Another Look at Philosophy and Disagreement (Column 248)

With God's help

Over the holiday I read an article by Eliezer Weinreb, "Omissions",[1] which deals with the philosophical question whether an omission (= failure to act) can be considered an act. This has several implications, mainly in the field of law (whether an omission is grounds for conviction in criminal law). Not long ago I read an excellent analytical book by Roni Rosenberg, devoted entirely to this subject, Between Act and Omission in Criminal Law. In chapter 2, section 2 (p. 66 onward), he discusses the philosophical question whether an omission can be considered the cause of something. It turns out that philosophers are divided over a similar issue, and I wanted to touch on it here.

An article with a signature but no cat

Mark Twain once received a letter containing a single word: "Idiot!" He did not lose his composure, and replied to the writer with a letter of his own: "I have received letters in the past without a signature, but this is the first time I have received a letter containing only a signature." I was reminded of this story when, a few days ago, I was sent the following article, by Tyron Goldschmidt of the University of Rochester. No, you are not mistaken: there is only a title there: "A DEMONSTRATION OF THE CAUSAL POWER OF ABSENCES." Beyond the title there is nothing there. For your information, this "article" was published in the philosophical journal Dialectica(vol. 70, issue 1, 2016, p. 85). And while we are already on anecdotes, on second thought this "article" reminds me even more of a favorite line Lewis Carroll placed in the mouth of his Alice (which serves as the epigraph to chapter 4 of my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv): "I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice, "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!".

At first I did not really understand the point, and I sent the sender my questions. He explained to me that this "article" teaches us something significant about the aforementioned debate. The claim was that the article addresses the philosophical dispute whether an absence can be the cause of something. Thus, for example, people say that my failure to water the potted plants caused them to wither. How can something that does not exist, or did not occur, cause anything? An absence is nothing, and as such it seemingly cannot cause or bring about anything. This "article" tries to demonstrate concretely that such a phenomenon can in fact exist. There you have it: the fact that nothing is written beneath the title causes you to be surprised when you see the article (think how surprised you would be if you encountered a grin without a cat). If so, absence too can cause something (your surprise). QED.

Between an experience of absence and the absence of experience

In addition, as I was told, this article offers a resolution to another philosophical/psychological question: is an experience of absence an "absence of experiencing existence" or an "experience of nonexistence"? For example, when I am sad that I do not have a million shekels in the bank, is that because I experience the absence of a million shekels in my account, or because I do not experience the existence of a million shekels there?

It is quite clear that in this case I have an experience of absence, not that there is (!) in me an absence of experience, for ordinarily I am not sad about the absence of a million in my account. That sadness arises only in circumstances in which the absence is made vivid to me (when I need the money, or when I see someone else whose account contains such a sum), that is, when I have an experience of absence, and it is not enough merely that I lack an experience of its existence. One must understand that an experience of absence is not itself an absence but something positive. I do have some experience (the absence), and it is this that produces the feeling of sadness. This is not a phenomenon caused by sheer nothing. True, one can ask how this very experience of absence arose in me. Was it not the absence of the million shekels that produced it? If that is the case, then the experience itself is the product of an absence, and once again we arrive at the conclusion that an absence can cause something (an experience, in this case).

The relation to the principle of causality

With all due respect to all the philosophers, it seems to me very difficult to argue against the claim that nothingness cannot cause anything. A cause or reason has to be something. Nothingness is not something, and therefore it cannot be the cause of anything (see the responses to Goldschmidt's article, such as that of David Oderberg, or that of Justin Weinberg)[2].

All this, of course, is if one adopts the conventional meaning of the causal relation, namely that A is the cause of B if and only if it brings B about. David Hume and others following him offer a different interpretation of the causal relation: according to them, a causal relation is nothing more than a mode of expression meaning that event B always and necessarily comes after event A (without positing a relation of production between them). According to them, for example, nine o'clock is the cause of ten o'clock (because it always comes before it, and ten always comes after it). This is nonsense,[3] and I will not address it here. I am, of course, assuming in this discussion and generally that the causal relation contains three components: the temporal – A always comes before B. The logical – if A then B (A is a sufficient condition for B). The physical – because of A, therefore B (A causes B).[4]

