Causality Forward and Backwards
The joy perhaps of principles is that the stand at the exact juncture of the two great rhythms of the maths of the masses. Or better it invent a single word to look two ways at once. Belief is at once the gathering of the masses into an average example. A Belief will then aim to equalize differences, and infer from a very great number of past, what the future will be. Seen from the perspective of impressions this is really merely a matter of count, count, counting impressions , and thereby treating then as single pint of articulation. The expected result, is the averaged out winner of all these trails.
The Past is the home to a host of separated and distinct flickers in memory, which are naturally arrange in contiguous sequals. One impression will then have at its side, sharing and merging with its diversity all the others (as this is what vivacity actively means). This process will also include all the elements that have not worked out quite the way one expected (and all their memories). The averaging arises in the sense that the mind will turn its thoughts, from one set of impressions to another, but will belief the one that is most strident.
Or to put it otherwise: if one starts with the fixed points of impressions (and their radial effects), one uncovers something rather strange in thought. Firstly, belief is the abilty of the mind to wander from one impression to another. It is therefore the very real facet of the mind where one impression becomes a sin for another: Or even better its vivacity becomes as a thing shared with the vivacity of the other. It vivacity becomes caught up with what is not their, as much as what is there. The Future is then for al lo see.
However this seeing of the future is then not lying around as if it were stable of fixed. On the contrary the future itself s only grasped as it is open to possibility. The same impression might will be caught up in making other futures. And the status of these another is highly nuanced.
If one looks at the vivacity native to any one impression it is f course also simply a mental sprocket. The means by which it is given here and now, both the means by which thought is always caught up in other versions of itself. It is also the given without identity. It is immediately only resembling itself. what is actually is something distinct again.
If One then looks at the simple idea crowding out that impressions, they ill be high complex and multifarious. Each such of ideas operating to share amongst themselves the vivacities of the impression, must also the vivacity it itself still has. The principle of causality therefore arranged vivacity in sequences of chains. The same thought opens on many chains.
If on then considers causality itself, it clearly breeds a principle in which both the length and richness of the chains is synonymous with its vivacity. A causal is then vivacious as it binds up sequence of impressions (and so involves many elements) I strong links, which are reinforced by repetitions. The have many repeats of the same, and to hook up many elements within a complex chain become then given together. There is of course a natural delimiter here. Make the chain too long, and it is not repeatable. Make it to short and it will lose itself within a welter of complex ideas, and be hard to separate out as something distinct : Although these are not equal problems. To make a chain to long is to loose the cause for ever. To make a chain to short is merely to loose the ability to see to, until someone points it out!
If one then considers the nature of the future impression, that nature is by on means singular, the same simple chain can of course open on other longer chains these chains will always also be there. Moreoverthat being there is highly conditional on vivacity: that is on the transform of the vivacious element from idea to idea, a vivacity that is then now directed into the future (and yet also depended on the number of impression or rather ideas this future caught up). The vivacity as its very ability is streamed into conflicting futures, and it ability to orchestrate many sets of impressions masters, become as it were countative. All futures are not equally vivid – and are not therefore giviej in the same way or to the same degree. Those that occur more frequently are given as richer, than those that are not.
However note that this is not counting as in one two three. The counting is not of a formal kind. It is rather the necessary effect of vivacity. Or better vivacity because the principle which names its augmenting (causality) insists that the vivacious elements are split of from one another. One past makes one future (or does not). the vivacious counts then to express it own unity in spite of this.
Counting is born out of the communication of multiple options of the condition of splitting of.
Counting is given because impressions, with there ability to simply ‘be’ there are taken as the leading element in the thought. Because they are there, a future happens: or at least might be there.
Counting is not a formal synthesis. It is not even as a Kantain mind, which aggregates the part of a tree into a whole. This is because what counts in Kant is the layers of impression, which are thereby synthesized into a space (via time). What counts then in Kant, is to move from unity via plurality to a totality On counts to produce things which are actually given is a sequence of impressions (and only given as they are supported in understanding).
Counting for Hume, by contrast need not involve a synthesis in the giving of an element (for that is already carried out by vivacity, that is the ready transfer of ideas one to the other). Each impression is at once singular, and yet, in being lively caught up in ushering in others. Counting only comes in when many are ushered it. Counting is therefore a matte of giving diversity. That is it is a way of understanding not a totality of future, but rather their lack of totalizing. The future is what it wants to be, and counting merely an proximate way to think that giving.
