Causality

Causality as a Corollary of Identity

So far we have been concerned, as adults, to identify the foundations of human cognition. In this context, the three axioms we have discussed are inescapable primaries: no conceptual knowledge can be gained apart from these principles. Chronologically, however, the three axioms are not learned by the developing child simultaneously. 

“Existence,” Miss Rand suggests, is implicit from the start; it is given in the first sensation.[11] To grasp “identity” and (later) “consciousness,” however, even in implicit form, the child must attain across a period of months a certain perspective on his mental contents. He must perform, in stages, various processes of differentiation and integration that are not given in the simple act of opening his eyes. Before a child can distinguish this object from that one, and thus reach the implicit concept of “identity,” he must first come to perceive that objects exist. This requires that he move beyond the chaos of disparate, fleeting sensations with which his conscious life begins; it requires that he integrate his sensations into the percepts of things or objects. (Such integration is discussed in chapter 2.)

At this point, the child has reached, in implicit form, the concept of “entity.” The concept of “entity” is an axiomatic concept, which is presupposed by all subsequent human cognition, although it is not a basic axiom.[12] In particular, the grasp of “entity,” in conjunction with the closely following grasp of “identity,” makes possible the discovery of the next important principle of metaphysics, the one that is the main subject of the present section: the law of causality.

First, however, I must offer some clarification in regard to the concept of “entity.” Since it is axiomatic, the referents of this concept can be specified only ostensively, by pointing to the things given to men in sense perception. In this case, one points to solid things with a perceivable shape, such as a rock, a person, or a table. By extension from this primary sense, “entity” may be used in various contexts to denote a vast array of existents, such as the solar system, General Motors, or the smallest subatomic particle. But all “entities” like these are reducible ultimately to combinations, components, or distinguishable aspects of “entities” in the primary sense.[13]

Entities constitute the content of the world men perceive; there is nothing else to observe. In the act of observing entities, of course, the child, like the adult, observes (some of) their attributes, actions, and relationships. In time, the child’s consciousness can focus separately on such features, isolating them in thought for purposes of conceptual identification and specialized study. One byproduct of this process is philosophers’ inventory of the so-called “categories” of being, such as qualities (“red” or “hard”), quantities (“five inches” or “six pounds”), relationships (“to the right of” or “father of”), actions (“walking” or “digesting”). The point here, however, is that none of these “categories” has metaphysical primacy; none has any independent existence; all represent merely aspects of entities.

There is no “red” or “hard” apart from the crayon or book or other thing that is red or hard. “Five inches” or “six pounds” presuppose the object that extends five inches or weighs six pounds. “To the right of” or “father of” have no reality apart from the things one of which is to the right of another or is the father of another. And—especially important in considering the law of cause and effect—there are no floating actions; there are only actions performed by entities. “Action” is the name for what entities do. “Walking” or “digesting” have no existence or possibility apart from the creature with legs that walks or the body or organ with enzymes that does the digesting.

When a child has reached the stage of (implicitly) grasping “entity,” “identity,” and “action,” he has the knowledge required to reach (implicitly) the law of causality. To take this step, he needs to observe an omnipresent fact: that an entity of a certain kind acts in a certain way. The child shakes his rattle and it makes a sound; he shakes his pillow and it does not. He pushes a ball and it rolls along the floor; he pushes a book and it sits there, unmoving. He lets a block out of his hands and it falls; he lets a balloon go and it rises. The child may wish the pillow to rattle, the book to roll, the block to float, but he cannot make these events occur. Things, he soon discovers, act in definite ways and only in these ways.

This represents the implicit knowledge of causality; it is the child’s form of grasping the relationship between the nature of an entity

 and its mode of action. The adult validation of the law of causality consists in stating this relationship explicitly. The validation rests on two points: the fact that action is action of an entity; and the law of identity, A is A. Every entity has a nature; it is specific, noncontradictory, limited; it has certain attributes and no others. Such an entity must act in accordance with its nature. The only alternatives would be for an entity to act apart from its nature or against it; both of these are impossible. A thing cannot act apart from its nature, because existence is identity; apart from its nature, a thing is nothing. A thing cannot act against its nature, i.e., in contradiction to its identity, because A is A and contradictions are impossible. In any given set of circumstances, therefore, there is only one action possible to an entity, the action expressive of its identity. This is the action it will take, the action that is caused and necessitated by its nature.

Thus, under ordinary circumstances, if a child releases a balloon filled with helium, only one outcome is possible: the balloon will rise. If he releases a second balloon filled with sand, the nature of the entity is different, and so is its action; the only possible outcome now is that it will fall. If, under the same circumstances, several actions were possible—e.g., a balloon could rise or fall (or start to emit music like a radio, or turn into a pumpkin), everything else remaining the same—such incompatible outcomes would have to derive from incompatible (contradictory) aspects of the entity’s nature. But there are no contradictory aspects. A is A. Cause and effect, therefore, is a universal law of reality. Every action has a cause (the cause is the nature of the entity which acts); and the same cause leads to the same effect (the same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action).

