Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Causation Without Clunking

We are beginning to see how we can do without a mechanistic theory of causation: all to the good, since mechanistic theories just fail to cope with relativity or quantum theory. [57] There is an ontological reason why we need to avoid mechanism. If all objects are unique, there is no sense in which we can specify a mechanical level that somehow chugs along beneath objects. This would require consistent machine parts, and according to the view of OOO, we are just not living in that kind of reality.

There is a far deeper problem. If all objects are unique and enclosed from access, they can never truly be said to touch one another! Harman thus outlines an OOO theory of vicarious causation. This may sound absurd on the face of it, but is it? Consider quantum theory for a moment. If objects truly touched one another at the quantum level (down towards the Planck length, 10^-33 cm), they would become one another. [58] Above this level, what we think of as touching has to do with how objects resist one another. The fact that I can rest my hand on a cinder block means that the quanta in my fingers are failing to bust through the resistance wells on the surface of the block. From a rather straightforward physics point of view, objects just don’t touch one another in the ways we take to be given in our experience. When something touches something, even when it seems to penetrate that something, it’s not really fusing with it. Its quanta are failing to fuse with it.

Touching, no matter how intimate, involves a necessary aesthetic distance. People commonly think of causality as a clunk that breaks through the aesthetic screen, like Doctor’s Johnson’s boot. This kind of clunking is one aesthetic phenomenon among many. I am touched, for instance, at this very moment, by gravity waves emanating from the beginning of this Universe. A chemical solution can be touched by a catalyst. Soft tissue is touched by high energy photons such as gamma rays, giving rise to mutagenic effects.

Two deep philosophical traditions have explored how causation can be vicarious: how causation does not have to imply direct touching. One tradition is Islamic; the other is Buddhist. We’ve looked at Al-Kindi briefly; now consider Al-Ghazali, whom Harman cites as a foil for his theory of vicarious causation. Al-Ghazali was an occasionalist—he held that only God could make anything happen. Fire doesn’t really burn a piece of cotton—somehow God magically intervenes and uses the fire as an occasion for the cotton to catch alight. [59] Why is this important for our purposes? Because if objects are withdrawn from one another, there must be some vicarious way in which they affect one another. We don’t need it to be God—in fact, we don’t need God at all. All the vicariousness we want can be found in the aesthetic dimension in which things are enmeshed.

Now this is remarkably similar to an argument in Mahayana Buddhism. Even the example is similar—it involves fire and fuel. Nagarjuna, the great philosopher of Buddhist emptiness (shunyatā), argued that a flame never really touches its fuel—nor does it fail to touch! (Here’s a dialetheia again.) If it did so, then the fuel would be the flame or vice versa, and no causality could occur. [60] Yet if they were totally separate, no burning could take place. Nagarjuna argues that if something were to arise from itself, then nothing would happen. Yet if something were to arise from something else that was not-itself, then nothing can happen either. A mixture of these views (both–and and neither–nor) is also possible, since such a mixture would be subject to the defects of each one combined. For instance, on this view, the idea that things arise neither from themselves nor from something else is what Nagarjuna calls nihilism, on which basis anything at all can happen. The logic of causal explanations, he argues, is circular. [61] Emptiness is not the absence of something, but the nonconceptuality of reality: the real is beyond concept, because it is real.

What explains burning? Buddhism is non-theistic, so it isn’t God. Instead, it’s emptiness. In other words, the lack of an intrinsic, non-contradictory, purely given being means that objects can influence one another. We see flames spurting out of candles all the time, but if the candle were to be touched by the flame, it would simply be part of that object, and a flame can’t be burnt—it is the act of burning. Yet if the flame and the candle were separate, we would never see flames jiggling about on top of candlewicks. Causality, according to this view, is like a magical display—there is no physical reason why it is happening. Rather, the reason is aesthetic (magic, display). Furthermore, the magical illusion happens all by itself, withdrawn from perception.

There is no “causation” as such—that’s a superficial illusion, a presence-at-hand as Harman would say. Like Al-Ghazali, for whom God provides the causal links between unlinkable objects, a kind of magic happens (without God) and we see flames emerging out of candlewicks and billiard balls smacking one another. There is nothing underneath this display. And the display happens whether “we” observe it or not.

What does this mean? It means that causality is aesthetic.