Counting therefore is the consequence of causes, and not there cause. It is what the attempt to tie a idea to a series of impression naturally produces. It is what it means to wish upon an reality, so that a belief comes true. It is not a stodgy matte rof giving and re-giving.
From which it follows that, in Hume at least, it is not necessarily the counting element that comes first in ideas (it does of course come first in the matter of impressions). That is, ideas will not count beyond there liveliness unless they have to. To see the sun rise, and to always rise, is to simple know that it will. No doubt enters in, and so now real counting up is needed.
From which it also follows, that vivacity is essential either later or before counting or impression or ideas. Impression, which are always singular (and given as they are complete, and so ended in the mind), are the ultimate units in thinking, and yet not one that can never be formally counted, as they can never be retained as impression. On the contrary the very elements that makes them different, their lively nature arranges them, as they are in ideas sequels and series of fleeting images. And yet this vivacity is not itself a counting. It does not reckon up image be image, as it is too busy moving between them, In a way which the mind itself hardly sees or feels. Counting is only attributed to this movement as it is caught up in differing possible outcomes. It is then and only then the different possibility sequels of impressions open onto can be thought in counting.
From which it follows Hume’s own allusion to the brush work of the past, or even the tick, tick tick, of the repeating dimensions in that past, only brings itself to the fore when the differing past ruptures the future.. The Mind looks from this doubtful future back into the past that ruptures it. This past, which in this situation (and only that situation) is the locus of simple ideas appears of itself an eddying complexity of impressions, with not necessary reason for the rupture of the future it gives.. The division then have to be predated, and read back into the impressions themselves, and the sense part by part they create that ruptive past.
That is, tenses (and with them a manner of thinking time) become important as the way to locate a manner of recording within simple ideas akin to counting. What is counted is the future, which is produced in is conflicting quantities of vivacity; What enables that counting is the impressions, upon which the idea of different futures is predicated. And yet ‘where’ that counting ought to happen, is the fluid gauze of the ‘pas’ (that is of simple ideas) which of itself does not count, merely and contains the constant shifting of ideas on to the other (or not).
The empricism of counting and of averaging is rooted therefore in impressions, and their sequences, as impression are integrally that which appear to be reckonable up, as they are merely’ there’, the mean breeds a thought capable of reckoning. Or better capable of mirroring this element. And yet of course the differnce between the two is tangible, The Impression is givien and given as complete (and so over to the vivacities it creates). the future, is created out of a ruptive (and not ruptures) past. The future, far from being given as complete, makes that very fact that it is merely an option amongst others, and that it is more or less intense that it fellows a problem. This problem will then be traced back through simple ideas, to the impression themsevles. The distinctiveness of the impressions is made o echo elsewhere. A dimension of reality is then recorded, albeit by crossing the threshold into a different tense.
What makes causality so very special is that it can articulates as reality the very singular nature of impressions. Their singularity: That is the fact they are all different from one another, becomes itself a positive and distinct factor in the mind. This difference is traced across simple ideas, and into beliefs, whose vivacity is made to depend upon it. The difference itself becomes then thought in simple ideas as if it were a reality: or better is becomes thought was that on which a reality might swing.
As an aside each of the three principles of mixing follow this game. Causality orchestrates the singular nature of impression; resemblance, the peculiar contents, and contiguity the demand of their vivacious nature, that is being over they produce other ideas.
To Belief is thence to count. That is it is to look to a world in which elements while remaining fundamentally distinct from one another become as signs for each other. And yet in this process that dominant refrain of impression-reality matter, there is noting in ideas that needs to impose such a move the move merely comes from the orchestration of the difference of impression, into the different possible futures. Or again it comes form the sense that each impression really is a sign. It is really over in the giving, and so leads to something other something new (and must do). Causality merely asks the question what? What is the being over (and its associated vivacity) giving? What impressin ought to follow? What can I already infer in its giving (with its associated being over)? What will that being over lead to in short.
Hence Causalities very close alliance with both contiguity and resemblance. To be a sign is to ask ‘what in the present (what in the immediacy of resembling contents) can I tell of what is to come (how is it a part of another, and so contiguous): Two questions, conjoined in causality which leads to another: ‘And then what other things could the same resembling create?’ .
