David Hume 1711 - 1776

From: K. Loganathan

To: akandabaratam@egroups.com ;

meykandar@egroups.com ;

agamicpsychology@egroups.com ;

ontologicalethics@yahoogroups.com ;

abhinavagupta@egroups.com

Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004

Subject: [ontologicalethics]

Meykandar Hume and Heidegger-Reply to Gary-2

Loga-1

suffers existential repetition and escapes from that historical way of Being-in-the-World by attaining Moksa. I want to make some comments in relation to the posting below and show that while Hume is way off, Heidegger comes quite close to Meykandar,

(GCM: Now Heidegger is quite literally saying the self is nothing. On the one hand this gives the 'self' a kind of 'freedom' since no thing can effect nothing, and, on the other hand, intentionality must always fundamentally and simply be "intent" which means directed by futural purpose WHERE THE FUTURE ITSELF IS LITERALLY NOTHING AGAIN which includes every possible trivial and immediate purpose as well as the whole thirst or shape of life in the face of death. Death itself, for both Hume and Heidegger is a very trivial 'event'. It is how it shapes the purpose, thrust, form of one's life that it is important to Heidegger. With Hume it remains trivial because it is simply a necessary accident, does not at all involve one's basic desires because they should be based on substantial realities and not mere abstractions, and is simply the same nothing that Heidegger says the self is.)

Loga-2

Yes there is some truth in saying that the self is nothing and which gives it a kind of freedom. But we should distinguish between Being-on-the-Way -Towards-Moksa and enjoying Moksa itself. The anma remains intentional on the way in its movement towards Moksa but on attaining Moksa it is FREED of all intentionalities and hence EMPTY of intent. Put elliptically the 'self is NOTHING (Suunyam)' at this point. There is no future, past and present as there is NO TEMPORALITY. Hence also NO THINKING. As Tirumular and Meykandar say the self is both the sat-self and asat-self (the authentic and inauthentic self?) and at the point of Moksa, it is purely the Sat-Self with all intention-infested asat-self overcome.

Death should not trivialized and made simply an accident as is done by Hume (and also Heidegger?).

GCM2: Heidegger recognizes death as accident which is trivial to him. What he is interested in is death as the termination of the story of your life as you are forming it, that is, Are you living as you honestly want to live? Or are you just following the 'They-self' and doing what tradition tells you? Tradition, though highly valued in Heidegger -- even too highly valued -- is definitely subordinate to the story-formation or "projection" of the so-called "authentic self". But remember, Heidegger says "authenticity" HAS NO MORAL CONNOTATION WHATSOEVER! It is what you want, alone, without ANY gods or God. Heidegger is trying to separate 'I' from "world" and divinity has a clearly subordinate place in that unavoidable cognitive schematic as Laurence Paul Hemming has demonstrated with Descartes and Heidegger. So essentially what Heidegger does is ignore death as a mere accident -- however, Hume demonstrates that the contingency of death makes man as trivial as an oyster in the universe because it is a "brute fact" that overpowers us utterly -- and then translates "accident" into "arbitrariness" when Dasein, all alone in the face of death which utterly erases any importance of or any help others can give (and this includes God), makes the decision how to procede or not procede. There is nothing whatsoever to determine Dasein's decision UNLESS Dasein chooses to let it do so.

Loga-2: Death is the deprivation of the body but without blessing the anma with Moksa. The anma still survives as the complex sat-asat-self (sat-asat anma) As long as the self continues to be this kind of self, there will be rebirth for the very purpose of birth is to provide opportunities to LEARN, overcome the asat-self and evolve into the sat-self.

GCM2: How can you "learn" if you do not clearly and precisely remember your past lives?

Loga-1

but falls short of the final conclusion because he failed to note Moksa as the Fundamental INTENTIONALITY that provides the motivational dynamics for all actions including the metaphysical.

