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There are No Relations in the Cosmic Monstrosity
Neo-animism and nature’s pseudo-social causal relations
David Hume was famously struck by the “occult” implications of the folk sense of causality.
We assume that effects are necessarily connected to their causes, but we never experience such necessity. On strictly empirical grounds, this reassuring sense that the future will always be like the past, so that our inductive generalizations are sensible is baseless.
What we perceive are “constant conjunctions” or patterns between events of certain types. What goes up, for instance, always comes down in our experience. But just because the pattern has lasted throughout our experience doesn’t mean it will always do so. We can speak rationally of what’s been constantly conjoined in our experience, but not of what will necessarily follow from some conditions.
For some psychological, social, or evolutionary reasons, we project that necessity onto nature, simplifying what’s strictly perceived to reassure ourselves and feel more grounded in our judgments.
Both necessary connections and constant conjunctions, though, are relations. When we think of limited or universal patterns, we’re thinking not so much of stuff but relations between things. Is there a similar projection, then, in…
