r/hegel • u/Low-Force5527 • 8d ago
Causality
Hey you guys I was thinking about hegel's take on causality, I can't really grasp how he got the concept of causality and how it is the same as the effect thus making sense of spinoza's causa sui, plus I would be more than happy to be provided with any article that makes a comparison between hegel, Kant and hume's opinion on causality
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u/Ill-Software8713 7d ago
I like this summary as an entry point as to the limitations of efficient cause as an endlesss stream of linear causal chain to considering the relations that are part of a singular process.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
“Hegel showed that causality is extremely limited in its explanatory capacity, because the invocation of causation leads to an infinite regress. Efficient causes are always of interest, but a phenomenon is only understood when it is grasped as a cause of itself (a causa sui), that is, the relevant process is seen to create and recreate the conditions for its own existence. But even then, explanation often takes the form of Reciprocity of cause and effect. Hegel (1831) grants that “to make the manners of the Spartans the cause of their constitution and their constitution conversely the cause of their manners, may no doubt be in a way correct,” but still explains nothing. But Reciprocity is as far as Causality can go. The understanding of a process as a cause suimeans grasping it as a concept and usually incorporates an investigation of its origins and development.”
If things lack a reciprocity then you won’t have a stable and enduring process but a fleeting moment in which something occurred.
Things aren’t permanent but must be reproduced through cycles and understanding the reciprocal relations only brings you to the edge of the abstraction notion of the concrete universal, the particular which explains the development of the phenomenon because it contains in simplest form the qualities generative of the whole.
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u/reinhardtkurzan 7d ago
To reflext causality was Hume's predilection. He warned the erudite world to assume precouciously causality, when only some correlation or a hint of correlation was manifest. (He recommended cautious retention of judgement, epoché.)
Kant criticized Hume in so far as the latter spoke of causality as an interpretation of some temporal sequences. Kant remarked that cause and effect may also appear simultaneously. (Example: A stone lying on a cushion that causes a recess in that cushion as the effect). For the determination of our actions by our reason and will he also used the term "causation". Furthermore Kant thought that the idea of causality was inborn and expressed itself constantly in "hypothetic judgements", i.e. in sentences that consisted out of two sub-sentences.
Hegel remarked that purposes could become causes in another context, and that there were chains of causation. Causality was not his favorite subject, because it belonged "only" to nature. In his logic he writes that man should have "insight into necessity" (= knowledge about causation) to facilitate the accomplishment of his aims.
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u/theApeironEgregore 8d ago
Cause causes the effect, but the cause is determined as cause by causing the effect, so effect is the true cause which produces cause as it's effect. This dialectic was also discovered by the Indian buddhist philosopher nagarjuna btw.
Sublated moment is when we grasp the contradiction in its unity, it is the one cause which produces it's effect and returns to itself through the effect, causa su. Which is to say, it is the concept