David Hume 1711 - 1776

[Gnothi]  ON THE MARVELOUS AND MAGNIFICENT
ALL-HEALING MAGICAL POTION OF DAVID HUME

Date: Sat,17 Jan 2004

From: pomonomo2003

POM: The Hegelian (did you also mean to say Humean?) God as concept is interesting. Could we say that the difference for Hegel would be that this Concept could eventually be actualized - in History? In Being? - While Hume, of course, would never sit still for saying that.

GCM: Walter Kaufmann made the observation that Hegel's philosophy of history is often interpreted as purposeful  AND PROGRESSIVE whereas Hegel, in reality, was very reticent, even negative, about future history. The original lecture series THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY was edited by a Frenchman who deliberately destroyed all his sources after making his version. When he said the Prussian state was the highest development of government it was not a moral or 'progressive' statement but more like, considering the chain of logical consequences in history this is the 'best' that is actual. Like Hume did many times, this may not express what he really felt but said to appease censors and political authorities.

POM: Heidegger’s polytheism can also mean the gods are irrelevant for human knowing. Polytheism suggests that the gods philosophize because they too lack knowledge. Therefore the threat of nihilism screams through all realities, this world, the next world, and the worlds that loom threateningly beyond.

GCM: I am reading an excellent book right now, HEIDEGGER'S ATHEISM, by Laurence Paul Hemming, a Catholic theologian, who is addressing the meaning of Heidegger's methodological atheism and his very early spliting of "being" as a predicate of the essence of God. He does this in his DUNS SCOTUS' THEORY OF CATEGORIES AND OF MEANING I completely missed this the first time I read BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY but his view of the meaning of 'being' is positional and argues very much like Hobbes did about angels and God and spirit that for something to be real it has to be somewhere confronting you in empirical experience. It will be interesting to see how Hemming resolves this as a Catholic, but, so far, he has been extremely honest like Thomas Sheehan (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/Sheehan.html ) and not only asks all the right questions that have always bothered me about Heidegger but gives very careful, step by step answers, and he translates his own quotes not only from Heidegger but also Aquinas. Aquinas is interesting always if you get into a detailed examination of what he literally says. A great set of essays on the early Heidegger can be found at http://www.freewebs.com/smcgrath/index.htm . S. J. McGrath is also a Catholic and does a great job of examining the detailed logical analysis of 'Scotus' and Heidegger's analysis of 'Scotus' (actually Thomas of Erfurt).

POM:  I like what you say about certain knowledge and provisional knowledge. Nietzsche, I think, can be shown to think in a similar manner. But the problem isn't provisional knowledge; the problem is the ones that know this provisional knowledge - whatever it might be. Now science has solved this problem through experiment. Whatever can be done repeatedly - for all intents and purposes; truly is.

GCM: Hume would say, "Whatever is done repeatedly is done repeatedly. There is nothing that "truly is". When he and Kant and Heidegger said that existence is not a predicate, they completely and forever pulled the lynchpin from all 'absolute' knowledge. A clear realization of that is in both Hegel and Newman and they are both trying to find different ways to deal with that to justify either natural law or faith as having some kind, and it becomes a strange kind, of necessity. Heidegger's radical temporalizing (mortalization) of knowledge as purely positional, contextual, linguistic, makes the concept of God or gods as nearly, nearly, nearly completely trivial as David Hume did. But "nearly" is NOT an absolute concept and ALL of these philosophers are acutely aware there is a bothersome 'tag' that remains.

POM: Anomalies are discarded until someone can make sense of them.

GCM: Anomalies already make sense: They are anomalies. Sensation in itself without language is an "anomaly.”Explanation" classifies as excellent 20-20 rearview vision. "Natural Law" is intended to predict, and if it does not predict what actually happens then there really is, at-hand, in the present, an "anomaly".

POM: Which in practice may mean no more than that a pattern only eventually emerges after enough anomalies have been observed. Mathematics, by this I mean mathematical theory, has its role to play. It is the glue that holds science together.

GCM: But it is not 'absolute' knowledge. As Hume said of geometry, it seems obviously 'right', but examined in physical, even microscopic detail, we really do not observe in experience any 'absolute' knowledge. In this, Hume anticipated non-Euclidean geometry where triangles on different kinds of plains (as, for example, a sphere) do NOT have 180 degrees as the sum of all three angles. Distortion is inherent in empirical experience.

POM: Can this be done for society? But electrons, geologic faults, clouds and mathematical formulas neither think, imagine nor read, neither do they enthuse and become indignant. They know no vanity or fear. There is no way to treat human society as an experiment. The only answer is to enclose the experiment of human society in myth. Myth is the glue that holds society together. I think both Hegel and Hume are very worried about human society. I would say that it is their primary interest. It is interesting to note that in the end they can both be said to adopt the same practical policy towards it. Thus they both end up saying to slow moving conservatives and reactionaries hurry up and to the hurrying liberals and radicals slow down. They are both, in the lingo of our times, conservative liberals. This may be the only philosophic position - blending mindless opponents into a seemly whole.

GCM: You are perfectly right. This also applies to Edmund Burke. Burke and Hegel were both horrified by the extremity of the French revolution. Hobbes and Hume were horrified by the total anarchy of the English civil war in the 1640's. They all saw the need for government to be strong and secure first and foremost above everything else.

