Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One Book 3: The Constitution of Modern Western Philosophy Chapter 1: The Constitution of Analytic Philosophy Through the Differentiation of Consciousness: The Example of David Hume ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

It is the differentiation of consciousness which has caused the degeneration of (traditional) philosophy into “analytic philosophy” of the English-speaking world. Here we’ll try to understand how the English philosophic tradition, from which this “analytic philosophy” issues forth, may have been constituted by the differentiation of consciousness by considering the particular example of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding -- specifically of Hume’s insight concerning the disjunction between cause and effect.

Hume’s experience of the disjunction between cause and effect, it shall be shown here, was the result and the expression of the differentiation of time, of linear (i.e. differentiated) time, whose ends were at the time finally disentangled once and for all from one another in the (western) European experience or consciousness; i.e. disentangled out of compact or undifferentiated circularity, that undifferentiation or circularity of time which had not allowed in the temporal experience of those predating Modernity (“Enlightenment”) the formation of a problem (gap) between cause and effect, between past and future.

The Genealogy of Hume’s Experience of the Disjunction between Cause and Effect (sect. 4 of the Enquiry)

1. The first stage of the genealogical work consists in explicitating this experience of disjunction, in pulling up to the level of explicitness what precisely is involved in the disjunction between cause and effect. According to Hume:

• a.) “All reasonings concerning matter of fact [the empirical reality] seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect.”
• b.) “I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori [i.e. demonstrative or deductive reasoning]; but arises entirely from experience, when we find, that any particular objects are constantly conjoined [in the temporal course] with each other” (p. 17).

Now why not attainable by demonstrative reasoning? “Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation [experience]… [the mind] must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary [i.e., no wise guaranteed by the certainty of demonstrative reasoning]... For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it” (p.18; emphasis added).

Hence the arbitrariness of any imagination, outside the consultation of experience, of the connection between cause and effect.

By the un-discoveredness of the effect in the cause Hume means to point out the syntheticity, hitherto “ignored,” of the relation of cause-and-effect, or reversely the absence (non-presence) of analyticity (analytic equivalence) between them, the mutual expulsion, holding between cause and effect, of one from the interior of the other, in consequence of the analytic effect of their respective definitions (attributes)… this, in other words, that one is not internal, because it does not form part of the definition of the other, to the other: Hume means the definitional exclusion of effect from cause (or of cause from effect), which renders impossible the deduction by demonstrative reasoning, supposedly always independent of experience, of one from the other. (One remembers that in deductive reasoning what conclusion [effect] is allowed by “demonstration” to follow from the premise(s) [cause] is only that which is already contained in the premise(s).)

2. The second stage (part 2, sect. 4): Now: “What is the foundation of all conclusions from experience?” If, outside the consultation of experience, the pronouncement concerning cause and effect must be arbitrary, the reason for this being the absence of one in the other, the pronouncement within the range of consultation is surely definite and constant. But in this section Hume intends to show, when he asks for the foundation of the pronouncement after consultation with experience, that this definiteness and invariability of answer improves not in the least the (non-)relation between cause and effect.

“... I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on [demonstrative] reasoning…” (p.21). “Our senses inform us of the colour, weight, and consistence of bread; but neither sense [the perception of the attributes, i.e. of the definitions of the bread] nor [demonstrative] reason can ever inform us of those qualities [i.e. definitions], which fit it for the nourishment and support of a human body [i.e. inform us of the origins of the effect among the definitions of the bread, that is to say those origins, those definitions that make it the cause of.…]” (p.21).

But what is the foundation or origin of this EXPERIENCE of Hume’s?

“But notwithstanding this ignorance of natural powers [an ignorance made necessary and general by the laws of logic, i.e. demonstrative reasoning, or deduction] and principles, we always presume, when we see like sensible qualities [i.e. the same definitions], that they have like secret powers, and expect, that effects, similar to those which we have experienced, will follow from them. If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread [i.e. a body of the same definitions as the formerly nourishing bread], which we have formerly eat, be presented to us, we... foresee, with certainty, like nourishment and support... [But] it is allowed on all hands, that there is no known connexion [known from the perception of definitions and from demonstrative reasoning based on this perception] between the sensible qualities and the secret powers [i.e. between cause and effect – this being a reiteration of the above-explicitated definitional mutual exclusion between cause and effect]; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature [by the definitions it perceives of the ‘cause’ – namely by the premises of demonstrative reasoning, in which, for Hume, the conclusion (effect) is simply not pre-contained in order for the mind to justify, demonstratively, the ‘constant and regular (i.e. necessary) conjunction’ between cause and effect].”

Again, we must wonder, what could have been the origin of, the condition of consciousness making possible, this experience Hume was expressing of the logical (and hence general and necessary) disjunction between cause and effect? Hume himself was hardly in the position to comprehend his own origin, having never understood why people before him were able to see the necessary presence of effects in causes – for a definite reason: his consciousness was already too differentiated.

a.) Let us suggest the answer in a single stroke. The presupposition of the empiricist experience, which is also its origin, its condition of possibility, was the differentiation of the temporal definitions of the object concerning its future temporality, from the object itself, which is to say from its synchronic definitions, those definitions consolidated by the synchronicity of the moment: a differentiation that was in consequence of the total constitution of linear time (for the object) in the manner of the differentiation of past and future, and consequently of a present (for the object), or a differentiation of the two aspects formerly considered compact by the previously operative un- (or less-) differentiated consciousness, namely the temporality of the object and the object itself. Does one not see the production, by the differentiation of consciousness, especially regarding time, of the empiricist experience of the disjunction between cause and effect, in terms of their mutual definitional exclusion? If past and future be differentiated one from another, so as to preclude for consciousness the possibility of the object’s eternal return to itself, but to, in place of that, spread it out over the flat surface of its history, there should occur for consciousness the mutual non-implication between the definitions synchronic to the object (the present, the “now” of the object) and its future “time” (its effects, of itself or on others), never returning to the “now”, or to put it another way, the mutual non-containment of one in another, the former mutual containment being consequential precisely of this object’s “eternal return to itself”, its circular history, the compactness of its past and future, of its synchrony and diachrony, in which the “later” is always with the “now” – like a sheet of paper, representing the surface of its history, being rolled up so that the two extreme edges (past and future) are one and the same. (“For the effect [the future of the cause] is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it” – the differentiation between past and future, of history (history differentiated out): that which supplies the logical un-necessity of the (future, continual) irritation of the “present” cause).

To repeat: this was the empiricist experience, that temporality was no longer contained in, or counted among the definitions of, the object, henceforth purely synchronic.¹

b.) Hume gives protracted continuity of experience as the factor formative of the compactness in quotidian consciousness between the temporal definitions of the object and the object itself, such that we experience the constant, or even necessary, conjunction between cause and effect.

“In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity, which we discover among natural objects [i.e. on the sameness of the synchronic definitions of the objects], and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those, which we have found to follow from such objects [and from which we derive, or even deduce, the temporal definitions of the objects: their futures]… From causes, which appear similar [actually, the same -- having the same (synchronic) definitions], we expect similar effects… Now it seems evident, that, if this conclusion were formed by [demonstrative or deductive] reason [where conclusion is always already contained in the premises], it would be as perfect at first, and upon one instance, as after ever so long a course of experience. But the case is far otherwise. Nothing so like as eggs: yet no one, on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them. It is only after a song course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event” (p. 28).

From this may actually emerge a picture of the evolutionary trajectory of that consciousness always concerned with “matters of fact,” with, that is to say, cause-and-effect.

