In Between

Abstract

My sister, she told me, was recently walking down the footpath when she farted and all the streetlights went out. A butt speaks, “Let there be darkness” and there was darkness. For Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, all events, however regularly they may coincide, are merely contiguous, and have no necessary relation between them. Causation is not a sense-impression, which for Hume is the origin of the only real knowledge, namely, empirical knowledge. Even in the case of apparently “necessary” physical laws, “All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected.”¹ A carminative and a fart; a severed nerve and loss of feeling; a fart and darkened streetlights; for Hume, all such are mere crotties of fact drutled along the path of time, without intrinsic relation, however consistently some may coincide, however “necessary” physical “laws” of causation may seem. By naming one event “cause” and another “effect,” we are not describing objective reality so much as articulating the rules of a game called truth, with which we manage the world. A “cause” is not a thing, but a convention of language, a tacit agreement to arrange events in a particular way.