(GCM: Anticipating the future essentially does that for all entities, not just human. It is fundamentally the experiential and dialectical drive to stay alive, a learning evolution of experience confronting mistakes one has made and the "already always" inadequateness of ANY result. IT IS A FUNDAMENTAL DISATISFACTION WITH THE PRESENT SO ONE ALWAYS PLACES ONE'S HOPES INTO THE NOTHING OF THE FUTURE WHERE "NO THING" CAN DISILLUSION YOUR HOPES, however irrational they may be. So, essentially, even if one attained "moska" (liberation) or "jivanmukta" (liberation while alive), at BEST you would achieve that primordial point of first and fundamental decision before ANY decision you "always already" went through as a child before you knew what you were doing, or better what was being done to you, but now you are free from all the influences that made you, literally, what you were, and can make that primordial decision all over again either without, or conscious of, all of your presuppositions. But guess what. That would dissolve ALL intentionality unless you are a mere robot of the will of Brahman. For Heidegger and Sartre it is both a point that cannot be attained AND ALSO trivial and worthless since it necessarily by its own description and definition erases all value (intentionality). It would be a problem like "Buridan's ass" where a mule is place between two exact amounts of hay and only a very trivial circumstance will determine which pile it eats from.)

Loga-2

Agreed with most of it. But why say Moksa is unattainable? Both Heidegger and Sartre never contemplated on the Deep Silence (Cutta Moonam) where speech as such is impossible and the only language of communication is Cin Mudra.

GCM2: I think Sartre necessarily assumed that point of silence ( and that one can make a decision in such "silence", see my recent analysis of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Book II, chapter 19) and did not say anything. But I feel uneasy as if he did. Heidegger certainly did although he called it "profound boredom" in THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit), trans. McNeil & Walker, Indiana U. P., 1995, chapters 4 & 5, pages 132-168. He speaks of it like "All is vanity" from ECCLESIASTES, meaning quite literally all and everything whatsoever is "useless" including words, emotions, perception, absolutely everything, the whole of the universe including the gods (who cannot speak, see page 238).

"We are now no longer speaking of ourselves being bored with . . . (GCM: noticing objects, ANY OBJECT, at all) but are saying: It is boring for one. It-for one-not for me as me, not for you as you, not for us as us, but for one. Name, standing, vocation, role, age, and fate as mine and yours disappear. To put it more clearly, precisely this 'it is boring for one' makes all these things disappear. What remains? A universal ego in general? Not by any means. For this 'it is boring for one' this boredom, does not comprise some abstraction or generalization in which a universal concept 'I in general' would be thought. Rather it is boring. This is what is decisive: that here we become an undifferentiated no one (my italics) . . . Now, in this 'it is boring for one', we no longer even attain this evasion in the face of boredom. Passing the time is missing in this boredom . . . To no longer permit any passing the time means to let this boredom be overpowering. This entails already understanding this boredom in its overpowering nature . . . We now have a being compelled to listen (GCM: neither speaking nor thinking, just waiting) . . . The 'it is boring for one' has already transposed us into a realm of power over which the individual person, the public individual subject (GCM: language altogether), no longer has any power . . . being left empty as Dasein's being delivered over to beings' telling refusal of themselves as a whole . . . But what emptiness is this, when we are not explicitly seeking any particular fulfillment and do not leave even our own self behind in this being left empty? . . . We want nothing from the particular beings in the contingent situation as these very beings (GCM: this means ALL particularity including gods and self opposite God) . . . We want nothing is already due to the boredom . . . We are not merely relieved of our everyday personality . . . but simultaneously also elevated beyond the particular situation . . . and beyond the specific beings surrounding us there . . . It makes everything of equally great and equally little worth . . . It takes us back to the point where all and everything appears indifferent to us . . . This indifference of things and of ourselves with them is the result of each and everything at once becoming indifferent . . . All of a sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference. Beings have become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves . . . are not excepted . . . Beings as a whole . . . show themselves precisely as such in their indifference (GCM: this is exactly how Aristotle's 'perfect induction' of the perception of the universal "understanding as a whole is related to its object as a whole" would necessarily perform [100b16-17]) . . . Being left empty is here no longer the absence of a particular satisfaction through being occupied with something-we do not seek such a thing at all . . . All beings stand in a strange indifference all at once . . . If we ourselves belong to these things that have become indifferent, then it is surely a matter of indifference whether we are satisfied or left empty

(my italics) . . . Being left empty [therefore can no longer be] some claim to being fulfilled, where the necessity of a fullness exists; it is not the indifference of emptiness . . . Even this being left empty, is indifferent, i. e., impossible (my italics) . . . This determinacy of Dasein is not the petty I-ness that is familiar to us . . . In this boredom the beings that surround us offer us no further possibility of acting and no further possibility of our doing anything . . . We find ourselves-as Dasein-left entirely in the lurch . . . And yet this 'it is boring for one' does not have the character of despair . . . Without an essential transformation . . . into another attunement, this profound boredom never leads to despair . . . Beings' telling refusal of themselves as a whole . . . is a making manifest of . . . the very possibilities of doing and acting . . The telling refusal . . . points to them and makes them known in refusing them . . . This telling refusal on the part of beings as a whole merely indicates indeterminately the possibilities of Dasein, of its doing and acting indirectly and in general . . . In all interpretation of what is essential in every field and area of Dasein, there comes the point at which all knowledge and in particular all learned wisdom is of no further assistance. (pages 135-142)

This being "left in the lurch" is the extremity of being human wherein Heidegger says that in a Moment of Vision [Augenblick] the whole situation is revealed to us . . . but nothing more. We may act but just as in the Jivanmukta of Shankara it is an utter matter of indifference which means indifference to good and evil, a problem others have noticed that Shankara never really addresses. In other words, the descent from 'it is boring to one' through the Moment of Vision becomes, at least to some extent and most often to the whole extent, disastrous once we become attuned again to everyday affairs. It is the Moment of nothingness wherein the samurai warrior slaughters everyone in sight [beserker] as he (or "she" like Uma Thurman) are swept up in their Moment of Vision that they are the sword. What the Moment of Vision motivates out of the infinite range of possibilities is, as Sartre said, completely arbitrary. Hume had such a "Moment of Vision" at the end of Book I of the TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE which he deliberately trivialized by going to have a drink with his friends and playing billiards. When he came back, the results of his "Moment of Vision" seemed like trash. Within the "Moment of Vision" there is no standard of judgment. When you have a standard of judgment, the "Moment of Vision" means absolutely nothing.

To make a long story short, I think this makes everything you say problematic just as it makes it problematic for Heidegger and resolves to this:

Loga-1

and remain fixated to the imagined [we have] inherited.

(GCM: Now THAT I can fully agree on. That is exactly what language is, essentially what the so-called 'self' really is, and how it operates: It fixates us. Thank you.)

Loga-2: Thank-you but what you say about the self pertains to the sat-self, that which fixates imprisons etc and which has to be DESTROYED in order to FREE the authentic sat-self already within the self.

GCM2: When the fixated self is destroyed, one is in the position of 'it is boring for one' because all the "enjoyment" you mention that becomes one of the things in their telling refusal as a whole of all meaning and desire. Without 'things', nothing is desired.

HI Gary,

I have been enjoying following the conversation even though metaphysics is not my strong suit. My purpose for writing here is to ask you if you expound on or perhaps even provide a tutorial on Hume on what you wrote here.

Is there a concept of “wholeness” in Hume? A lot of people would love to find such a concept in him for their own personal purposes. Yet there may be a legitimate place for it. After all, he found a legitimate place for God in THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION which eventually became “transcendence” in Kant and Heidegger.

It will help very much with an argument that is currently going nowhere amongst Humanists.

Raja Mylvaganam

Dear Raja,

What I said relates to the end of the NATURAL HISTORY:

1 The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, being at least a general attendant to human nature, may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work; and nothing surely can more dignify mankind, than to be thus selected from all other parts of creation, and to bear the image or impression of the universal creator. But consult this image, as it appears in the popular religions of the world. How the deity is disfigured in our representations of him! How much he is degraded below the character, which we should naturally, in common life, ascribe to a man of sense and virtue!

2 What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

3 Here the verbal protestations of all men: Nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: You will scarcely think that they repose the slightest confidence in them.

4 The greatest and the truest zeal gives us no security against hypocrisy: The most open impiety is attended with a secret dread and compunction . . .

5 What is so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological systems? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

6 The comfortable views, exhibited by the belief in futurity, are ravishing and delightful. But how quickly vanish on the appearance of its terrors, which keep a more firm and durable possession of the human mind?

7 The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Boubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning the subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion . . . we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Now, I have written about this before, cannot remember where, but will try to remember what I can. However, as with any great philosopher or poet, each time you read them you get new points of view. I will try also to make this letter relevant to the other letter series I have been so unwisely conducting far beyond my actual abilities.