The tabula rasa, so supposed by the empiricist experience, experiences since its infancy compactly (or confusedly) together objects and their effects, the latter retrospectively differentiated out of the object in the later experiences of differentiation, and has not as yet formulated of them a uniformity of definitions with the power of cross-temporal and -spatial unconcealment of all. The understanding of being is still in the process of being born. But “after a long course of uniform experiments” – after a long course of experience with objects consciousness forms of each uniform definitions that define it – light it up – both across its synchrony and over its diachrony: the future temporality of the object, referring to its future state and relations with others, not as yet differentiated from the synchronicity of the object – the object itself – but the two aspects forming, in their confusion with one another, an integrated definitional portrait or “semantic field” that is both temporal and spatial of the object, in order for consciousness to so see one in the other – time in space and space in time: effect in cause and cause in effect - as to expect the same effects from the presence of the same semantic fields, in a different time or space (body) or both.²

Consciousness continues to see effects in causes and causes in effects, without yet a capacity for distinguishing between inferring and deducing (demonstrative reasoning), until the differentiation of consciousness be completed in a linear time, equipped with past, present and future un-returnable one to another – i.e. one excluded from, or no longer contained in, the semantic fields of the other two. Now, the completed-ly differentiated consciousness suddenly sees, in shock, the break between past and future, effected by the exclusion in their respective definitions of one from another as the extremities implicit in the loop of time get disentangled... and it also sees the consequent break between cause and effect, between for example the movement of the first billiard ball and its communication of this movement to a second upon their impact: The Empiricist Conclusion: “We have said [stage 1], that all arguments concerning existence [i.e. empirical facts, as opposed to logical truths] are founded on the relation of cause and effect; [stage 2] that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; [stage 3] that all our experimental conclusions [i.e. concerning what cause gives what effect] proceed upon the supposition, that the future will be conformable to the past” (p. 23). It is this last supposition which, for the differentiated mind of the empiricist, cannot hold, namely cannot fulfill the criterion of logical truthfulness or of demonstrative reasoning, the implication of a contradiction at the reversal of the proposition: thus, as said earlier: “this definiteness and invariability of answer [from the consultation of experience] improves not in the least the (non-)relation between cause and effect.”

“Should it be said, that, from a number of uniform experiments, we infer a connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers [i.e. The Empiricist Conclusion: stage 2]... on what process of argument is this inference founded? [Hume’s answer = stage 3] Where is the medium, the interposing ideas, which join propositions so very wide of each other?”

c.) That medium is the “supposition, that the future will be conformable to the past.”

Here (i.e. in the concluding area of the empiricist’s experience) the genealogy of his experience should trace it finally back to the point of boundary between it and the origin that it denies, to this new depth: the surface of time, within the undifferentiated experience, curving back onto itself to necessitate the eternal return of the object therein embedded back to itself; and that other surface, so perfectly flat that the object therein embedded survives in the paradoxical manner from point to point only, i.e. from moment to moment. In the first space, in this first space for (the operation of) logic (or demonstration), logical validity or demonstrativeness – though this should never be sought for by the experience living in this space – can immediately be intuited for this last, important “supposition” (future = past); that is to say, not at all may be experienced here an excess in the movement from the premise of this supposition (past) to its conclusion (future as past): the future will always be conformable to the past. On the other hand the differentiated experience in the empiricist of the causal disjunction may procure, in the second space, and only in this second space of time, its justification-through-demonstration from the intuition, only possible here, of the non-preexistence in the premise of the conclusion. Consider:

The logical validity – demonstrativeness – of this argument (now not simply a declaration making explicit an experience), referring to the pre-existence of the conclusion (“flame”) in the premise (“heat”), depends on the validity of that supposition (the additional premise, so to speak), the supposition stating the implication of an invariant future by a past, a past which informs us of (one may say) the “pre-existence” aforementioned.

This argument is actually valid, as a piece of deductive reasoning, for an undifferentiated consciousness understanding (only) circular time (the great Cycle), for whose understanding of being the future, indeed, pre-exists in the same shape in the past, in its eternal return to the past – but not so for a differentiated consciousness understanding (only) linear time. (The exile of the future from the past, this function of the constitution of differentiated time: thus is made evident herein also for the consciousness living this time the corresponding exile of the temporality of the object from its synchronicity, the exile of flame from heat in the present case, in virtue of the want of past in the future consequent to it (as one shall never return to the other as if returning to itself as was the case in the past), and therefore of the want, in the future, of the compactness in the object of its synchrony and diachrony that was “given” (experimentally) in the past: the same argumentative sequence (heat then flame; past then [the invariant] future), and the same logic as standard for verification (demonstration); there is however a difference between the two sorts of consciousness in their respective experiences of the content of the premises – in what “heat” or “past” says to one consciousness and to the other.

