Hume And Love

I felt kind of out-of-synch with the rest of the class today, and as we ended on kind of a 'downer' note today despite my optimism about Hume I feel compelled to explain myself a little, hopefully to someone's benefit.

There exists a tendency to think that Hume is kind of stealing away any hope for confidence or certainty in the world. John, especially, expressed this kind of distress which it's possible to take from Hume. But it doesn't have to be that way. This enquiry and our experiencing it isn't, to me, a cold separation of terms as with a scalpel, but instead it's more like a love story.

You know how in the Symposium there's the notion that you can't love something you already have? Well, I feel that when you think you have knowledge about something, you think you have the truth and so you aren't interested in truth anymore. Every new philosophy, book, or acquaintance is a potential enemy; every new idea presented to you must either be fit in with your current beliefs or summarily refuted. When you think you know something, it is expedient to run away from all new information, and to cower from (what I would call) truth, lest you fall prey to (what this person would call) deception or trickery.

But with the limits Hume places on human knowledge, you are deprived of possession of the truth. As a result you are free to love truth, and the things you formerly 'knew' are matters of belief. You can and ought to defend your opinions voraciously but if you perceive greater truth in some new argument, you can accept it without contradiction or shame. I perceive a great fear of being thrown into confusion or doubt among people who take pride in their knowledge (a la Descartes and the maelstrom). But if you are in love with truth, no confusion or doubt or new opinion can remove from you the joy of the seeking for truth in which you have engaged yourself. No change in belief can depress your emotions because it is your priority to be in love with truth, not to merely possess it. Loving the truth means confidence in belief, prudence (not reticence) in dealing with other beliefs, and a certain courage in dealing with new texts or ideas.

I'd even go so far to say that this love of truth is the entire point of PLS: to inject yourself with these books and these ideas, to let them really hit you, to temper yourself, test your mettle and see what emerges from the forge. It's my sentiment that what's so 'depressing' about Hume is that accepting what he's saying is to accept uncertainty. But if you give uncertainty with respect to knowledge a chance, you might find certainty with respect to love of truth to be much more challenging and rewarding.

If 'love' wasn't the right word to describe the seeking for truth, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have just made a fool/nerd of myself in front of people whose company I enjoy in class twice a week. I hope this benefited someone, or at least cemented their opinions by contrast with mine; and I hope this has made me and my apparent delight-in-lack-of-knowledge seem less, rather than more, crazy. If none of those succeed, at least here you can find a rationale for why Hume need not be paralyzing.

Hume I

The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sense. (pg. 10)

This seems to be a premise that Hume takes to show many of his other ideas. Because of this, he concludes that experience is critically important to the discovery of cause and effect, which is critically important to discover everything that deals with matter of fact. What is the consequence, though, of saying that nothing in the realm of matter of fact can be discovered unless through knowledge, but writing a work in which each person cannot experience, but only use reason to understand? What also does this do to the style of learning that we in PLS or we in universities use to learn?

Custom is King

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact, beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses.  p.29

To trot out a good ol' fashioned PLS cliche, Custom is King. We saw Herodotus describing one tribe that always ate their dead, and one tribe that always burnt their dead. We saw Gulliver (in the first half of his travels) learning time and again that what seems huge is minuscule, and what seems important is trivial. Here, however, we see Custom coming into the picture in a radically different way...or does it? Herodotus and Gulliver teach us that subjective judgements may be valuable, but should not be taken as Truth. Hume seems to be preaching the same sermon, except he is now applying judgements that were previously associated with morals and rituals to every aspect of understanding. With Hume, we realize that there is every single moment of our lives may be (pardon me for mixing metaphors) like a different island of Gulliver's travels - what we learn from one moment (or island) can not necessarily be brought to the next. However, Custom applying to every understanding is far more radical than the Custom of morals and rituals that Herodotus and Swift present. But, this point could be debated. If we would like to, we can take that as a first question. Judging from what we have read, is it fair to say that, Custom is no longer just King,  but Custom is man's (false) God? By this, I mean that if one assumes that God is a delusion, then God is just an imaginary friend that humans thought up in order to make sense of a world in which things don't actually make sense. It seems to me that Custom, and Cause and Effect serves the same purpose - to provide an explanation of a world that cannot be sufficiently explained, (although Cause and Effect do "appear" to result in concrete betterment of our world. 

Hume-ility

Were our ignorance, therefore, a good reason for rejecting any thing, we should be led into that principle of denying all energy in the Supreme Being as much as the grossest matter.
--p.48, last paragraph of VII.I

It is not uncommon for 'humility' with respect to human knowledge to be supposed to consist of an assertion of knowledge of some other fact. For example, we questioned Bacon's supposed humility with regard to knowledge; Descartes's capacity for doubt found its bottom when he supposed his "clear and distinct perception" to be equivalent to knowledge. Pascal, I think, can be said to be nearer to Hume in this regard.

