In this article we discuss Hume’s influence over the 20th century, the enlightenment and the fetishism of rationality, perception, quantity and Qualia, necessity and contingency, causation and the soul, language and the world.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, age of reason (17th to 19th century), followed middle age scholasticism Even today most people living in a western society can be associated with it. The values that relate to the Enlightenment are : tolerance, pluralism which is usually atheistic / non theistic, belief in reason, belief in centralisation – a core in every concept, belief in essence, belief in science, belief in human progress, belief in man’s control over nature, belief that the cosmos has a certain structure that can be known to us.
Isaac Newton (1642-1726) presented his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The mathematical principle of nature) in 1687. It is a work in three books, one of the most important one in the history of science. He established classical mechanics. What classical mechanics suggested is that nature can be investigated to a point of complete certainty through the use of math.
Before the Newtonian times, the Aristotelian approach reigned, there was no doubt that the world can be read like an open book through logic, the rules governing the world can be found and understood. As always, there was no point of doubting the foundations of knowledge since everything known was satisfactory, it seemed progressive, it was progressive. It was more of a problem trying to explain why things didn’t make sense than to explain why they did. From today’s perspective we can understand this approach from both an Anthropomorphic principle and also Evolutional. I will come to that later.
The Enlightenment founded its ideas over reason. It opened up people’s opinion towards other opinions, other than theirs. Theology began to be challenged. The opposite of being enlightened is to be benighted, to be ignorant, and not necessarily because someone is less intelligent, but rather that someone was less educated, less enlightened. Not being enlightened was not being exposed to tools of innovative, to progression. The pluralism associated with the Enlightenment stopped when it got to the question of being enlightened, what i mean is that there was only one way to be enlightened – only on the base of reason.
Hume
When we talk about David Hume (1711-1776), we see how much his ideas continued to develop and was not the last stop of a chain (like Spinoza for example). In that sense we can say he is an important philosopher. In order for us to get proper understanding of philosophy we have to put it in its meta-context and also the context of culture. For example, Hume was a huge catalyst for Emanuel Kant (1724-1804), who tried to bypass Hume’s skeptical conclusions. Later the philosophy of Kant developed further by philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard.
Hume was the perfect example of a person, who like in the platonic tale of the cave, was not satisfied in his sphere and therefore decided to radically question what all others were taking for granted. It is an example of the human spirit which can use radical criticism as a tool for future development.
Descartes & doubt
je pense, donc je suis
– R. Descartes
Hume followed Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in his methodology of using doubt (Dubium sapientiae initium) as an instrument of investigation that aims at the discovery the truth. Doubt, according to Descartes, was the solid base of rationality. Descartes philosophised that there is only one way in which we can all talk about one truth, therefore every different opinion is a result of not using the correct method of asserting the truth. The tools for asserting that truth / certainty would be : deduction, induction, concluding from causation. One method for all sciences.
Descartes’ philosophy was based on the subject – the thinking consciousness, Cogito ergo sum. This model was split into two methodologies. One method was to capture the principle of the consciousness and use deduction to develop, that was called Rationalism (Leibniz 1646-1716). The second method was also based on the consciousness as a Sine qua non, a necessary condition, but with a slight difference. The consciousness was not considered to be a Tabula rasa. Therefore the consciousness gets its data from the world through sensual data, and this is called Empiricism (John Locke 1632-1704). While Rationalism is associated with analysis, Empiricism is associated with experimenting.
Berkely and Newton
esse est percipi
– G. Berkeley
George Berkeley (1685-1753) criticised Locke’s type of Empiricism and claimed that things in the world exists in the mind only as a projections which takes the form of ideas. Locke’s Empiricism transformed into Berkeley’s Idealism.
Newton claimed that he achieved the same certainty that Descartes was talking about, three principle which can be applied to every field and conquer the world, is was called mechanical determinism, which later Darwin and Freud adopted. In mechanical determinism the whole universe including organisms are governed by principles of causation and nothing exists beyond those principles, therefore knowing the basic principles would actually mean the possibility of knowing everything, complete certainty.