In my last letter on Aristotle and Hume, Don Garrett had revealed that Hume’s problem with the self revealed in the APPENDIX of the TREATISE (THN 633) was the difference between his known personal ownership of “his own present ideas” and the ‘otherness’ of past memory and imagination. However efficiently brought forth, memories come from nowhere. However systematic a scheme of memory retrieval in one’s “own present ideas”, that scheme dips into something it cannot possibly know directly. Memory cannot be inductively examined because all the evidence no longer exists in its actual context. And what inductive evidence there is has different levels of certainty from none to highly probable but never ever unquestionable. AND it is piecemeal, already taken apart, and disconnected from the whole of a perception it once existed within. Any memory cannot possibly have any standard of accuracy as to a reality that existed in the past. What is, is all within the present.

Now, with this unresolved abyss in the concept of the self, we come to the concept of God in Hume’s NATURAL HISTORY. Now, the great strength of Hume’s philosophy is that it eschews all metaphysical systematicity. If there is a real problem, then there is a real problem that remains and may well never be resolved. There is no idea of inevitable progress in Hume. He has no necessary compulsion to explain everything. If it is inexplicable, it is inexplicable, and let’s go on to something else. It seems he never tried to resolve the split in the self between ‘my’ present and the ‘other’s’ past.

In his discussions of religion a great deal of mockery, irony, anger, and intellectual outrage is evident. People desperately want to classify Hume as an atheist or Deist or agnostic, maybe even as a crypto-Christian. Passages can be found to support all these views if taken out of context.

But Hume is always precise. He can be precise because he is honest. The honest man always has the advantage in one thing over the dishonest. He does not have to worry about maintaining the ‘seeming’ consistency of a façade of truth but merely says what is true at the moment knowing that, as a true statement, it can be realistically integrated according to context with all his other statements. It is a loose arrangement with loose parts and a loose philosophy built to work like an AK-47: It can work under any conditions because it is designed by the life of a living person. Hume always called himself a philosophical theist. He did this continuously and consistently, saying no man could literally be an atheist, and being a Deist or agnostic was ridiculous. He did this even when his French friends thought they had demonstrated to him that atheists really could exist.

So when we come to this passage in the NATURAL HISTORY, we should be apprized that the angle of vision is going to be precisely his, but, being Hume, he will try to be as clear as possible in communication as he can be. These are “his own present ideas” recorded and revised on paper leaving an actual artifact that the editors of the critical edition of Hume’s philosophical works in the 19th century, Green and Grose, saw in the library of the University of Edinburgh in Hume’s handwritten manuscript, but soon after disappeared. In the section I quote, all of Hume’s emotions are in play. But this ending section of the NATURAL HISTORY is far more than a summary but a rational conclusion to what has been examined so that it is the result of sifting the ground wheat of theology to find the fine flour that remains. Hume in several ways is like Nietzsche. He is very easy to read superficially, but when you try to nail him down specifically, it can be difficult as Don Garrett has demonstrated. Your only clue to get through Hume’s labyrinth is that he does not lie.

Now, in paragraph 1, “propensity to believe” means exactly what it says and is a major philosophical principle throughout Hume. There are only two sources of strict KNOWLEDGE in Hume, logic and present sense impressions. Logic says sense impressions tell you nothing, communicate nothing whatsoever. They are just present sense impressions. Staying here would leave you in exactly the same place as Heidegger’s profound boredom. Your choices are suicide or doing something trivial, that is, doing something arbitrarily, whimsically, meaninglessly. But what is there to choose from? Why, the whole “world” “always already” interpreted and given to you so you never really have to think an independent thought yourself! Isn’t that wonderful! You are given a whole language ready-made to communicate any trivial, meaningless thought you want to, to express any creatively hysterical emotion that arises in your consciousness. But, as thought is thought, it eventually occurs to everyone even if they put it out of their minds immediately, Why would someone want to do something they KNOW is meaningless? So, you go look for meaning. If you are honest, this consists of trying to discover logical consistencies in what you have inherited. There are going to be contradictions and something has to be thrown out. How are you going to judge?

In paragraph 1 Hume passingly introduces his moral precept of “character, which we should naturally, in common life, ascribe to a man of sense and virtue!” Now, so far, what have we actually established? A) If you act, you act upon “belief”, it is “belief” that you will (in the future) find something worthwhile to justify what you do right now based purely on faith. B) You also have a passionate desire to KNOW “the facts of the matter” but find the process of really discovering that bewildering. C) You have this passionate desire that underwrites everything everyone does because everyone KNOWS if it definitely is not true, then it is utterly worthless. D) If all you are left with is the false, then you despair.

