​Chapter 2. Causa Sui

Nothing is met outside relation, and what we call a nature is only the response that recurs. But one candidate claims to break the pattern — to answer out of itself. Something that needs no encounter to be what it is, that holds itself up and so hangs from nothing. If such a thing exists, it is a nature after all.

The tradition reached this candidate by the road we are already on. Agrippa's modes — regress, circularity, assumption — were aimed at justification: every claim rests on another, and the chain runs forever, bends into a loop, or stops at a point that gives no further reason. Hans Albert later named it the Münchhausen trilemma, after the baron who hauled himself from the swamp by his hair. Read as a question about dependence rather than justification, the chain has the same three shapes. It regresses without end, closes into a circle or it ends in something that grounds without being grounded. The regress is Nagarjuna's leaning-all-the-way-down. The circle and the foundation look like two exits and are one: a foundation, pressed for what holds it up, can only answer "itself," and self-grounding is a circle of radius zero, while a circle walked slowly is a foundation spread across points that hold each other with nothing beneath the ring. Both converge on a single figure. Causa sui — the thing that causes itself; Spinoza's substance; the being whose answer comes from no meeting.

It is the most independent thing the tradition managed to think while staying inside nature — the natured thing's one shot at owing nothing. If the independent can have a nature, it has this one. So look at what "answering out of itself" would actually require.

To answer out of itself, a thing would have to meet itself — to be its own encounter, its own B. The steady response that other things yield only when struck, it would yield by striking itself. But self-relation is relation. For a thing to answer itself, it must divide into the part that answers and the part answered to, the observed and the observing; and that division is one more meeting, one more two-sided encounter, with the second side now folded inward. Causa sui does not escape the relation that gives every answer. The encounter is moved inside and called self-sufficiency. And an interiorized encounter still yields a response — indeed it yields the steadiest response there is, because nothing external can arrive to disturb it. Whatever it answers, it answers the same, forever.

This is Spinoza's substance. It acts from the necessity of its own constitution; nothing outside compels it; and Spinoza called that freedom — to be determined to act by one's own nature alone, with full understanding of the necessity. He saw that a thing shoved by external causes is a slave and located liberty in the opposite. But the compulsion did not leave when it moved inside. The substance still cannot answer otherwise than its constitution dictates. The sealed contour is determination with no outside left to interrupt it. Spinoza built the most closed of cages — the one where the prisoner holds the walls.

Take the case that looks like a sovereign. A man kills, and kills again, and asked why, says: this is what I am. He is not evading. The scans show the damage; the circuitry that brakes the impulse in others does not brake it in him. His answer comes from his own constitution, reliably, the way hardness comes from stone. By the standard of self-sufficiency he is its model: he answers out of himself, owing the deed to no outside hand. Yet he is the most bound, and the recognition is immediate. He is a contour running its program, and the more purely the deed follows from what he is, the more it is his nature's. "This is what I am" is a captured man's confession. Frankfurt called this identification freedom — to endorse one's own desire at the second level, to want what one wants — and The Black Flame works through the compatibilist position it carries.

By the measure we set, this is the worst place to be, not the best. The steadier the answer, the deeper the capture, as steadiness of response is the whole measure of how much nature a thing carries. Causa sui is steadiness pushed to its limit: a response that never varies. The serial killer of the example and Spinoza's substance are the same structure at different scales.

The figure is older than Spinoza and sits at the center of the tradition he scandalized. Classical theism calls God ens a se, being-from-itself, against the creature's being-from-another; the technical name for the divine independence is aseitas, self-being, and Aquinas fixes it in the formula that in God essence and existence are one — which is to say God answers out of himself and not out of any meeting, the causa sui raised to the highest. The attributes the tradition prizes most say the same thing in other words. Immutability: nothing changes him. Impassibility: nothing acts on him. Read on the axis of response, these are the signature of the sealed contour — a being no encounter can reach to turn, and therefore a being whose answer never varies. Theism offers this as the summit of freedom, the sovereign owing nothing to anything. The most self-sufficient being is the most fully determined, for it has walled out the one thing through which an unsettled answer could arrive: an other it did not author. Spinoza only said aloud what the doctrine keeps quiet — that to act from the necessity of one's own nature is the most closed of conditions.

There is no independent among natured things — not even the one designed to be self-dependent, since its independence is a habit of response closed into a loop. If anything is independent, it must be free of nature in the second sense: not free of encounter, which nothing is, but free of the settled habit — answering in a way the accumulated past does not hold. And here the easy sentence meets its difficulty. To have no settled nature sounds like having no being, since a thing seems to need some steady character to be anything at all. There are two readings, and the rest hangs on which is in play. To be without nature might mean to be nothing — no answer, no presence. Or it might mean to answer without the answer being fixed in advance by what one is: met, like everything, but not exhausted by the habit.