I will now clarify my claim that nothingness cannot be a cause of anything. The principle of causality says that everything must have a cause, and clearly that cause is not nothingness, for nothingness is nothing. If nothingness is the cause of something, that means that the thing in question has no cause, and this contradicts the principle of causality. But I intend here to make a stronger claim: even if someone disputes the principle of causality for some reason (such as atheists who reject the physico-theological proof and claim that the world came into being from nothing by sheer accident and without reason), he must still agree that nothingness cannot be a cause. At most he will say that not everything, and not always, must have a cause, but even on his view, if something has a cause, that cause must be something and not nothingness. This is an a priori logical claim, not a philosophical or scientific one.

The conclusion is that even if we accept the possibility of creation "something from nothing," what is meant is that previously there was nothingness and afterward there was something. But clearly this does not mean that nothingness is the cause of the something. Nothingness is the cause of nothing.

Implication for Quantum Theory

Several times in the past, when I presented the physico-theological proof (which, as noted, is based on the principle of causality), readers raised against me the claim that quantum theory allows particles to come into being out of the vacuum, that is, something from nothing. Seemingly, this is scientific evidence against the principle of causality, which is one of the premises of that proof. Of course, they do not mean to claim that the vacuum created the particles, but that the particles were created after a state of vacuum, in the sense of "something from nothing," as I explained above.

I argued there in response that, precisely because of the principle of causality, I do not accept this description. A world that is truly empty is also devoid of laws and of any structure whatsoever. In such a state, nothing can come into being within it. In our world, particles can arise from the vacuum only because that vacuum has structure. Our universe has a quantum character (that is, it is governed by the laws of quantum theory). Therefore even a state of vacuum is not a nothingness devoid of structure and form. It is a special vacuum with quantum properties that allow particles to arise without any other prior matter. But if so, it is not true that there is no cause here. There is a cause, and it is the quantum character of this vacuum. Therefore even if we were to assume (as those atheists do) that the entire world arose spontaneously from a vacuum, this would not contradict the physico-theological argument. Someone would have had to bring about the quantum character of this universe (to legislate the laws of quantum theory), and in that way he would be responsible for its coming into being.

This argument assumes two things: the emergence of pairs from the vacuum is based on a combination of the two principles we encountered: everything must have a cause, and nothingness cannot be a cause. In short, something from nothing is impossible.

Does nothingness exist?

In Kabbalah they refer to the sefirah of Keter (or to the Infinite Light) as "nothing," but this is "nothing" only in our terminology (that is, it is not matter and not anything of the kind we know). Clearly this sefirah too is something, however abstract it may be. The sefirah of Wisdom emerges from it (is emanated from it), and clearly it does not emerge from literal nothingness, for nothing can come out of nothingness. Some thinkers formulate this by saying that the nothing is, and is not not – that is, the "nothing" being spoken of here is something (and not sheer nothing).

This terminology is, of course, a paraphrase of Parmenides, who dealt with this question and argued that being is and nonbeing is not. From this he derived the following claim in favor of the eternity of matter:[5]

That is, all that can be known about nonbeing is that it is not. Beyond that we cannot know anything about it. All that remains for us is to speak about being. And what is known to us about being? That it is?
Parmenides replies and says: Being was never created, for if it had ever come into being, the possibilities would be that it came from being or that it came from nonbeing. But it cannot come from nonbeing, because nonbeing is not. Yet if being came from being, that means that being was there already, before it came into being.

But in light of our discussion here, it seems that he is mistaken. Being indeed was not created from nothingness (that is, nothingness is neither its cause nor its raw material), but it can be created by another agent (a non-material one: God) after a state of nothingness.[6]

Between nothingness and absence

If we return to our "article" about the causal potential of absence, it seems to me that the root of the author's problem is that he does not distinguish between nothingness and absence. Nothingness is a vacuum, sheer nothing. By contrast, absence is always the absence of something. What is going on in this "article" is not nothingness but absence: it is the absence of written content as we know it from ordinary articles we have read. Nothingness cannot produce anything at all, but absence certainly can. In the case of absence, what acts upon us is not the nothingness now standing before us, but the absence of something that ought to have been here. The combination of that something together with the nothingness is the cause that produces the phenomenon under discussion (our surprise).

