as does the connection that Hegel sees between Wirkung and Wirklichkeit (ACTUALITY): the effect, once produced, is an independent actuality, capable of generating effects of its own. The doctrine that neither the cause nor the effect contains anything that the other does not is interpreted by Hegel in two distinct ways.
G

1. In virtue of the very concepts of a cause and of an effect, a cause is not a cause unless it has an effect, and an effect is not an effect unless it is the effect of some cause. The concepts of a cause and of an effect are thus logically inseparable. 2. There is, Hegel argues, a non-logical or real identity between the cause and its effect; e.g.,
file:///D|/MY%20PAPERS/BLACKWELL%20REFER...CTIONARY/CAUSALITY%20&%20RECIPROCITY.htm (1 of 3) [5/4/2008 10:41:27 PM]

causality and reciprocity : A Hegel Dictionary : Blackwell Reference Online

when rain makes the ground wet, the wetness of the ground is not distinct from the rain that produced it: it is simply the rain in a different form. Cause and effect are the same matter or Sache, e.g., moisture, first in an original form, and then in the form of positedness. Indeed, the very distinction between a cause and its effect is the work of a subjective understanding, a distinction introduced by us into an essentially homogeneous continuum. Causal propositions such as Rain makes things wet are not, he infers, synthetic, as Kant believed, but analytic propositions or tautologies. This inference is faulty: it is not inconceivable that rain should make, or leave, things dry. In virtue of Hegel's principle that an effect has the same content as its cause, the dryness would not count as an effect of the rain, but the rain would still not have made things wet. Thus what might be claimed to be analytic is not Rain makes things wet, but If rain has any effect, then it makes things wet. But even this claim will encounter the difficulty that the principle that cause and effect have the same content is, at best, vague. Hegel agrees that such cases as a person's painting a canvas or the propulsion of one moving object by another are less favourable to the principle, since, unlike rain, a painter and a moving object contain many features that do not pass over into their effects. But the painter and the object are only causes, he argues, in respect of those of their features that do reappear in the effect.
The principle that cause and effect have the same content has two consequences for Hegel's account of causality. First, he does not, like Kant, regard the causation of one event by another as dependent on a causal law or rule: since cause and effect are not distinct, but at bottom the same, no rule or law is required to govern their connection. Thus laws figure in Hegel's account of appearance (Erscheinung) rather than of causality. Second, causality does not apply to all phenomena: in particular, it does not apply to living or to spiritual entities. Nutrition is not the cause of blood, and Caesar's ambition was not the cause of the fall of the Roman Republic. For living and spiritual entities do not admit another original entity into themselves or let a cause continue into them, but break it off and transform it. Hegel here makes two distinct points. First, what a living organism, a mind or a society makes of some external impact on it differs too much in content from the external object itself to count as an effect of that object: the pearl is not the effect of the grain of sand. Second, in the case of minds and societies, if not of living organisms generally, such an external impact is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of what results from it: a person or a society may, in view of its creative inner nature, respond in different ways to any given impact, and it may make use of different events or objects in order to achieve the same result. Thus an impact is at most an occasion (Veranlassung) or an external stimulus (Erregung), and it is made into an occasion by the inner spirit of a person or a society. Caesar's ambition or Cleopatra's nose did not cause the fall of the Republic: the Republic made the ambition or the nose the occasion of its downfall, as it might have used other objects or events to the same end, had these not been available. Cause and effect are inseparable. Thus in producing an effect, the cause makes itself into a cause and is thus, in a sense, the cause of itself and also the effect of itself. Cause and effect thus reverse their roles: the effect is a cause, since only its occurrence makes the cause a cause, and conversely the cause is an effect, since it is made a cause by its effect. But the understanding attempts (contradictorily) to separate the cause and effect as distinct events. When they are thus separated, the reciprocal relation of cause and effect expresses itself as an infinite regress and an infinite progression: any cause is the effect not of its own effect, but of some further cause, and any effect is the cause not of its own cause, but of some further effect. This false or bad infinity is unstable one cannot, e.g., fully explain an event if its causal antecedents regress to infinity and gives way to the relation of action and reaction, or, more explicitly, of reciprocity, in which two or more substances interact in such a way that the states of the one are both the cause and the effect of the states of the other. Cause and effect are thus brought into the intimate, reciprocal relation that their formal or logical relation requires, a relation closer to the circularity of true infinity than to the bad infinite regress. The logical superiority of reciprocity makes it, on Hegel's view, more suitable for the understanding of higher, viz. biological and social, phenomena than is unidirectional causality. It is more likely that the different organs of an animal, or the customs and the political constitution of a people, reciprocally affect each other, than that one is simply the effect of the other. But to explain x in terms of y, and y in terms of x, though correct as far as it goes, cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of either x or y. What is required for this is a third entity which embraces both x and y, viz. the concept of the entity, e.g., the organism or society, of which x and y are aspects.

Cite this article

"causality and reciprocity." A Hegel Dictionary. Inwood, Michael (ed). Blackwell Publishing, . Blackwell Reference Online. 18 July 2007 <http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2101/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9780631175339_chunk_g97806311753397_ss1-3>

file:///D|/MY%20PAPERS/BLACKWELL%20REFER...CTIONARY/CAUSALITY%20&%20RECIPROCITY.htm (2 of 3) [5/4/2008 10:41:27 PM]

causality and reciprocity : A Hegel Dictionary : Blackwell Reference Online

Bibliographic Details A Hegel Dictionary

Edited by: Michael Inwood eISBN: 9780631175339 Print publication date:

file:///D|/MY%20PAPERS/BLACKWELL%20REFER...CTIONARY/CAUSALITY%20&%20RECIPROCITY.htm (3 of 3) [5/4/2008 10:41:27 PM]