Cause and effect

We call it ’explanation’, but ‘description’ is what distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. We are better at describing - we explain just as little as all our predecessors. We have uncovered a diverse succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two different things, ‘cause’ and ’effect’, as they said; we have perfected the picture of becoming but haven’t got over, got behind the picture. The series of ‘causes’ faces us much more completely in each case; we reason, ’this and that must precede for that to follow’ - but we haven’t thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a ‘miracle’, as does every locomotion; no one has ’explained’ the push.

How could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist - with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces.

How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture - our picture! It is enough to view science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; we learn to describe ourselves more and more precisely as we describe things and their succession. Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; it is a suddenness only for us. There is an infinite number of processes that elude us in this second of suddenness. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment - that saw the stream of the event - would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness.