(b) The Relationship of Causality

Substance is Cause, in so far as substance reflects into self as against its passage into accidentality and so stands as the primary fact, but again no less suspends this reflection-into-self (its bare possibility), lays itself down as the negative of itself, and thus produces an Effect, an actuality, which, though so far only assumed as a sequence, is through the process that effectuates it at the same time necessary.

As primary fact, the cause is qualified as having absolute independence, and a subsistence maintained in face of the effect: but in the necessity, whose identity constitutes that primariness itself, it is wholly passed into the effect. So far again as we can speak of a definite content, there is no content that is not in the cause. That identity in fact is the absolute content itself: but it is no less also the form-characteristic. The primariness of the cause is suspended in the effect in which the cause makes itself a dependent being. The cause however does not for that reason vanish and leave the effect to be alone actual. For this dependency is in like manner directly suspended, and is rather the reflection of the cause in itself, its primariness: in short, it is in the effect that the cause first becomes actual and a cause. The cause consequently is in its full truth causa sui. Jacobi, sticking to the partial conception of mediation (in his Letters on Spinoza), has treated the causa sui (and the effectus sui is the same), which is the absolute truth of the cause, as a mere formalism. He has also made the remark that God ought to be defined not as the ground of things, but essentially as cause. A more thorough consideration of the nature of cause would have shown that Jacobi did not by this means gain what he intended. Even in the finite cause and its conception we can see this identity between cause and effect in point of content. The rain (the cause) and the wet (the effect) are the self-same existing water. In point of form the cause (rain) is dissipated or lost in the effect (wet): but in that case the result can no longer be described as effect; for without the cause it is nothing, and we should have only the unrelated wet left.

In the common acceptation of the causal relation the cause is finite, to such extent as its content is so (as is the case with finite substance), and so far as cause and effect are conceived as two several independent existences: which they are, however, only when we leave the causal relation out of sight. In the finite sphere we never get over the difference of the form-characteristics in their relation: and hence we turn the matter around and define the cause also as something dependent or as an effect. This again has another cause, and thus there grows up a progress from effects to causes ad infinitum. There is a descending progress too: the effect, looked at in its identity with the cause, is itself defined as a cause, and at the same time as another cause, which again has other effects, and so on for ever.

The way understanding bristles up against the idea of substance is equalled by its readiness to use the relation of cause and effect. Whenever it is proposed to view any sum of facts as necessary, it is especially the relation of causality to which the reflective understanding makes a point of tracing of it back. Now, although this relation does undoubtedly belong to necessity, it forms only one aspect in the process of that category. That process equally requires the suspension of the mediation involved in causality and the exhibition of it as simple self-relation. If we stick to causality as such, we have it not in its truth. Such a causality is merely finite, and its finitude lies in retaining the distinction between cause and effect unassimilated. But these two terms, if they are distinct, are also identical. Even in ordinary consciousness that identity may be found. We say that a cause is a cause, only where it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction between them is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down. This formal difference however again suspends itself, because the cause is not only a cause of something else, but also a cause of itself; while the effect is not only an effect of something else, but also an effect of itself. The finitude of things consists accordingly in this. While cause and effect are in their motion identical, the two forms present themselves severed so that, though the cause is also an effect, and the effect also a cause, the cause is not an effect in the same connection as it is an effect. This again gives the infinite progress, in the shape of an endless series of causes, which shows itself at the same time as an endless series of effects.

Action and Reaction § 154

The effect is different from the cause. The former as such has a being dependent on the latter. But such a dependence is likewise reflection-into-self and immediacy: and the action of the cause, as it constitutes the effect, is at the same time the pre-constitution of the effect, so long as effect is kept separate from cause. There is already in existence another substance on which the effect takes place. As immediate, this substance is not a self-related negativity and active, but passive. Yet it is a substance, and it is therefore active also: it therefore suspends the immediacy it was originally put forward with, and the effect which was put into it: it reacts, i.e. suspends the activity of the first substance. But this first substance also in the same way sets aside its own immediacy, or the effect which is put into it; it thus suspends the activity of the other substance and reacts. In this manner causality passes into the relation of Action and Reaction, or Reciprocity.

In Reciprocity, although causality is not yet invested with its true characteristic, the rectilinear movement out from causes to effects, and from effects to causes, is bent round and back into Itself, and thus the progress ad infinitum of causes and effects is, as a progress, really and truly suspended. This bend, which transforms the infinite progression into a self-contained relationship, here as always the plain reflection that in the above meaningless repetition there is only one and the same thing, viz. one cause and another, and their connection with one another. Reciprocity — which is the development of this relation — itself however only distinguishes turn and turn about — not causes, but factors of causation, in each of which, just because they are inseparable (on the principle of the identity that the cause is cause in the effect, and vice versa), the other factor is also equally supposed.