In the example of the above "article," the absence can act on us causally (create in us a feeling of absence that causes surprise) because in the background of that absence stand the articles we knew in the past that did have written content. They take part in causing our surprise. What causes the surprise is the contrast between an ordinary article (which causes us to expect written content) and this "article," which has no written content, and that creates some experience that affects us. In the formulation we encountered above, there is here an experience of nonexistence (the absence of written content), not a non-experience of existence (which is just nothingness). A non-experience is a nothing that cannot cause anything. By contrast, an experience of nonexistence is an experience in every respect (and its content is the contrast I described), and therefore it can also cause things (such as a feeling of surprise), and of course it too is caused by something that precedes it.

Causation by omission

Similarly, it is not true that failure to water a plant causes it to wither. What causes this is its drying out, except that watering could have prevented it. The fact that I did not water it is an omission, following which (but not because of which) the plant withered. This is the meaning of causation by omission in all contexts, legal and otherwise. An omission causes nothing; at most, it fails to prevent a result (fails to save from it). What causes the result is always some other factor, and the omission lies in the fact that we did not neutralize that other factor but allowed it to act. So it is in the case of the plant, and so too regarding a person who did not save his friend from drowning in the river. He did not cause the drowning. What caused it was the river and the drowning person's swimming capacity. True, had I taken steps to save him, I might perhaps have prevented it. In brief, we say that the omission caused the drowning, and that failure to water caused the plant to wither, but this is only a habitual turn of phrase.

In our language we can indeed say that I did not get up because (!) the alarm clock did not ring, or that I was late because (!) the bus did not arrive, or that I experience a lack of love because (!) I did not find a partner, and so forth. But in all these cases the omission caused nothing. At most one can say that had I not failed by omission, I might have prevented the result that was caused by some other factor.

Causation by omission in law

In the legal context, one can see such causation in the issue of "Its beginning was in negligence and its end in an unavoidable accident" ("it begins in negligence and ends in unavoidable accident"). I described this in the writings mentioned above, and here I will only summarize briefly. If a custodian receives money to guard, and he places it in a hut in the woods (a hut of willow branches, Bava Metzia 42a), such a place is considered susceptible to fire but protected against thieves (no thief would look for money in a hut in the woods). Therefore such an act is considered negligence with respect to fire, meaning that the custodian was forbidden to do this (even though the place is protected against theft). What is the law if, in the end, a fire broke out? In such a situation the custodian is considered negligent. Placing the money in the hut is the cause of its being burned, and since his actions caused the result, he is responsible for it (this is not an omission but an act). What would the law be if the money deteriorated on its own (it was old)? In that case, according to almost all views, the custodian is exempt, even though placing the money in the hut was itself negligence, because this would have happened even without his act (with the exception of Rif's view in Abaye's opinion there, 36a-b). In such a case there is no connection between the negligence and the unavoidable accident, and therefore the custodian did not cause the result, neither by act nor by omission.[7] The Talmud there discusses a third case: what is the law if, surprisingly, thieves nonetheless came to the hut and the money was stolen? This is a case called "Its beginning was in negligence and its end in an unavoidable accident", because the custodian was negligent in the very act of placing the money in the hut (lest it burn), but in the end an unavoidable accident occurred (it was stolen). In such a situation the Amoraim disagreed, and as a matter of Jewish law most halakhic decisors ruled that the custodian is liable.

On the legal plane, one cannot say that placing the money there caused it to be stolen, since the place is considered protected against theft (and a custodian is exempt in a case of unavoidable accident). On the other hand, it is clear that had he not been negligent with respect to fire (that is, had he not placed the money there), the money would not have been stolen. In other words, there is passive causation here. This is essentially an omission. He ought to have kept the money with himself and not placed it there, and therefore although his actions are not considered the cause that brought about the theft (for he is blamed only for an omission), his omission is considered (passive) causation, and it obligates him to pay. In such a case, what caused the theft is the thieves, or rather their decision to look for money in so unexpected a place. But if the custodian had not been negligent and had not placed the money there, it would have been saved from the theft. As we saw in the previous section, the omission is failure to save, and that is enough to impose liability.

