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          Hume, Hegel & Heidegger

It has become clear to me that to understand Hegel or Heidegger or even Kant it is first necessary to understand Hume. All three of the German philosophers wrote for a small elitist intellectual group and either assumed their subject matter had to deliberately be or desired it to be intentionally difficult. They assumed only a certain level of intellect was able to comprehend were saying and the rest were not worth talking to.

Hume proceeds on a profoundly different premise. He essentially assumes the equality of intellect, and that it is the scholar's duty and obligation to find the correct, specifically LOGICALLY correct, language to communicate to all willing and open minds. This is in no way 'popularization.' In fact, in some ways for those used to the academic elitist fashion of approaching philosophy, it makes things more difficult.

Hume proceeds by the natural flow of enquiry of the human mind into philosophical subjects. This is premised upon his fundamental that all thought is directly based on experience. Therefore, naturally, it is a pathway of search, proposition, mistake, correction while keeping what is correct, and then proceeding onward. It is a natural process of dialectic. I have not positively confirmed that Hume proceeds in the general Hegelian way of dialectic where one goes from a lower stage of understanding to a higher stage of understanding but I have seen indications of this in Hume. The primary point is, though, he never makes rigid structures of any of this as if written in stone as the German philosophers did. He delineates various pathways to the same object. And better still, he is constantly going back and correcting what he said in the first place. Therefore, yes, he is proceeding -- naturally -- through higher and higher stages of realization. However, they are never separated from daily life nor sociable communication -- which is way so many people miss the tremendous resemblance in the German philosophers.

Now, Heidegger despised the dialect. This was a tremendous blunder on his part. Its sole intent was essentially to "put down" the Hegelians of his day. However, he deprived himself OVERTLY of a very powerful intellectual tool. Covertly, he still employed dialectic, but since he desired no comparison with the Hegelians, it was so distorted, not only was the process itself missed but the very point he was trying to make so obscured as to make it permanently incomprehensible. The whole discussion in Heidegger of history and tradition become instantly illuminated when Hume is brought into focus here. They operate on very similar premises. But Heidegger because of A) his intellectual, elitist, and academic arrogance, and B) his German imperial racist political tradition came to a very different conclusion from Hume. Hume is a middle of the road, balancing political theorist. He thoroughly supports democracy but only upon the basis of gradual evolution in British tradition. He even supports, within certain reservations, an established church in Britain. Though he sees the faults in both, he prefers the Presbyterian Establish church in Scotland (from whom he directly suffered so much) to the Anglican establishment which only hurt him verbally. He shows, in his history, both Charles I and parliament had rational right upon their side, and that both transgressed their proper limits. He denounces repeatedly the Whig theory of an original democratic English constitution. And he shows that the Tories, when confronted with the problem of James II, could forget about the divine right of royal sovereignty and support democratic action to the hilt.

Heidegger, on the other hand, seems to have supported both ground roots German peasant tradition, alright within limits, and the hysterical German political apocalyptism that ended in Germany's total destruction in 1945. He even seems to have supported Ernst Roehm above Adolf Hitler in the Nazi party and was terribly discouraged with "the night of the long knives." Ernst Rome was, to all intents and purposes, a thorough-going anarchist straight out of Rabelais, no restraints or restrictions whatsoever, more vicious even than Hitler.

Many of the same approaches, though, to the nature of personal identity, unity, unit, and the identity of the historian or student of history can be found in both Hume and Heidegger. Unfortunately, Heidegger either says incredibly little, and that cryptic, or if more vocal so obscure that, without Hume, one could never simply in his own context figure out what the holy hell he is trying to say. On the other hand, Hume's approach is purely pragmatic, a problem one encounters in the process of understanding specific historical problems -- so that one does not necessarily realize what a truly profound discovery one has come across and it takes someone like Dr. Ulrich Voigo point it out to you.