Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

David Hume’s current influence

David Hume tops this PhilPapers survey of most influential and admired philosophers (scroll down to bottom of the page to “Non-living philosophers most identified with”).

Aristotle comes in second (yeah!) and Kant third (boo!). I’ve been thinking much about Nietzsche and Heidegger recently: eleventh and eighteenth, respectively. Overall, the list is still dominated by thinkers in the Analytic pantheon.

I have mixed feelings about Hume. He is often excellent as a critic of the traditional arguments for religion, and he is often shrewd in applied ethics and political economy. For example, I like very much this early statement of the benefits of money to facilitating free trade and comparative advantage:

“There seems to be a happy concurrence of causes in human affairs, which checks the growth of trade and riches, and hinders them from being confined entirely to one people; as might naturally at first be dreaded from the advantages of an established commerce. Where one nation has gotten the start of another in trade, it is very difficult for the latter to regain the ground it has lost; because of the superior industry and skill of the former, and the greater stocks, of which its merchants are possessed, and which enable them to trade on so much smaller profits. But these advantages are compensated, in some measure, by the low price of labour in every nation which has not an extensive commerce, and does not much abound in gold and silver. Manufactures, therefore gradually shift their places, leaving those countries and provinces which they have already enriched, and flying to others, whither they are allured by the cheapness of provisions and labour; till they have enriched these also, and are again banished by the same causes. And, in general, we may observe, that the dearness of every thing, from plenty of money, is a disadvantage, which attends an established commerce, and sets bounds to it in every country, by enabling the poorer states to undersell the richer in all foreign markets” (“Of Money” 1752).

Hume’s important weaknesses are in epistemology. He is an empiricist, which is great, but his empiricism is extremely atomistic, mechanical, and reductionistic. That approach leads to his skeptical conclusions about the perception of objects, about abstraction and concept-formation, about inductive generalization, and, metaphysically, about the reality of causality and the persistence of identity across space and time.

A sideways connection: It turns out that John Hunter, the surgeon and anatomist about whom I posted The Knife Man and Anatomy and philosophy, examined David Hume when Hume was in his final decline. In 1775 Hume began to suffer terrible abdominal pains, and, unfortunately, was attended “by the most eminent physicians of the day.” As biographer Wendy Moore puts it:

“None of them could offer a satisfactory explanation or effective remedy for Hume’s obvious decline. Though they were very happy to posit elaborate theories and propose assorted therapies, nobody was prepared to examine the patient in order to determine what might be causing his suffering” (italics added). The empiricist philosopher was surrounded by un-empiricist physicians.

John Hunter was called in by happenstance. Hunter and Hume were indirectly related through marriage, and in June of 1776 both men were in Bath. By then, Hume’s condition was very bad and Hunter was invited to examine him. Writes Moore: “Hunter laid his hands on the suffering man’s abdomen and could plainly feel a tumor, which he suspected was cancerous, in the liver” (p. 183). Internal abdominal surgery was not a realistic option, and the philosopher died two months later, back home again in Scotland.

Hume was philosophical in the best sense of the word when he learned, finally, about his condition. Writing frankly and forthrightly to his brother: “This Fact, not drawn by reasoning, but obvious to the Senses, and perceived by the greatest anatomist in Europe, must be admitted as unquestionable, and will alone account for my Situation.”

Metaphysical solutions to Kant

[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche

Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy is another fundamentally Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason and individualism. His philosophy is a partially secularized version of traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology. While Kant’s concerns centered upon epistemology, Hegel’s centered upon metaphysics. For Kant, preserving faith led him to deny reason, while for Hegel preserving the spirit of Judeo-Christian metaphysics led him to be more anti-reason and anti-individualist than Kant ever was.

Hegel agreed with Kant that realism and objectivism were dead ends. Kant had transcended them by making the subject prior, but from Hegel’s perspective he had been too wishy-washy in doing so. Kant made the subject responsible only for the phenomenal world of experience, leaving noumenal reality forever closed off to us. This was intolerable to Hegel—after all, the whole point of philosophy is to achieve union with reality, to escape the merely sensuous and finite and to come to know and be one with the supersensuous and infinite.