According to the accepted definition among jurists, an omission for which a person can be blamed is when that person failed to perform an action that the law requires him to perform. In such a case, although the person was in fact passive and did not perform an act (but rather suffered from an omission), and although liability in damages exists only where a person's actions caused the result, while an omission, as stated, causes nothing (rather, there is some external factor that brought about the result), nevertheless in such a case he is regarded as responsible for the result. Thus, in the case of "Its beginning was in negligence and its end in an unavoidable accident", the custodian who failed to act is regarded as a causal agent bearing responsibility for the result. This is also the reason for the linguistic practice I described above, whereby in certain cases we describe the omission as an event that causes the result (failure to water causes withering, failure to save causes drowning, and the like).

A note on art and argumentation

Works of art sometimes contain some message or insight (though there is no necessity for that; some even regard it as a defect in the work – it is too didactic), and sometimes a philosophical claim as well. What distinguishes such art from an article in philosophy is not the message (for both contain one), but the form in which it is conveyed. The article conveys the message verbally, describes it in words (preferably as clearly as possible), and it is evaluated and judged by the quality of its argumentation. A work of art, by contrast, is not judged through the quality of its message, nor even through the truth of the claims it conveys. It may convey mistaken claims, and there is no artistic defect in that. What matters in a work of art, even when it has a message, is not the message itself but the manner and form of its transmission. If the artist found an original and incisive way to convey the message or the claim, then his work has artistic value.[8] Therefore an ordinary article in philosophy is not a work of art.

In light of this distinction, it seems to me that Goldschmidt's "article" is a kind of work of art, but not an article in philosophy. Therefore its place is in a museum, not in a philosophical journal. As far as the artistry is concerned, it is irrelevant that its message (or claim) is mistaken. What matters is the original mode of presentation he found in order to present it. The main thing in this "article" is the manner in which the message is conveyed, not the message itself, and therefore it is really a work of art and not an article. Suppose Goldschmidt had described his claim in words and said something like this to the reader: assume that instead of words there appeared here a blank page under such-and-such a title. Clearly, surprise would arise in you, and this proves that absence can bring about results (mental ones, in this case). In that case we would be dealing with a legitimate article in philosophy (though a mistaken one, in this case, and so I still would not have accepted it). But in Goldschmidt's case this was cleverness, which is at most a refreshing way to convey the argument, not an argument proper; therefore this is a work of art and not an article in philosophy.

It seems to me that as an editor I would not accept it for publication for both reasons: first, it is incorrect, and second, even if it were correct (and even if it is not), its place is in an art museum and not in a philosophical journal. Well, that is, of course, a somewhat "square" position. I assume that if the argument were correct, there certainly would be room to be generous and depart from the rules, and to accept the article even for a philosophical journal. Here I only wanted to sharpen the difference.

I want to conclude the column with two remarks connected to topics we have already discussed: one regarding disagreement between peers, and the second regarding the nature of philosophy in general.

A. Peer disagreement

I would like to use the dispute described here (regarding the possibility of absence causing something) as an example of the attitude I ought to take toward someone who holds a position opposed to mine (the subject discussed in column 244). After that, I will raise the question whether I ought to reconsider my own position on the assumption that the author is a philosopher as skilled as I am (the subject discussed in column 247).

Let me begin by saying that Goldschmidt's argument, and that of his associates, can be interpreted in two ways: 1. They intend to prove that nothingness can cause something. 2. They intend to prove that absence can cause something. The first possibility is a clear mistake (nothingness cannot produce anything), whereas the second possibility is trivial. It is unlikely that there is any dispute about it (as we saw, it is clear that absence can cause things). I should note that according to the principle of charity, and this is also indicated by the terminology appearing in the title (absence), it seems that Goldschmidt intends to prove the claim about absence rather than about nothingness.

