David Fate Norton and Jacqueline Taylor, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume: Second Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
David Hume was an eighteenth century Scottish philosopher. The name
stood out to me when I first encountered it because as a child I watched
the Worldwide Church of God’s World Tomorrow television
program, and one of its anchors was named “David Hume.” The name of
David Hume, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, would come up
quite a bit in my studies. I read and heard that Hume was an
epistemological skeptic, one who had doubts about the existence of an
external world or the human ability to know it truly. Yet, Hume was a
naturalist, one who did not believe in miracles because they
contradicted what we ordinarily see in nature. The two ideas seemed to
me to contradict each other: we cannot trust our ability to know the
world, and yet we should trust what we ordinarily sense enough to
exclude the possibility of miracles? As I read more, another question
would come to my mind about Hume.
Last month, I read and blogged about
a book by a professor of philosophy whom I had as an undergraduate.
The professor was Noah Lemos, and his book that I read was entitled Common Sense: A Contemporary Defense.
Lemos was defending the Common Sense tradition of philosophy, which
largely maintained that we can assume things that many people take for
granted—-such as the existence of an outside world and our ability to
understand it, on some level—-rather than being skeptical about these
things and feeling a need to justify them before doing philosophical
work. The Common Sense tradition is often seen as contrary to David
Hume’s philosophy, particularly Hume’s skepticism. And yet, Dr. Lemos
made one statement about Hume that made me wonder how seriously Hume
took his epistemological skepticism. Hume essentially acknowledged that
the outside world is irresistible to us. Sure, we may reach skeptical
conclusions while we are in our study, but, once we leave our study and
go out into the world, we cannot resist it. We have a strong sense that
the world is real, and we act accordingly. Hume did not seem to
believe that was a bad thing. I wondered how Hume squared his
epistemological skepticism with his idea that the outside world is
irresistible to us.
Later, I read and blogged about James M. Byrne’s Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant.
Byrne’s book surprised me because it argued that Immanuel Kant was
actually trying to refute David Hume’s epistemological skepticism,
whereas I had long believed that Kant himself was an epistemological
skeptic. As I look at Byrne’s discussion of Hume and Kant again, I see
that there were things that I did not completely absorb in my first
reading, which now stand out to me. What I got out of Byrne’s
discussion in my first reading was that Hume argued that “experience is
composed of a series of fragmented impressions working on our senses”
(Byrne’s words, page 208), calling into question whether we can truly
trust our experience. Kant responded by focusing on human reason and by
saying that we can know things as they appear to us, not as they truly
are.
From Manfred Kuehn’s Kant: A Biography (see my post about this book here),
I learned that Hume was essentially an empiricist, or at least
overlapped with empiricism: Hume believed that what we think we know
comes from our experience of the world, and that there are no a priori (prior to experience) conclusions we made. Many would claim that math is a priori—-that
its principles were true before we experienced them, and that they are
true apart from our experience. 1+1=2 is just true! But my impression
is that Hume believed that we reached the conclusion that math is true
on the basis of our experience and our senses, not apart from
experience. According to Kuehn, as I understood him, Kant in his early
writing career radically distinguished between what we know from the
senses and what we know a priori, or rationally. Later, Kant
would posit that we rationally organize and conceptualize the world
around us. As Byrne says on page 210 of Religion and the Enlightenment,
Kant proposed that “the universality and necessity required for true
knowledge do not come from the structure of the world, which we only
know in the flux of phenomena anyway, but rather from the structure of human cognition itself.”
Kant turned his attention from the outside world to the subject, the
people who through reason seek to understand and conceptualize the
outside world.
These are the things that I have learned so far about Hume and Kant,
and I admit that I have a long way to go and that my understanding is
far from adequate or organized. What, though, did I get out of reading The Cambridge Companion to Hume?
I decided to check this book out from the library because it looked to
me to be quite lucid. And, while there were plenty of discussions that I
did not follow, there was enough repetition in the book that I could
learn more about Hume’s philosophy, even if I did not always grasp the
basis for his conclusions.
On epistemology, Hume was a skeptic. He did not believe that there
was any way to justify rationally or philosophically our ability to
understand the outside world. Hume also maintained that what we thought
we knew came from our experience and our senses, and he doubted that
these things were fully reliable or iron-clad. According to Hume, we
believe that there is cause and effect in the world because we regularly
observe one thing following another, but there is no way for us to know
for certain that this one thing will always follow another in the
future. Hume also referred to a previous skeptical argument that our
eyes are not necessarily reliable in helping us to represent the outside
world: when we push on our eye, after all, we see one object becoming
two objects, even though it is still one object. Hume also focused on
impressions, as Byrne said, and, as Kant would say later, Hume
maintained that we only “know” the outside world as it appears to us,
not as it truly is. Another point that Hume continually made was that
we have passions inside of us. For Hume, reason serves the passions
rather than vice versa: we use reason to try to get what we want. While
Hume does not believe that all passions are bad or unruly—-he
acknowledges the existence of calm passions—-my impression (and I am
open to correction on this) is that he may have held that the passions
get in the way of us ever being able to understand the outside world.