However, Hegel had no intention of trying to solve the epistemological puzzles about perception, concept-formation, and induction that had set Kant’s agenda, in order to show us how we might acquire knowledge of the noumenal. Instead, taking a cue from Johann Fichte, Hegel’s strategy was to assert boldly an identity of subject and object, thus closing the gap metaphysically.

On Kantian grounds, the subject is responsible for the form of awareness; but Kant was still enough of a realist to posit a noumenal reality that was the source of the content that our minds shape and structure. For Hegel, the realist element drops out entirely: the subject generates both content and form. The subject is in no way responsive to an external reality; instead, the whole of reality is a creation of the subject.

“In my view,” Hegel wrote at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject”.[23] The Subject that Hegel had in mind is not the empirical, individual subject of traditional philosophy. The creative Subject that is also Substance is the universe as a whole (or God, or Spirit, or the Absolute), of which we individual subjects are mere portions. Realists had seen the universe as a whole as an object or set of objects within which there are some subjects. Hegel reversed that: the universe as a whole is a subject, and within the subject are objects. Such a bold posit solves a lot of problems.

We can get even more necessity and universality than Kant had given us. Hume had told us that we cannot get necessary and universal truths from reality. Kant, agreeing with Hume’s conclusion, had suggested that we supply necessity and universality from ourselves. That grounded necessity and universality, but at a price: since we supply them subjectively, we cannot be sure that they apply to reality. Hegel agreed with Kant that our minds supply necessity and universality, but said that all of reality is a product of mind, the Mind that contains all of our little minds within it. Since reality comes from us, we can know all of reality in all of its glorious necessity.

We can also get a universe that does not dehumanize us. Hegel argued that the realist and objectivist models had, by separating subject and object, inevitably led to mechanical and reductionist accounts of the self. By taking the everyday objects of empirical reality as the model and explaining everything in terms of them, they necessarily had to reduce the subject to a mechanical device. But if instead we start with the subject and not the object, then our model of reality changes significantly. The subject, we know from the inside, is conscious and organic, and if the subject is a microcosm of the whole, then applying its features to the whole generates a conscious and organic model of the world. Such a model of the world is much more hospitable to traditional values than the materialist and reductionist leanings of the Enlightenment.

Hegel could also claim to be more of an advocate of reason than Kant was. Reason, Kant, taught us, is fundamentally a creative function. And, Kant also taught us, it can know only its own phenomenal creations. But having asserted that reason creates all of reality, Hegel could offer us the very optimistic, Enlightenment-sounding conclusion that reason can know all of reality.

References

[23] Hegel 1807, 17.

Bibliography [pdf] [html]

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Hayek and Rand on reason

I am organizing a session for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme is “Reason in Hayek and Rand.”

Here we have two giants of twentieth-century thought, but few comparative studies have been done. So as a start I have chosen Reason as a focusing theme and have solicited papers from several scholars on topics such as the following:

* How does Friedrich Hayek’s account of reason compare to Ayn Rand’s?

* Hayek is more focused on reason’s role in social causation while Rand is more focused on reason as an individual phenomenon. True?

* Is it accurate to say that Hayek is a sociologist of reason while Rand is a philosopher of reason?

* Hayek is an empiricist, broadly speaking, as is Rand, but Hayek’s reason is more Humean while Rand’s is more Aristotelian. True?

* Hayek has been interpreted as being a skeptic about reason and as tending to postmodernism (e.g., by Theodore Burczak). True? And if so, does this put him in direct contrast to Rand, who is a strong anti-skeptic?

* Hayek sometimes seems ambivalent about the relation between reason-based discoveries of social science and normative issues. Rand tightly integrates reason’s descriptive and normative functions. Issue here?

* On socialism: Hayek argues a reason-as-fatal-conceit thesis, while Rand places the blame primarily on an ultimately irrational altruism. Are these interpretations complementary or in conflict?

When the session’s panel is finalized, I’ll post it.