Whenever any object is presented to the memory or senses, it immediately, by the force of custom, carries the imagination to conceive that object, which is usually conjoined to it; and this conception is attended with a feeling or sentiment, different from the loose reveries of the fancy. In this consists the whole nature of belief.
--p.31, second paragraph of V.II

In re-imagining of human knowledge, Hume presents a system wherein one claims to know no more than one actually experiences. That which is usually considered to be knowledge ("I know the sun will come out tomorrow") is recognized, for Hume, to be belief ("I believe the sun will come out tomorrow"). I don't think, however, that in Hume's opinion this change would make the Annie song any less optimistic.

It seems to me like a reasonable presumption from Hume's philosophy would be to find it paralyzing: one is not, after all, supposed to "know" much of anything useful.

The only immediate utility of all sciences, is to teach us, how to control and regulate future events by their causes.
--p.51, second-to-last paragraph of VII.II

Cf. footnotes 5 and 8: Hume, however moderate (and occasionally pessimistic) the tone of this particular book, seems to believe that his philosophy can be of practical purpose. It seems to me that Hume is proposing that we do not need to presume to know as much as we often do presume to know in order to function. Belief, for Hume, appears to serve just that same purpose, with the added benefit of humility.

So much of this semester has been concerned with "throwing open the windows," with the search for Truth and the bounds of human knowledge. Hume, so far as I can see, approaches the question from an entirely new angle: "what can we know?" not in terms of "let's look at what exists" but rather "let's look at ourselves." How does Hume's redefinition of knowledge and belief fit in with the trends we've seen thus far? Is his philosophy blinding, paralyzing, and limiting, or is it empowering, honest, and keenly perceptive?

In all this, I hope we can get to the philosopher's-role-in-the-city question from the first part...

Is experience necessary or is sense enough?

"No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it . . ."

(end of 6th paragraph of section IV)

Hume argues in this section that even if we have sensory knowledge, we will never determine causes or predict effects unless we also have experience. I wonder if this is true. First of all, we could take the extreme example of an omnipotence (ie God); I've heard it said many times that if we could know absolutely everything about the universe at the present moment, we would also know its past and future, because that past and future are necessary to the universe's current configuration. This makes sense to me. If everything has a cause and effect and nothing is created or destroyed (the universe is just a set of constant particles bouncing off each other), then couldn't I tell from their current position what their next position will be? Couldn't we use reason to understand space and motion, sort of like in Lucretius did?

But even if we don't take this extreme example, there still might be problems. I wonder how Hume would react to modern chemistry. He claims that no one could predict water turning to ice, but couldn't we predict this merely by examining the molecular structure of water? Or if we didn't have knowledge of the effect, couldn't we get pretty close, come up with a pretty good hypothesis with a reasonable percentage of certainty?

Basically, could Hume's problem not be "merely sense" but "merely limited sense"?

Hume vs. Metaphysics

It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have the preference above the accurate and abstruse; and by many will be recommended, not only as more agreeable, but more useful than the other. (Sec. I, p. 2)
Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing. But this obscurity in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. (Sec. I, p. 5. My emphasis on profound)

In "Of the Different Species of Philosophy," Hume seems to claim there are two philosophical sects: the "easy and obvious" and the "accurate and abstruse" (2). It initially appears that he attacks the first sect, but he finishes the section condemning the second. Hume seems to be concerned with the accuracy of our knowledge more than whether that knowledge accords with reality. He changes the category "accurate and abstruse" to "profound and abstract," or he at least creates a subdivision under his second category. This change in wording reflects his view that the abstractness of metaphysics leads to human error when discerning metaphysical principles. Does this text reject metaphysics completely or does it dissuade humans from engaging in metaphysical philosophy? In other words, does Hume believe that metaphysics is bogus or does he believe that metaphysical principles exist yet outside our minds' comprehension (and therefore useless to humans).

Hume Section I - Section VII

"This influence of the will we know by consciousness." Section VII, Part I, pg. 42

"But consciousness never deceives. Consequently, neither in the one case nor in the other, are we ever conscious of any power. We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable." Section VII, Part I, pg. 43

This is the beginning of Hume's discussion on the "necessary connexion" by which two events are related.  These passages are a bit of a tease; Hume asserts that the influence of the will is something that can be known and taken as truth, but then rejects the idea that impulses of the will connect actions.  Yes, the influence of the will can be seen in our experiences.  According to Hume, however, this tells us nothing about the power that relates these events.  It is only by repeated circumstances (custom/habit) that we begin to "feel a new sentiment or impression, to wit a customary connexion in the thought or imagination between one object and its usual attendant" (Section VII, Part II, pg. 52).  Personally, I find the the influence of the will much more convincing than the description of some inherent "feeling" that leads one to the "necessary connexion."  Throughout the work, Hume dismisses experience as unreliable because it is so fickle.  In my opinion, feelings are even less conclusive than actual experience.  Why/How does Hume find solace in the connexion that we "feel in the mind" (Section VII, Pat II, pg. 50)?