From antiquity, philosophers considered non-linear forms of cause and effect. Aristotle introduced the idea of the final cause: an end to be reached which, paradoxically, explains a phenomenon by working back from the expected effect to the cause. Such an explanation runs against the classical principle in which the cause always precedes the effect.

In the seventeenth century, Spinoza took a further step with the notion of immanent causality. In his Ethics, he holds that God or Nature is cause of itself — causa sui — finding within itself the reason for its existence and for everything that follows from it. The cause is no longer external but built into the system: a self-determined universe in which the whole produces its own effects and vice versa.

In the twentieth century, cybernetics gave these intuitions a scientific formulation. The notion of feedback appeared with Norbert Wiener in 1948 to describe self-regulating machines. Second-order cybernetics then insisted, in the 1970s, that the observer can no longer be excluded from the system: “the observer is part of the observed system”.

Researchers such as Heinz von Foerster brought forward the recursiveness of living systems, in which causes and effects form a continuous circuit. This epistemological shift lays the ground for an approach to knowledge that recognises that our knowing is itself built in a loop, through interaction with the real.

In parallel, systems thinking developed to grasp the complexity of human phenomena. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson showed that in relationships — familial, social, ecological — it is illusory to look for a first cause. Paul Watzlawick popularised the idea that in human communication every action is at once response and stimulus: one cannot isolate who started it, because A influences B who influences A, in a continuous circle.

This perspective breaks with the classical Cartesian model. Modern science, effective for simple mechanisms, long favoured a linear causal scheme. But with living systems, isolating a behaviour from its context quickly empties it of meaning: in a relational system, an act only signifies in the light of the overall interaction.

In circular causality, effects act on their own causes and vice versa. A continuous loop forms between cause and effect, fed by constant feedback.

There is therefore no point hunting for a single initial cause in a circular network. Better to grasp the overall process that brings the phenomenon into being and keeps it there.

The circular view of causality has deeply transformed our understanding of human systems.

In psychology it gave rise to family and systemic therapies: rather than blaming an isolated individual, we consider the cycle of interactions in which the problem is embedded. A child’s symptom can be at once the result and the trigger of a dysfunctional balance: the parents’ reactions feed the problem, which in turn justifies those reactions. Family homeostasis is the term for this invisible mutual regulation that holds the system as it is.

In sociology, circular causality illuminates many emergent phenomena. An institution or a company culture is not imposed from above: it emerges from interactions between individuals, then, once in place, influences those individuals in return. The concepts of emergence and autopoiesis, in Maturana and Varela’s sense, describe this: the elements of a system produce a whole which in turn acts on those elements. Here again is recursiveness — effects at the level of the whole feed back on the parts that produced them.

Finally, in the epistemology of science, circular causality counsels caution towards simplistic explanations of complex systems. More and more integrative models in psychology and sociology incorporate the idea of multiple feedback. This conceptual frame bridges the intuitions of the philosophers, who already sensed circularity, and modern methods for grasping real complexity.