Through your personal history, you judge everything by feeling, but experience teaches you to try to rectify that into something like “right feeling”. Your judgment adjusts as your viewpoint adjusts. You thinks someone is purely evil until you think you learn some of the causes of their being ‘evil’, and them your strictness of judgment is ameliorated to some degree because you have imaginatively put yourself, feeling-wise, in their shoes. Hume repeatedly says, “Moral distinctions are not derived from reason.” They can be corrected by reason into self-consistency, but they are derived from passion and tradition. And all the values of tradition were derived from passion and the tradition before that, ad infinitum. You have “belief” in the validity of your emotions and you have “belief” in the values you have personally picked from tradition as your own. This does not, however, ameliorate the problems stated above: They stay around forever.

With perception, exactly the same thing happens. You judge all things within a moral perspective, that is, a perspective of emotional valuation. Your perception is always one whole. However, the viewpoint constantly changes. Things are always both up and down, right and left, light and heavy, etc. Your “own present ideas” are included in one universal whole. However, all of your judgments derive from the ‘past’ images derived from the ‘other’ ‘elsewhere’. Hume repeatedly says we can never know the ground from which our thinking grows. This is our “character” and completely unique to each person – as far as each of us can tell. Unless insanely distirted, each “character” though wants to know what “the facts of the matter” are. And so develop a generally and mutually recognizable “sense and virtue” that “we should naturally, in common life, ascribe” to ‘good’ people, and by which the vast majority of ‘characterizations’ of God are called ‘good’ only hypocritically.

From this “propensity to believe” we proceed to “original instinct”. These are things we cannot help, theist and atheist alike, to “believe” like “causation”. As many arguments one may raise to question causation’s certainty, in daily life you always rely upon it to provide explanation of :the facts of the matter”. Now, “belief” in a supreme being, though, is “a general attendant of human nature”. This is deliberately ambiguous, covering both a broad desire amongst many to believe in a God to also having undisplacible remnants of such a “belief” permanently imbedded in even rational language. In Greek tradition, the concept that the universe MUST be created factually in time, and not vaguely by mythical stories, was considered ridiculous. In Western culture now, we all grow up thinking of a definite creation at one point in time is ‘obvious’. It gives time a definite sense of beginning and end, a seeming sense of purpose and design that is not really there. But it is very helpful in thinking about time in any scholarly way because thereby it is made into an object that seemingly can be observed, and all the actual experiencial and rational difficulties of thinking about time as an object can be easily ignored because this kind of practical thinking is so pragmatically productive. But productiveness of practical knowledge one can apply has nothing to do with the two strict forms of KNOWLEDGE I originally proposed as Hume’s. Practical knowledge belongs to “common sense”, the “world” one inherits with its inbuilt purposes.

This “general attendant of human nature”, though, Hume says, “may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work, and nothing can surely more dignify mankind . . .” Now, as this paragraph proceeds, and as the whole rest of the book has shown, the “image” of “the universal Creator” is highly compromised. Not only is it morally degraded, but Hume has raised the problem of how an infinite being commit finite acts by interfering with human history at specific points of time and space. So the rational conception of God is logically detached from any experiencial evidence except the possibility of a “divine workman’ on the purported rational design of the universe. Hume seems to reluctantly grant the last as a ‘possibility’. But essentially, as far as any reality of God may be concerned, its importance to humanity is trivial because we cannot know it and it cannot effect us.

However, this does lead to the “noble privilege . . . of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle . . .” Hume has essentially reversed the argument for God’s existence from the design of the universe into an argument providing the imagination to enable human reason to infer so sublime a principle, that is, the scope of human reason has been enlarged by imagining God from the works of nature so that it transcends its unique and purely personal situation to include the whole universe in that “human reason”. This is essentially provides the field in which science can operate.

Norman Kemp Smith has two definitions he found in Kant that fill this conception out. “Transcendental knowledge is knowledge not of objects, but of the nature and condition of our a priori cognition of them,” and, “An intuition or conception is transcendental when it originates in pure reason, and yet at the same time goes to constitute an a priori knowledge of objects.” COMMENTARY TO KANT’S “CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON”, Humanities press, reprinted 1996, pages 74-75. “A priori” corresponds to Hume’s “universal propensity to believe” and “original instinct”.