David Hume sets up an irreconcilable opposition of Pyrrhonian (Radical) Scepticism versus tradition.

The Radical Scepticism comes from the result one cannot discover rational structures in experience. Sense experience just happens, and in sense experience per se there is, of course, no communication, which implies language, and if no communication of rational structure, no rationality. However, Reason is the only extra-personal, 'external', "truly' objective standard there is. This actually might be questionable on the ground rationality is part and parcel of the inheritance of language and hence simply a part of tradition also. However, one can thoroughly divorce--at least theoretically--reason from tradition precisely because one can develop extreme rationality and hence Radical Scepticism which wholly drops tradition as having any truth value. The result of this is literal nihilism, the belief in absolutely nothing but reason. Ivan Karamazov: "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."

Yet though everything is permitted, by pure reason alone through Radical Scepticism you have destroyed all motivation which is dependant upon the emotional motivation of desire which is dependent upon a physical context and hence upon a context of other objects, animals, and human beings which brings in the invalidated tradition. Even to manage motivation as languageless animal involves judgments of this is better than that, that is more practical to achieve than this, etc.

Hence Hume says A) in order to act at all and fulfil your desires you must accept at least as the situation one must live with as the context of what-is as a whole (this is not validated, just recognition of what the situation is); B) by the use of reason, BUT WHOLLY WITHIN THE TRADITION, criticize it for self-consistency, i. e., Is it preferable to have many tyrants, the turbulent nobles, or one tyrant who controls the nobles (Henry VII)? Hume doesn't like kings as such, but a strong king is far preferable to a weak king. He does not like religion at all (as he told Boswell, Show me a religious man and I'll show you a scoundrel), but he by far prefers established and government controlled religion to the free-play, anarchistic religions of the English civil war just like Thomas Hobbes. He even said the Anglican ministers should be paid a salary by the government so they do not become pestiferous and interfering by collecting tithes, judgments, fees, levies, and causing all sorts of hellatious trouble and accumulating untaxable and unalienable property like the Catholic Church did and ultimately trying to seize all power whatsoever. even so, he is honest enough to recognize that the structure of the Catholic Church and its professed principles of justice and peace did at times have a civilizing effect on English history.

He even makes statements about the beauty of religion, the Glory of God and of Christ. However, a number of them are obviously ironical and sarcastic. But not all. In THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION Hume does find a place for God as the ground for the expansion of the human mind which becomes in Kant transcendence so when he says he was not an atheist, agnostic, or Deist but was a philosophical Theist he meant it as he meant it that he could not believe that any man could truly and consistently believe in a God. However, this God was trivial and harmless.

You notice he left Scotland in disgust after they tried to excommunicate him? This was the last straw. The Anglican Church could only vilify him and watch for occasions of blasphemous-type statements as the time he thought of printing his essays on Immortality and Suicide ("But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.").Real excommunication would have meant jail, loss of property and civil rights, and possibly even his life. Remember the hanging of a retarded Scottish teenager in 1692 at Edinburgh for slandering the Old Testament. The comments in his HISTORY OF ENGLAND about Scotland praises their courage and love of anarchistic freedom but that otherwise it is a land of ungovernable savages.

Gary C. Moore
22 Feb 2004