So far therefore causality, as it relates to a reality founded on impressions, uses the other two principles to breed into the mind one of the critical aspects of that reality: Namely that impression not only pose there own eclipsing, but because hey do so, what happens next remains open, and inexact: it can only be counted. An impression might then be a sign, and one might very well believe one knows what it is the sign of, yet the very assumption of it being a sign at all (as it rests in resembling) opens out a thought into other possibilities: Makes whether that sequence is true or not a matter of belief or custom. The openess, the ability of an impression to be different, becomes thence a pro-active force.
And yet it clearly need not be that way. And yet it clearly is not just that way; and yet it cannot be that way.
To deal with the last, the negative point first. Ideas, in their simple vivacity know nothing or reality itself. They care not too button for it. The question to uncover the real is in ideas really a nonsense. One can in the interest of vivacity impose a reality on perceptions on can demand that the vivacity of the lively impression, and the vivacious ideas are one and the same (as indeed they must be): and therefore there must be a way of thinking reality in simple ideas, and indeed there is. And yet that does not make imagination any the more about reality. Simple ideas will have a tendency o wend there own ways onwards.
The middle ‘and yet’ refers to the dimension these causailites have to reason. once reason is bound to experiences then any necessity that there is simply one form of reason slips by the wayside. Or better reason is fixed between two extremes. On the one hand it teaches noting is actual (other than impressions): on the other it shows that of the only thing that is real are the infinite agglomeration of space and time. Reason would naturally inhabit either world. And yet when engaged in reality. When it is forced to reckon up with what is, it must find another option. It pitches up then within the domain of experience and recpkns up different experiences differently. The reasoning of cause and effect which ties a shoe lace, or builds a car or drives the car, destroys an eco-system or humanities ability to live on a planet need then not to be reconcilable with one another. Or at least never simply so, t be held within the reason of consciousness is thence not to be necessarily simply reconciled. Indeed any reconciliation is likely to be eruptive, in the sense that it will engender a slightly different mode of thinking in all elements involved, and so gut everything. at which of sees the proirity in the poles of Hume’s analysis. One gets the philosophy of continuity for free. One needs not elaborate synthesis that allows reason (or its successors) to claim the credit for what beckons to us all. Far more difficult is the idea of sprocketing a difference, and thereby allowing a entire series of ideas to also re-hinge (which the old unities also remain).
Kant’s Antinomies from such a perspective are quite literally vacuous. The pose and repose the to extremes of reason and totally fail to comprehend what lies in between.
The first and yet build on these last two points. Hume is very clear that simple idea change the way they think a cause is operating. The viviacities there slowly bend an idea. The elements that are repeated gradually become the ones that the idea holds onto. The elements that are not are gently lost (or occluded). To appreciate the full radicalness of this method it needs to be remembered that there is no smug level of the real which some ensure that is recorded is true, or guarantee it in anyway. Exactly what a cause is recording is therefore genuinely open. The transfer and the subtleties of its inclusion, has a very real dynamism to it.
Now one needs careful (before reason pricks up its east, and starts to mutter about abyss and differences). there is a clear unnatural limit to this process. There are impression, and the vivacities they cause. Ideas therefore also need a reality from which they remain distinct (if complexly implicated). Or perhaps better from which they are in their complexity at least in counter point of. The same shade of red, could be a blush, or a bleeding corpse or a fire breathed out from the mouth of a dragon, real or imagined.. What the complex idea is, what it makes across the shifting simple ideas (and attendant vivacities) is at highly volatile, and only emerges across a span of time impression indeed are so nuances to be the ultimate parts to creation. A single simple idea is that which can be a part to everything that follows on from it (that is it is sprocket): the sprockets only have a reality afterward, in what follows.
This facet of perception, has two complex implication.
Firstly the great story told since at least Spinoza time, that complexity and reality run together is modified to include perception. The story has been that the body had elements, call them organ’s or individual or parts or monads, which cannot be perceived, and yet which by their own individual actions create for us the body. The Body we have was founded at a level beyond our perception. (as it was not directly perceived this way in God). It was founded in the realm of those unintended consequences.