The above is not to be taken as a proof of the law of cause and effect. I have merely made explicit what is known implicitly in the perceptual grasp of reality. Given the facts that action is action of entities, and that every entity has a nature—both of which facts are known simply by observation—it is self-evident that an entity must act in accordance with its nature.

“The law of causality,” Ayn Rand sums up, “is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.”[14]

Here again, as in regard to axioms, implicit knowledge must not be confused with explicit. The explicit identification of causality (by the Greeks) was an enormous intellectual achievement; it represented the beginning of a scientific outlook on existence, as against the prescientific view of the world as a realm of miracles or of chance. (And here again the worst offenders philosophically are not the primitives who implicitly count on causality yet never discover it, but the modern sophisticates, such as David Hume, who count on it while explicitly rejecting it.)

Causality is best classified as a corollary of identity. A “corollary” is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge. A corollary of an axiom is not itself an axiom; it is not self-evident apart from the principle(s) at its root (an axiom, by contrast, does not depend on an antecedent context). Nor is a corollary a theorem; it does not permit or require a process of proof; like an axiom, it is self-evident (once its context has been grasped). It is, in effect, a new angle on an established principle, which follows immediately once one grasps its meaning and the principle on which it depends. Many of the most important truths in philosophy occupy this intermediate status. They are neither axioms nor theorems, but corollaries—most often, corollaries of axioms. In fact, the essence of metaphysics, according to Objectivism, is the step-by-step development of the corollaries of the existence axiom. The main purpose of this chapter is to unravel systematically the implications of “Existence exists.”

Now let me reiterate that the causal link relates an entity and its action. The law of causality does not state that every entity has a cause. Some of the things commonly referred to as “entities” do not come into being or pass away, but are eternal—e.g., the universe as a whole. The concept of “cause” is inapplicable to the universe; by definition, there is nothing outside the totality to act as a cause. The universe simply is; it is an irreducible primary.

An entity may be said to have a cause only if it is the kind of entity that is noneternal; and then what one actually explains causally is a process, the fact

 of its coming into being or another thing’s passing away. Action is the crux of the law of cause and effect: it is action that is caused—by entities. By the same token, the causal link does not relate two actions. Since the Renaissance, it has been common for philosophers to speak as though actions directly cause other actions, bypassing entities altogether. For example, the motion of one billiard ball striking a second is commonly said to be the cause of the motion of the second, the implication being that we can dispense with the balls; motions by themselves become the cause of other motions. This idea is senseless. Motions do not act, they are actions. It is entities which act—and cause. Speaking literally, it is not the motion of a billiard ball which produces effects; it is the billiard ball, the entity, which does so by a certain means. If one doubts this, one need merely substitute an egg or soap bubble with the same velocity for the billiard ball; the effects will be quite different.

The law of causality states that entities are the cause of actions—not that every entity, of whatever sort, has a cause, but that every action does; and not that the cause of action is action, but that the cause of action is entities.

Many commentators on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle claim that, because we cannot at the same time specify fully the position and momentum of subatomic particles, their action is not entirely predictable, and that the law of causality therefore breaks down. This is a non sequitur, a switch from epistemology to metaphysics, or from knowledge to reality. Even if it were true that owing to a lack of information we could never exactly predict a subatomic event—and this is highly debatable—it would not show that, in reality, the event was causeless. The law of causality is an abstract principle; it does not by itself enable us to predict specific occurrences; it does not provide us with a knowledge of particular causes or measurements. Our ignorance of certain measurements, however, does not affect their reality or the consequent operation of nature.

Causality, in the Objectivist viewpoint, is a fact independent of consciousness, whether God’s or man’s. Order, lawfulness, regularity do not derive from a cosmic consciousness (as is claimed by the religious “argument from design”). Nor is causality merely a subjective form of thought that happens to govern the human mind (as in the Kantian approach). On the contrary, causality—for Objectivism as for Aristotelianism—is a law inherent in being qua being. To be is to be something—and to be something is to act accordingly. Natural law is not a feature superimposed by some agency on an otherwise “chaotic” world; there is no possibility of such chaos. Nor is there any possibility of a “chance” event, if “chance” means an exception to causality. Cause and effect is not a metaphysical afterthought. It is not a fact that is theoretically dispensable. It is part of the fabric of reality as such. One may no more ask: who is responsible for natural law (which amounts to asking: who caused causality?) than one may ask: who created the universe? The answer to both questions is the same: existence exists.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand Library Book 6) (pp. 12-17). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.