Principle of Causality

The Principle of Causality names the way an appearing thing is first apprehended as already there in its own absence, preparing its arrival. Rather than an eternal bond between phenomena, causality begins as a temporal structure of appearance; ordinary perception then fixes that movement into an external relation between things.

Causality Begins in Appearance

The account starts from the appearance of a thing in a world where it was previously absent. A For-itself, already present to that world, apprehends the thing’s advent as an adventure: what appears is encountered as having been there in its own nothingness before its arrival. This is not merely a concept supplied by the mind but, the text argues, an original structure of perception. The Gestalt School’s experiments are invoked to show that pure appearance is grasped dynamically, as an upsurge coming into being on the ground of nothingness.

On this account, causality does not begin by denying the appearance, as Meyerson’s view is characterized as doing, nor by positing a permanent exterior bond between two phenomena. Its first form is the apprehension of the appearing thing as already present before it appears, in a way that prepares its apparition. Causality is thus the initial apprehension of the appearing thing’s temporality as an ekstatic mode of being: appearance is experienced through a before that opens toward an arrival.

Perception and the Fixing of Relations

The dynamic structure does not remain intact. In perception, the event’s adventurous character disintegrates: before and after become fixed as moments, and the appearing thing is apprehended as indifferent self-identity. What had been its non-being at a prior instant is now revealed as the full being existing at that instant. In turn, causality is reduced to a purely external relation between earlier things and the thing that appears.

This collapse explains the account’s ambiguity: appearance and abolition, like the world, space, potentiality, instrumentality, and universal time, are given as totalities that are continually disintegrating. Causality therefore bears two aspects at once. It originates in temporal apprehension of an advent, yet perception converts that advent into a sequence of fixed, externally related moments.

The World’s Past

The analysis places this transformation within the constitution of the world’s past, which consists of homogeneous instants connected by purely external relations. Through the past, the For-itself founds itself in the In-itself: what was transcendence is revealed as being in the midst of the world, and has lost its transcendence. The past of the For-itself is not a separate temporal domain from the past of the world that was present with it; the difference is that the For-itself has to be its own past.

There is therefore only one past: the objective past of being, in which the For-itself was. Its past belongs to the totality of past being that it is and flees. The account’s treatment of causality thus leads beyond the relation between an earlier and a later event: it shows how perception’s external ordering of moments belongs to a world of past being, while the For-itself’s own temporality remains bound to that past without being reducible to it.