From this argument a further consequence was drawn, by Leibniz (and his successors), if not actually not by Spinoza (who had a far more complex argument than is usually allowed). This argument ran that the body itself belonged to its own domain (call it matter or whatever); a domain prior to and distinct from the perceiving world of monads. The complexity of the body, and the worrying fact that it appeared to be what is creating the unity of an individual could be quietly ignored.
Or even better it could be ridiculed, (as Leibniz was not above doing) as a self-evident contradiction. Ones mind or ones consciousness or ones soul or monad or duration (or whatever word you want), clearly implied a whole which existed independently of these parts, and which is not reducible to them (something Spinoza in part never denied, he just doubted the power of the ‘whole’ to be what gives the meaning). It follows that if one assumes a crude parallelism of material and mental world Spinoza’s argument(which lacks such crudity) can so easily be made to appear incomprehensible. Spinoza with his myriad little moves of body and soul appears to have simply dissolved the mind into the immediate causalities of materialism (by which the body it made), and forgotten the reality of the soul, whose unity demands something different from the one Spinoza is not alledged to have proposed.
‘Let’s Stick Spinoza’ – the cry that animates most philosophy in one way or other, revolves around the dignity of the whole- a dignity Spinoza can very readily be shown to outrage. The exact scope of this outrage is highly complex (It will be apparent that one needs to understand the outrage in context- Spinoza does wish to ditch the idea of the whole as it is habitually argued, for Aristotle to Bergson in terms of duration. And yet Spinoza’s genius lies in the fact that he thought up a highly original way to do this – and one that avoided the inanities of either matter or memory).
But that is quite a different matter. The genius of Hume lies in the way he took he vulgar interpretation of Spinoza and made it sing differently. Hume effectively inverts the habitual argument. The souls is divided anyway, integrally he claims, as it perceives. And as perception is clearly the founding point of our mind, it would simply be more honest to start there. These perception, will then breed, through complex ideas, notions of unity, or even individuality. The soul or the body or even the house upon which one founds ones identity are all merely the products of these complex ideas – and the vivacities they breed.
Here of course Hume himself has his own deep problem with the philosophical Mafiosi who demand that given he talks only of conjunctions (and never synthesis) between perception, and start with the all too passive element of perception, what he cannot move beyond inactive bundle men, which arise as the joint amalgam of their experience. Hume therefore the rule book says, lacks a theory of dynamism (which of course the ‘new improved ‘superior’ Empiricism such thinker look to might supply. Once again, such a reading clearly undervalues the radicalness of vivacity. There is nothing un-active in being lively, and nothing passive in always conjuring up the next simple idea, and with it, enabling the complex idea to form itself. The path ways one finds within oneself, leading from place to place which endlessly refashion the unities (and must never be simply mistake for them), are Hume would argue what are real. It is that extra dimension, that movement beyond the current – a demand which is nonetheless somehow caught up in the very giving (even it that is elusive- lively) that matter, not the spurious principles of form that one applies to these shifting ideas once they have burnt a passage within our minds.
Hume deserves then the full credit for not only having defined the sense which impressions can at once be taken as the starting point for both thought, and action. He defines what that action might be like, and what that like might then produce and its lively nature rips across ideas to forge a soul. He also deserves the full credit of understanding that this act of forging at once ‘forges’ a single pattern, a single unity. We look at the house or the lively face and say yep that is it. And yet, for all this ability it is not face or house that gives us this feeling (until passion become involved at least, but the odd moving dynamics of vivacity itself, which is forever uncovering yet other images for us to see. Or to put it slightly differently: in gawping at the unity the no doubt see as in one the effect of the vivacity. This is what the vivacity did. It allowed this ‘principle’ of form (or duration) to be,. And yet it did so from its own unique space at once present in the reality of an the impression (which is always implying others) and realized, without ever being completed, in simple ideas. A move that moreover has the advantage of avoiding any jump into the world of hidden ontologies (be they transcendental or not) which when miss thought so readily slip into onanism,
Hence in impression that are vivacious and ideas that are lively Hume managed to define the ultimate part based ontology. Every perception, as it was within ones mind carried within it the element of being a part (even as it was completed), and was also caught (as simple idea) in the complex thinking of something else.
Believing was then the locus in which this more can be thought without resolving it into a unity (a simple fixed structure). To belief was to look to another- and to have an idea which was capable of such a looking; an idea which might only be expressed in it and through it, and yet which lacked a reality of its own beyond that belief itself.
Hume straps the marching boots onto the apparent paradox that Spinoza’s God at once does not formally think the body any attribute, and yet nonetheless has a perception of it ‘as he has an idea concerning many thing’. This situation is simply the normal Hume contends. Perception is a once within our minds at hose minds contain many things, and yet I that containing a simple idea was bred across that diversity. The difference then being for Hume at this idea can be supposed to exist in the mind alone and may only possibly exist within the world); while for Spinoza the idea is related to the world (and not the mind at all). Here once again a careful caveat needs to be insisted upon. Given that Spinoza famously makes the same argument within the attribute of thought and for consciousness as he does with extension and thought, the difference here intra-thought might well not be that large .however that is quite a different argument.
Secondly if the habitual theory of Hume , that he lacked any ability to explain the minds inner dynamism, and snatched humans to be a mere bundle of sensations (a world he does use once or twice in Treatise) is clearly misplaced for a thinker who attempted to turn the idea of the ‘lively’ and animated mind (words he habitually does use) into a theoretical principle. If this is simply bad reading, what of that other conjecture, from Kant ownwards that Hume simply has an inadequate conception of temporality?
This question of course is badly put, as it assumes that there is a ‘good’ reading of temporality and yet the entire tendency of Humean thought is to deny that one reading is possible or desirable. One has already had one account of time, which in the name of the reality that causality appears to imply the mind’s is defined in terms of a past. However in relation to simple ideas this application is clearly not quite right. Simple ideas are defined not by ‘a past’ so much as in their ability to communicate their vivacities for one another. Pasts thereby become a matter of the depth of vivacities needed to communicate to the mind, and image. These depths of course utterly change by context. Long distant memories will therefore be less vivid in themselves, and therefore require great agglomeration be thought. It follows that the degree and the type of causes, the patterns one established within these far past will be different from the ones one thinks in the present. The Historian will therefore trace causality at an utterly different rhythm to the poet. Moreover the sense of urgency in such cases is different, in relation to causality. in recent pasts (or pasts returned) there is a far freer exchange of ideas, as they are in the imagined poetic past. The vivacities being rich the same idea might lead backwards or forwards, Hectors failing to tie his shoe laces might lead to the fall of Troy’). In the long past however is only given in last agglomeration of fact, as those facts actually constantly shift and change in their natures, and run into our present. Hence the rhythms and nature of the past is simply different depending on the scale. This difference is not merely a matter of kind, so much as species. That is recent memory is simply utterly different fro long terms memory, which is different from the records held in books. The past becomes then becomes diverse, and complex. It contains as an idea many different ways and manner of differing. Now once again extreme caution needs to be thought her. It is not that all encompassing past cannot be created to the all these elements to it. On the contrary it clearly could ,and yet the past nature of such a past would demand it bared no relation to any of the other part (and certainly was no whole containing them).
If one wants a theory turning on time, and giving one all the re-assurances for our empirical selves that turn on such a theory, them Hume is not the thinker one needs. Kant is a better starting point (as Kant of course new full well). But the reason for this is not because that infamous cinnabar bar was likely to fall out of the mind of the Humean thinker, so much as the incompatibility of what stopped it falling out of any mind with any attempt to present a single account of time. For Hume the idea level fell out because each impression communicate to the next there entire welter of vivacities. Such an image them grew in the mind 9and ultimately became an identity): the idea in this regard inhabited a space between many and – and yet close to many. That is it was closer to vivacities and its augmention (on which the idea of identity turned) than it was either on the unity of the impression itself (which was never thought here) or the unity of the stick of stuff. It was not the more philosophical idea, which demanded that the difference it held within it (the many) was actively caught up also in a unity beyond it: a unity that is driving the process; a unity that then must always be synthetic. A point Hume does not deny, and yet sees as not critical. It is vivacities that augment, and not synthesis: Hence unity if always the effect and not the cause.
The past as a category becomes thence a scotch mist of might have been, or (if taken at all seriously) a mental sprocket of its own. That is from the fact (as Hume would chirpily admit) one can read and read the past (within certain its) differently, it follows that it might be thought akin to impression, which after all are also sprocket. Why it is not quite the case, for the Humean empiricist will then form the subject of the next essay.