According to one essay in the book, however, there were skeptical
arguments prior to Hume, and Hume’s project was to show us how we can
move past them. Hume, as Dr. Lemos said, believed that the outside
world was irresistible, and Hume also maintained that we need to act
accordingly in order to survive. Our weakness in yielding to our senses
is what saves us, according to Hume! Why bring up reasons to doubt our
senses, then, if it does not make much of a difference in how we live
our lives? According to one essay, Hume did so to teach people
humility, so that they would not be so dogmatic.
I have heard some evangelicals or Christians use Humean insights to
argue that it is perfectly all right for Christians to have faith, to
believe in something without the basis of evidence. After all, we
accept the existence of the outside world, which cannot be proven! We
believe that certain effects follow certain causes, even though we
cannot know for sure that those “effects” will always follow those
“causes”! Why, then, are Christians so wrong to believe in God and
Jesus Christ, even though there is no proof that Christianity is true?
But, according to an essay in The Cambridge Companion to Hume
about Hume and religion, Hume believed that the two were apples and
oranges. The outside world and the existence of cause and effect are
irresistible to virtually everyone, Hume noted, whereas there are people
who manage to resist believing in religion.
The essays in The Cambridge Companion to Hume about Hume’s
stance on morality and religion were very interesting parts of the book,
at least to me. There were debates about the basis or origin of
morality: Was God necessary for morality to exist, or is morality simply
rules that people have devised in order to live together in peace? My
impression is that Hume’s stance was that morality is rooted in how
humans are psychologically—-he does not locate it in human reason, but
largely in human passions. Hume disagreed with overly pessimistic
conceptions of human nature—-whether that be the Christian doctrine of
original sin or Hobbes’ view that human nature gravitated towards war
and conflict—-for Hume thought that there was enough virtue in human
beings for virtue to be conceptualized and practiced by them, on some
level. Hume also held that morality helps humans to live together in
peace.
On religion, Hume objected to certain philosophical arguments for the
existence of God. I have heard his objections from atheists and even
some Christians. I one time attended a debate between Christians and
atheists about the existence of God, and one of the Christians said
that, if we saw a hamburger on the street, we would conclude that
somebody made it, and that we should similarly conclude that God made
the universe because it looks so orderly and designed. The atheist
responded: “I know that hamburgers are made because I have seen it
done. Have you ever seen universes being made?” The idea seems to be
that we cannot draw conclusions that God made the universe or that God
designed the universe as it is, and the reason is that there is only one
universe. We have nothing with which to compare it. Hume also
questioned the idea that the universe demonstrates design by pointing to
the bad or harmful aspects of nature: Would God design that? Yet, in
his writings, Hume still indicates that he may believe that the argument
from design makes sense, on some level. One of the essays explores the
possibility that Hume did so to avoid prosecution, but it concludes
that Hume truly did believe that there was something to the argument
from design, flawed as it might be.
On Hume and miracles, Hume did argue against accepting the existence
of miracles, or testimony for them. The author of one of the essays
asked if Hume could legitimately do this: How could Hume question the
existence of cause and effect and allow for the possibility that the
world may not follow certain laws or regularities in the future, on the
one hand, while maintaining that people should rigidly follow their
understanding and observation of natural laws, on the other hand? Good
question!
The book also contains chapters about Hume’s stance on politics,
economics, and art. These topics did not intrigue me as much as the
chapters about epistemology, politics, and religion, as important as
they may be to those who desire to understand David Hume and his
thoughts. The chapter about art overlaps some with Hume’s epistemology,
since Hume believed that art makes an impression on us, and our
passions play a role in our response to it; Hume also wrestled with how
people can have different responses to art, due to their different
backgrounds or culture. The chapter about Hume’s histories was
interesting to me because it touched on whether we can know that certain
histories are reliable, and which parts are. This overlaps with the
question of what we should do when a historian mentions miracles. There
was one statement in particular that stood out to me in that chapter,
however: A woman wrote to David Hume to tell him that his history really
made her feel good about herself, for she got in touch with her virtue
by feeling sorry for Charles I when he was executed. Her reaction to
Hume’s narration of that really made her feel that she was virtuous!
I’ve felt the same way in my viewing of television programs!
Good book! I will be looking at other philosophy books in the Cambridge Companion series in the future.