In the 18th century Hume was born into a Newtonian way of thinking, but rebelled against it. Empiricism was fully backed up by the Newtonian thinking. Its was a time of intellectual optimism, a huge belief in the power of the mind to be able to grasp the whole universe. Hume asked himself if was founded the basis of that conception actually made sense.
The Empiricists, unlike Descartes, did not believe in born ideas, instead they believed that there is only one data type which is collected through experience. Hume used conceptual analysis as a tool to deconstruct these theories. To explain what he did using today’s language : every theory has a semiotic field which contains key definitions or terms. One has to understand certain term definitions and connexion with other close-relations terms to understand a certain theory, a certain concept. Semiotic analysis would inspect separately the most fundamental elements that in the end can compose or conceptualise a theory.
Further reading : David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature (~1740)
Hume’s analysis
The mind, which is different from the spirit and the soul (psyche), is also responsible for conceptualising terms (words). In a mature phase of conceptualisation, that mind is able of writing articles or books, developing theories, using more complex concepts, that tie together more words and smaller concepts.
Experience – is actually what is being absorbed by the brain, only through impressions. That is the infrastructure. We have three types of impressions : perceptions, feelings and emotions. Only through these impressions coming from the outside that they are received to the inside. Those are categorised into sensory data / Stimuli (hot/cold), feelings (pain), Emotions.
Feelings come from the inside, as such we have the exemplary case of one body organ that makes it ‘feel’ like another is causing the pain, or phantom pain. For example the nervous systems of our back, ear and throat etc’ which gets ‘confused’, Therefore we can conclude that it is purely subjective, in the meaning of, cannot be assigned with a proper signifier. It does not always find its way to the world, to space.
Stimuli comes from the outside world, its our body reaction to it. In this case Hume is not an idealist like Berkeley. Feelings are, in a way, reactions to the stimulus we get. While feeling something hot is stimulus, the pain we get from is a feeling. It is also called qualia – the quality data from experience, not measurable in to way of quantity. It is very important to mention that the term pain is referring to qualia, which is individual experience, not something that we share physically but conceptually, not something in the world although caused by it. The brain works by method of association, it is binding the term, the word, pain to an internal group of similar feelings.
The question ‘Does the word pain, reflects reality ?’ becomes irrelevant. In the 20th century Wittgenstein would link this to lingual instrumentalism. More about this later.
Hume was quite humble in his investigations, in a sense that he did not try to deal with idealistic / sublime / complicated ideas, but rather more fundamental human ideas. History shows a reverse tendency or trend in which primitive times dealt directly with bigger ideas, godhead and such.
So Hume was an empiricist, in the sense that he believed that man, similar to a machine, goes through a processing of external stimuli. Impressions becomes feelings becomes emotions. Language can represent objects from the real world, but also feelings and also ideas. Ideas are complicated combinations which is unique for human thinking.
Combination is the main ability that we have as humans. Complex combinations can create ideas, which then can be transformed, be reduced. These Ideas can come to such an abstract point that they loose their relevance with the outside world, it is the power of the intellectual that can build complex structures, theories, thought and ideas, they have the dual paradoxical quality of controlling reality at the same time of being detached from it, and sometimes because of that. What is human is unique, therefore different from the world, the more human we make the world the more we can control it, but thats not the world, it is human expression.
Then there is the hypothesis that the world is contingent in nature, meaning that it does not hold value. It sounds crazy only because we are Newton-ially brought up to believe the complete opposite of it, but such hypothesis, not only that is very possible, but also very powerful in terms of Humanism. Human as the sole creator of the valuable universe. We will get to that late on, but first we have to understand the following.
If we associate pain as stimuli with the negative feeling of distaste, then what happens when someone is inflicting pain on us ? The distaste is then becoming associated with the act of the person who is inflicting pain on us. Then we call this person an evil person. This is then registered on the physiognomic machine of impressions. On the base of that type of process, Aristoteles defined whats good and bad, morality and ethics. This topic got more attention in the beginning of the 20th century with Emotivism (G.E. Moore, C.L. Stevenson).