It is only with these knowledges kept in mind that we may continue in the reading of Hume learning not a thing from him but much about ourselves.

“It is confessed, that the colour, consistence, and other sensible qualities of bread appear not, of themselves, to have any connexion with the secret powers of nourishment and support. For otherwise we would infer these secret powers from the first appearance of these sensible qualities, without the aid of experience.” Note that such statement is applicable as truth-telling description only to a differentiated consciousness having already had much of compact experience of cause-and-effect that allows him now this capacity for differentiation and disjunction between the two. In reality, of course, the undifferentiated consciousness, still foggy in memory and perception, could not yet, at the (really) first appearance of objects, form of them any sort of definitions (at first compact-ed of space and time) that are already quite complete. This is in infancy: the pre-maturity of the understanding of being. In reality, actually, in fact… the sort of empirical agent, with the power for highly differentiated observations (see Hume’s description below), and therefore with the power for the differentiated experience of linear time, presupposes logically and actually, synchronically and diachronically, as the anterior mode to his present perception, the undifferentiated mode of perception compacted of space in time and time in space, the basic, ambiguous mass of datum which gives rise to the logically and experientially ulterior formation, through differentiation, of the very SEPARATE entities now understood as cause and effect, in order for Hume to then make a fuss about them, to no longer see one in the interior of the other. “Here then is our natural state of ignorance with regard to the powers and influence of all objects. How is this remedied by experience? It only… teaches us, that those particular objects, at that particular time, were endowed with such powers and forces. When a new object, endowed with similar sensible qualities, is produced, we expect similar powers and forces, and look for a like effect…. But this surely is a step or progress of the mind… when a man says, [this is the step – that supposition, stage 1] I nave found, in all past instances, such sensible qualities conjoined with such secret powers; And when he says, similar sensible qualities will always [in the future] be conjoined with similar secret power; he is not guilty of a tautology, nor are these propositions in any respect the same…. You must confess that the inference is not intuitive; nor is it demonstrative [now, that supposition considered invalid]: of what nature is it then? To say it is experimental [i.e. that the eternal resemblance between future and past is learned from past experience], is begging the question. For all inferences from experience [that is, including this one, the eternal resemblance between future and past] suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past.” Here is the circularity in reasoning – begging the question – of which Hume accuses anyone with a justification by means of experimentation of the supposition: “that the future should resemble the past is given us by the experienced past, in which such temporal resemblance has always held”; but will the future be conformable to the past so as to render the temporal resemblance between past and future in the past holding too for the future? This circularity of reasoning is the physical effect of the un-fulfillment by the supposition of the criterion of logical truthfulness: the supposition would not have the need to depend on itself, but on something greater (the generation of contradiction when its conclusion is reversed), for its truthfulness were there to be no possibility of (the imagination of) the suspicion concerning it, as is expressed below. “… if there be any suspicion, that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience… can give rise to no inference or conclusion” (p. 24).

The very possibility of this doubt, the very fact of proposing or imagining this doubt, shows the non-implication of a contradiction within this doubt, this doubt that is the reversal of that supposition ultimately foundational for any experience of the conjunction between cause and effect, which, in light of this exhibition, fails to enter logical truthfulness and to receive therefrom a certification guaranteeing its “holdability” against its accidentality, i.e. its logical validity. To put it reversely, the inability of the supposition to generate, at its reversal, an (un-imaginable) contradiction means the demise of this supposition: logical invalidity.

But we must try for once to overcome the trap of anachronicity and imagine if an undifferentiated consciousness understanding no other than an (undifferentiated) circular time can understand this suspicion – that the course of nature may change – as we understand it here. Could it be that for such undifferentiated consciousness an un-imaginable contradiction is indeed in the suspicion here? Is it even possible that the boundaries of the field of the imaginable might have shifted outward, in fellowship to consciousness’ continuous differentiation?