The first interpretation illustrates a case in which my interlocutor (Goldschmidt) is making a logical mistake. His argument does not prove the conclusion he is aiming at, and in addition his conclusion is plainly false. As I noted in the previous column, in such a case there is no reason to unsettle my position because of the dilemma of peer disagreement. If Goldschmidt were to hear my counterarguments, he would presumably retract; and if he would not retract, I should assume that he is "locked in" or that he is not really a peer (that is, he does not possess reasonable philosophical competence).[9]

The second interpretation illustrates another phenomenon. Goldschmidt's argument proves a trivial claim about which there is no dispute. In fact, here too there is an implication for the dilemma of peer disagreement. Sometimes the dispute is only apparent, and in fact both sides are making agreed-upon claims, and in many cases those claims complement one another. Sometimes the disputants are dealing with different concepts, or they use the same term in different senses. For example, in the dispute discussed here about the causal potential of an empty state, there seem to be two polar positions opposed to one another. But a closer examination shows that the two sides are not arguing at all, and the full picture is the combination of the two claims: nothingness cannot produce anything, and absence certainly can produce things. The dispute is waged with full force, when in fact they are making claims about different concepts (nothingness and absence).

Another look at disputes in philosophy

In column 223 I dealt with the question of disagreement in philosophical issues. My claim was that, contrary to the prevalent impression, there are not many genuine disagreements in philosophy. When you examine such disagreements, in most cases you will discover one of two things: either there is no dispute and each side is speaking about something else (about a different aspect of the issue), as we saw here in possibility 2. Or you will discover that one of the sides is mistaken (they are not really peers), as in possibility 1. In another variation, you will discover that one of the sides is speaking nonsense (see the discussion of the French in that column). Be that as it may, the cases in which the dispute is genuine are few. This may perhaps happen in issues regarding which no decision really can be reached, and then it is usually a barren dispute between two unfounded positions (see the example of solipsism brought there). Here again we discover, as I also concluded in the previous column, that the dilemma of peer disagreement is not as troubling as it sounds at first glance.

In light of this, one can understand a phenomenon that at first glance seems puzzling, but in light of my remarks here is easily explained. Let me preface this by saying that in recent months I have returned to reading articles in philosophy, and almost all the articles I read are very disappointing: either they are trivial or they are mistaken. Very few of their arguments prompt me to rethink matters. Seemingly this contradicts my principled position regarding philosophy. In columns 155–160 I discussed the definition of philosophy, and claimed that it is a kind of empirical science (synthetic observation of ideas). This was an optimistic view of it, since it showed that philosophy can indeed teach us new things and that there is reason to engage in it. And, of course, there is truth and falsehood in philosophical claims (not only consistency and inconsistency). In light of this, in column 223 I went on to claim that philosophy can teach us things (it is not a barren word-mill, as people tend to think), but I explained that precisely for this reason the disagreements within it are mostly only apparent. The innovations in philosophy are mostly agreed upon, and they are not all that numerous. All this seemingly stands in tension with the sense of disappointment I described at the beginning of my remarks. Is there any point in engaging in philosophy or not?

To understand this, one must note that most of the material published today in philosophy deals with polemics and does not introduce new subjects. Therefore, by its very nature, its value is rather slight, since as we have seen few of these polemics can be significant. In most cases, these are either word games, or ill-defined claims, or trivial arguments, or mistaken arguments, or discussions of different concepts (that is, there is no disagreement at all, but rather different aspects of the issue). As a lover of philosophy, I am disappointed by this state of affairs time and again, but in a certain sense it is actually a consequence of my optimistic conception of philosophy. It seems to me that, in an ironic reversal, this state of affairs actually confirms that philosophy is a quasi-empirical field that makes claims and produces genuine innovations.

Returning to the rule "Both these and those are the words of the living God"

In the previous column I presented Beit Hillel's approach as described in the passage of "Both these and those are the words of the living God" ("These and those are the words of the living God") in Eruvin. Beit Hillel considered Beit Shammai's position before formulating their own, and as I showed, this is exactly the basis for the proper approach to peer disagreement. I will now continue with the passage of Both these and those and use it to illustrate my general claim about philosophy.

In my article on the rule "Both these and those are the words of the living God", I explained (see the chapter "Both these and those: the general model") that in a dispute between a Torah scholar and an ignoramus, the assumption is that the Torah scholar is right and the ignoramus is wrong. They are not peers. By contrast, in a dispute between Torah scholars (peers), usually each side has correct reasons, and the dispute is not about those reasons. The disagreement is about how to weight them against one another. My favorite example in this regard is a dispute over whether it is worthwhile to eat chocolate: Reuven says no – because it is fattening, and Shimon says yes – because it is tasty. Which of them is right? Both are right: chocolate is both fattening and tasty. Their dispute is not about the reasons but only about the question which reason outweighs the other (the weighting). This means that in the case of peers, the natural model is a harmonistic one, that is, we should conclude that truth is built from multiple facets, each of the parties to the dispute presenting one of them, exactly as we saw here.