The conclusion of such analysis is that moral judgement mistakenly (but arguably) categorise actions in a binary way for good and bad, but is rather it is just based fundamentally on the subjective feeling of pain. If some doings are causing relief, delight, pleasure, they are good, if they cause the opposite they are bad. A moral sphere which by definition should be coherent and objective does not exist. Western culture for years and years dealt with the topics of the moral sphere : the idea of god, human intuition, universal humanism etc’. This moral sphere was engaged in a useless search, since it was based on a meaningless question which did not correspond with the fundamentals of human nature.
Hume completely disregarded Thomas Hobbes’ (1588-1679) human treatise on human nature, he would see it as an instrument, which is in practise not dictated on reason or higher principles. Rather is was merely based on the contingent (not of necessity) fact of survival, to use modern terms : Darwinian. To say it again, the sacred status of morality through religion or social principles from this perspective is a huge mistake, something that Nietzsche (1844-1900) would develop further down (or up) the road from Hume. I would again like to mention that this seemingly radical materialist nihilistic ideology can be something very positive as long as its understood properly, we already mentioned the paradox of doubt and skepticism as an instrument of knowledge.
De omnibus dubitandum est
– S. Kierkegaard
De fetishism of the intellectual
During the Enlightenment period intellectualism was fetishicised. The Gestalt theorists would say, that it is only natural to do so. If your basic assumption is that the whole universe itself is open for investigation and analysis : thinking the opposite is absurd. Because, how can you act is this world ? how can you know ? where will you head ? Kafka or Samuel Beckett or the Coen brothers, will answer : In reality, one cannot really act. There is no inherit logic in the world and the result is a world of stagnation. Everything that seems to be progressing and reaching somewhere is effectively not so. That is human existence according to The absurd in the 20th century.
What Hume actually claimed (before Darwin, Marx or Ernest Mach) is that reason is a concept, a tool, not an inherit property. To see a purpose, serves only means of evolutional survival, because not seeing a propose does not get one far. Purpose is a mean only for itself and all the extra we build around it – value and reason, they belong to our imagination and are not inherited in the world.
Hume was doubting the Cartesian certainty, he raised the problem of induction, claiming in the famous example that nothing guarantees that the sun will rise tomorrow, or to say that there are no black swans (until they are discovered in Australia). The meaning of Hume’s skepticism is to show induction cannot vouch for certainty. What we call facts are contingent in nature.
Contingent is what is not necessary by definition, devoid of true/false value. We are used to look at facts and statements as always holding a value of validity but thats not the case. A statement does not, and cannot, bind the world to act. What a statement does is making the mind believe and assert, maybe only out of psychological fear.
Euclidian geometry as an example
Euclidian geometry can be used as a very good example to show that assertion of certainty can only be done on the base of language and then with the condition that it does not relate to anything in the world that is contingent in nature. The biggest problem with this notion is that 2400 years of education taught us to think in a different way.
When we say two parallel lines never meet we are not saying anything because not meeting was already included in the definition of being parallel.
When we say 1+1=2 then we already know 2 in just two 1’s.
When we say the sum of all angles in a triangle equals 180 degrees, it does not relate to facts in the world (how would you measure on a 2d plane and with accuracy ? what about the fact that time and distance according to modern physics are not linear ? everything can be looked upon as non linear / rational).
The truth that is being discovered in Euclidean geometry was once defined by Kant as an a-priori truth, which is not based experience, but analysis. Since Hume tried to show that nothing can bypass experience, then today we call it an analytical truth. Analytical truths are lingual structures, they are tautologies, statements that reflect only the structure they contain in themselves. The only thing that hold value in that case in the lingual structure itself. We once called it axioms and theorems. It becomes the subject of analysis of logic.
Color as an example
If we remember the example of pain from before, we shall treat color in the same way. First we see several types of color as impressions, perceptions. Then we understand that they share something similar we have our feelings or qualia about them. At the end they also tap to our emotions.
Our perceptions categorise color under the word of color (and not pain for example). The qualia of color (seeing Red, Blue etc’) is, in reality, the wavelength being characterised by phenomena, in our mind. What makes the wavelength being expressed as phenomena in our brain is our biological mechanisms, and some would say our mind / soul / spirit.