POM: I would say that phenomenology, the rigorous extraordinary study of the ordinary, is politically useless for a reason. The ordinary that it studies is not a solution - it is the problem. The `solution' is always part invention - not only a discovery.

GCM: Very well expressed.

POM: Though it should probably always be portrayed as a discovery. No one wants to understand their loves, hopes and ideals to be artifacts - to understand themselves as an artifact. I like what

Gary

says about the passions (which point within us) as an unknown ground, like the sense impressions (which point outside us) - the unknown ground all around us. One is tempted to say the mob within face to face with the mob without. Philosophy is the only thoughtful place within the storm.

GCM: But philosophy also subject to the same degree as any other experience to those same storms. We always philosophize exactly what is inside us, not the absolutely true.

I like what you say about Hume and history - nothing guaranteed. How could contingencies guarantee anything? I would add that the difference between Hume and Darwin is that

Darwin

is a gradualist while Hume is not. By that I mean

Darwin

thinks that weight of circumstances over time guarantee gradualism and Hume doesn't. The gradualism in English History is an artifact that needs to be carefully maintained.

GCM: I would say circumstances accumulate gradually while always possessing the option to fall apart completely.

POM: Again, I would say that the common opinions about things are a beginning, just as belief is a beginning. This is the mess we are already in. it is only the results that matter.

GCM: It is most interesting that John Milton, examining Christian tradition, says that tradition should never be taken as a standard of validity, only reason. Tradition in and of itself is always wrong. This accords with you're saying that "common opinions" are only a start. They are the ONLY place we CAN start from. There can be no alternative. I would say this is the best possible of all possible worlds because it could not have happened any other way (as this is the way it empirically happened).

Gary C. Moore

Sunday, January 18, 2004

GCM: A comment of Pomonomo's I should like to emphasize: "The gradualism in English History is an artifact that needs to be carefully maintained.” I think this applies as well to all 'knowledge' as well as English history. "Gradualism" is formed by a purpose. In Hume, it is the establishment, first, of strong and stable government. Second, the establishment of objective and impersonal law, i.e., "blind justice". Third, the discarding of all laws that have ceased to be relevant within a rational context of the free exchange, i.e., "laissez-faire", information initially generated by the discarding of mercantilism for free-enterprise capitalism (merely an ideal, impossible within a political-economy as Marx saw). The "purpose" is not on any grand scale but is merely propelled by the ENLIGHTENED self-interest of each person seeing that it is A) to her self-advantage, and B) cannot be one-sidedly maintained but must be freely available to all to work at all. Also, and most important, C) one must always think of a beautiful woman as the idealization of one's thinking. Thinking must operate upon an erotic basis or it is pointless and sterile. Are there any beautiful women conversant at this site?

KANG: In light of what is said below about "absolute" knowledge, I would ask a Q of some importance, what is knowledge?

GCM: 'Knowledge' is what you are forced to imagine accounting and connecting your sensual impressions to make so-called 'sense' out of them. I have never thought of that connection before. "You have to make sense out of sense." Somehow, this is not a redundancy or tautology NOR is it symbolic or merely representative.   I would say "pain" is the over-riding, most important sense impelling us to 'think' things through. "Pain" supposedly communicates - a 'natural language' as Bishop George Berkeley would have it? I am slowly becoming fascinated by

Berkeley

as well. I have found my knowledge of British philosophers grievously deficient. However, without the toil of confusion and despair of dealing with the Germans, would I have truly had a thorough basis of appreciating their tremendous value? We now have on hand an Irishman (Ou est elle erotique?), several Scots (Hume definitely a strong erotic thinker), a number of Englishmen (Bertrand Russell an obsessively erotic thinker), an Anglicized German (the homosexual representative of very aggressive erotic thinking), but what of the Welsh? I would definitely nominate Dylan Thomas (verbal rapist). Any objections or suggestions? - "Pain" supposedly communicates 'knowledge' of what we do not like, but that is actually not at all a simple affair. For once again custom intervenes and tells us much of the time what is "suppose to be" painful. Needles are a non-sexual ambiguity of pain. If you are intelligent and rational (or not), you know the needle delivers to your body something you want very much.

KANG: Perhaps a conversation can take the place of the abandoned commentary on a work apparently devoted to this very Q. 

GCM: Don't give up on the commentary on WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? It is a very difficult, important, and sensual text I have dealt with, I think, in Heidegger's, Sartre's, and Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the personal (non-scientific, non-physiological, non-textbook) body. Also, Jacques Derrida's GESLECHT essays. Also, Michel Foucault. I need to re-do that again and finish reading the ZOLLIKON SEMINARS. Heidegger is critical of the French, but is he justified?

KANG: As a starter, I would simply echo Heidegger’s skepticism regarding propositions, representations, and so forth, as exhaustive of knowledge. 

GCM: If 'knowledge' is primarily derived from the imagination and almost totally unknown sources (What is "sense" without language? What is "pain" without inherent moral connotations?), then "absolute", necessity", "necessary law", "exhaustive" all go out the window. They all, like "statistics", actually boil down to trying to be accurate predictions of the future. And, when expressed in that fashion, it should be obvious they are all fundamentally ridiculous and theological, teleological, popularized "historical materialism", "progressive Darwinism" a la Huxley.

KANG: To express this skepticism is to express skepticism re geometry as the paradigmatic form of knowledge.