We may employ one last illustrative example. It is typically taught in introductory analytic philosophy classes that an argument such as:

is not logically (deductively) valid: his being dead does not follow from his head’s being cut off. This sounds bizarre for “ordinary people”, i.e. for minds rather undifferentiated, and everyone “knows” that one’s head’s being cut off entails one’s being dead. Within the framework of undifferentiated consciousness the argument is in fact valid, because here the connotation of decapitation, i.e. “being dead”, is still compacted with its denotation, its literal meaning of head’s being chopped off, so that “being dead” is already contained in “head’s being chopped off”. When the advancing consciousness of analytic philosopher, therefore, “discovers” that the ordinary argumentation is in fact logically invalid, it is not really discovering anything but simply changing the meaning of “head’s being chopped off”: differentiation has reduced the originally rich meaning of “head’s being chopped off” to its literal denotation, referring to the bare empirical instant of head’s being chopped off and nothing more (i.e. not including the connotation of what happens immediately afterwards). This is how consciousness upon differentiation produces (not discovers) the distinction between synthetic and analytic statements (in this case: through the differentiation of linear temporality: "John's head's being chopped off is his head's being chopped off" = analytic; "John's head's being chopped off means he is dying" = synthetic). Thus the differentiation of consciousness, by cutting up reality into ever finer chunks – “head’s being chopped off” in complete distinction from “being dead” – has actually made the perception of reality much more impoverished, in contrast to the former undifferentiated reality in which each element (e.g. “head’s being chopped off”) drags with it a thick layer of other meanings (“being dead” being part of them). As the Western consciousness matures and differentiates, therefore, it also becomes more and more impoverished and spiritually depraved.

Thus one important lesson we gain here is the recognition that deductive reasoning has not the power to establish or to isolate a truth in the absolute manner, independent of the specificity of experience, or of the question of in which field of experience, of understanding of being, in which epistème (to use Foucault’s word in Les mots et les choses) the “demonstration of reason” is carried out; and thus that, insofar as divergent experiences or understandings of being may, carrying out the same demonstration, deduce without fault divergent conclusions, a sudden new insight in the manner of an invalidation of past truths which are thus presented as falsehood merely accepted as truth previously by incautious reasoning may not be such at all, i.e. a discovery of truth hitherto undiscovered, but may simply reflect a change or differentiation in the understanding of being, in consciousness, in the perspective from which we see and experience reality. Whereas the logical truthfulness of A = A (i.e. of any tautology) may well be eternally guaranteed (by demonstrative or deductive reasoning), the falsity (i.e. analyticity as opposed to syntheticity) of A = B may not so be: it all depends on whether the understanding of being within which logical operation is conducted has or has not as yet differentiated between A and B – depending on how A and B are experienced at this historical moment in the history of consciousness. Notwithstanding the eternal validity of demonstrative reasoning, the relativity of its “product” (conclusion) remains, and “truthfulness” depends just as much on its location in World-History; analytic philosophers err frequently in passing “analytical” judgments (always valid only in their own location) on wisdoms of the past, and in not being aware of how their discourse – the issues they are concerned with, from “epistemology” to “ethics”, and the solutions they offer – is historically constituted, i.e. by the differentiation of consciousness.

Footnotes:

1. If the empiricist wishes to object: “But time is really linear, the future never returning to the past and the past never going to the future: hence Hume’s differentiated experience of non-causality is correct and the old experience wrong!” he or she is doing no more than base his or her determination of correctness or truthfulness on his or her differentiated experience and presuppose again, and overlook again, that experience of differentiation which is his or her origin. Nothing that is really the case has been found. (C.f. below, section c.).

2. This “integrated” semantic field of the object is in fact the (explicitated) being of the object in our understanding (experience) of being (Seinsverständnis), even in the empiricist’s understanding of being, in which he is now making extra cuts in order to utter extra discourse.