The world presents facts to us. In this example : wavelengths. These wavelength are contingent, meaning, they do not hold any value or reason of their own, it can be yellow or blue and it would not matter in that sense. Their wavelength, which is their energy level, as something in the world does not hold any valuable information for us of any kind. If red is ~ 700–635 nm and Blue is ~ 490–450 nm, it might as well be the other way around, this information does not have any meaning, it is the quantity in opposite of quantity.
At the context of casualty and laws of physics every contingent fact can be linked only to other facts. The certainty we have about these facts and the conclusion we draw upon them is always based on experience and never on something like an a-priori. Then what does exists beyond experience ? beyond language ?
Its only when we build axioms, statements, theories, books about our idealism or categories of the concept of color, and what relates to it, that it gets valuable. But again, the value we get from these combination, we get from the structure of language itself and not from the contingent facts, because in the end, the structure of language, only by itself, its what is human, it is what will describe the qualia of colors. It is qualitative that holds value for us, because only the qualia binds with feeling and emotion.
In the example of colors : The description of the colors that the sun gives the earth at certain hours of the day. It holds a significance for us from not-quantitive reasons only.
Causation as the structure of the world ?
Every time that we see causation, we see a cause and effect, fire and smoke. We always get aware of causation through empirical observation, if we make it up, our assumptions are also based on experience, though we ‘tend’ to forget it. Therefore we tend to see in causation a system of three elements – cause, effect, and a causal link which is a necessity, which binds cause and effect together.
But in practice, is the casual link only coming from our experience ? isn’t it based on our habit of seeing fire and smoke perpetually in time and space ?
Yes, we have that habit, because it was very much common, but that does not make it a necessity. Therefore we should replace casualty, in the context of two events, with contiguity (approximation).
Hume addressed the failure of induction. Induction was seen as necessity, and therefore held a high status as a fact of the world. We notice its failure when a disaster happens and then we are caught unprepared and get surprised. Why do we get surprised ? Because we trusted the principle of induction and it let us down. And why did we trust it in the first place ? Because it rarely lets us down. This principle is based on a model in which we give up fetishising rationality as having the ultimate status of eternal and universal, admitting it is caused by bad evolutionary habits.
To put it now in psychological terms : we often see things go ‘wrong’ or ‘out of control’ – Isn’t it just referring to our wrong mechanistic notion that we assume the natural state of things should take ? We assume wrongfully, by habit, that everything has a pre-defined course.
But isn’t it that in practise, our lives are more characterised by the chaotic amount of impressions, ideas, association ?
There is not even one consequent minute in our internal life as a personality, as a soul. Our mental dynamics are as of such that is in a constant flux of change and zero stasis. The personality, the subject, our persona, they are in essence chaotic dynamics that change every minute.
Conclusion
From the perspective of the 20th century, we are able to understand that necessity, in contrast to contingency, is only to be found in lingual structures. A statement that can assert the value of truth through deduction (=certainty), can do so only through language, but as a syntax and not as statements about the world and its facts. For example “1+1=2” can be a necessity because we are building a structure in language. It is consequent as long as we decide to follow it. These are part of the analytical theses of the beginning of the 20th century in analytical philosophy, the Viennese circle and the early and late Wittgenstein.
After theology, the Enlightenment fetishised the intellect as the tool to assert certainty in the universe with the help of science. The Enlightenment in theological terms replaced religion with science. Scientists are the ones who are responsible for all kind of certainties in our world from an ecological disaster, medicine and health and social dynamics. They understand the cosmos and therefore have the duty of Enlightening the rest.
Hume showed that science is after all based on conexxion of ideas that through association are bound together. The binding happens because of language and not because of the world. Our mind likes habits and through time it got used to work in certain ways. If, what we call rational and logical, is something that has changed so much in 2400 years, shouldn’t we abandon these terms because they are misleading ? they are misleading because they are suggesting they are something eternal and universal that we share, regardless of language, habits, agreements and culture. Hume claimed we consider the peak of human intellect is in the end a product of our psychology, so why not address it for what it is ?
I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar
– F.W. Nietzsche