Interestingly, the only place where the Talmud itself explains the rule of "Both these and those" is in Gittin 6b, regarding the concubine at Gibeah. There the Tannaim disagreed whether he found on her a fly or a hair, and when Elijah tells them what is happening in heaven regarding this issue, he says:

Both these and those are the words of the living God: he found a fly and did not mind; he found a hair and did mind.

That is, both sides were right, and the overall picture is formed by combining all the views of the sides (hair + fly). This is the same harmonism that we also saw with respect to the philosophical dispute about the causal potential of nothingness/absence.

[1] In the anthology Language, Thought, Society (in memory of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, author of Logic, Language, and Method), edited by Yehuda Melzer, Magnes, 1978, p. 249.

[2] It seems to me that despite his criticism and disagreement, Oderberg is a bit too enthusiastic about Goldschmidt's article (he lavishes on it superlatives that seem excessive to me).

[3] They are based on a correct point of Hume's, who noticed that there is no empirical source from which one can learn the causal relation between two events, or the principle of causality in general. In several places I have explained that the solution to this difficulty is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater – that is, to give up the physical component within the causal relation. The more plausible alternative is to understand that we possess a non-sensory faculty of discernment that teaches us this matter (intuition, or the synthetic faculty).

[4] I discussed this topic at length in my book The Sciences of Freedom, chapter 6, and in the first part of the fourth book in the series Talmudic Logic, The Logic of Time in the Talmud. I showed there various implications of this picture, and the sorts of errors one reaches when one ignores any of these components.

[5] From Wikipedia, in its entry on him.

[6] One can, of course, say that in this sense we are dealing with something from something, because being was created from God (or by God). This connects to that marvelous midrash from Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, about which Maimonides says in the Guide of the Perplexed II:26 that he had never seen anything stranger:

I have seen statements by Rabbi Eliezer the Great in the well-known chapters known as the Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer; I have never seen anything stranger than them in the words of a person belonging to those who follow the Torah of our teacher Moses. What he said was as follows—listen to his language: He said, "From what place were the heavens created? From the light of His garment He took and stretched it out like a cloth, and they kept extending onward, as it is said: 'Who wraps Himself in light as with a garment, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain.' And from what place was the earth created? From the snow beneath the Throne of Glory He took and cast it, as it is said: 'For to the snow He says, Be earth.'" This is the wording of that statement as it appears there. And I am astonished: what did this sage believe? If he believed it false that something can be found from nothing, and that it is impossible for what comes into being to come into being without matter from which it comes to be, and for that reason he sought for the heavens and the earth from what they were created—then what has this answer accomplished? One would then have to ask him: And the light of His garment, from what was it created? And the snow beneath the Throne of Glory, from what was it created? And the Throne of Glory itself, from what was it created? And if he means by 'the light of His garment' something uncreated, and likewise that the Throne of Glory is something uncreated, this would be extremely far-fetched, and it would also imply the eternity of the world, except that it would accord with Plato's view…

What troubles Maimonides is that this implies that creation was something from something and not something from nothing (similar to Parmenides' argument cited above). Incidentally, Nachmanides, in his commentary on Song of Songs (chapter 3, verse 17, in Rabbi Chavel's edition), really does derive from this a Platonist picture (that our world was preceded by primeval matter, because it is impossible for something to be created from nothing). All of these are grappling with the difficulty of creating something from nothing (even in the non-causal sense).

[7] According to Rif's understanding of Abaye, the custodian's liability is apparently for the negligence itself, regardless of what resulted from it. Thus, for example, Rabbi Akiva Eiger explains in his glosses there.

[8] In this connection, see the discussion of the definition of kitsch in column 109.

[9] This is a situation in which the very fact that he does not accept my claim raises in me a doubt about whether he is truly a peer. As I noted in the previous column, in situations where I do not know my interlocutor (or where my experience of him is scant, for example when it is based on only one case), one contrary case is enough for me to suspect that he is not a peer.