The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin
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Название: The Pursuit of Certainty
Автор: Shirley Robin Letwin
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Юриспруденция, право
Серия: none
isbn: 9781614872214
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Thus Montaigne crystallized for Hume what others had suggested—the need to formulate a philosophy based on new assumptions about human nature, a philosophy that would restore man’s wholeness, and undo all the mischief wrought by a long tradition that had divided man between holy reason and brutish passion. Those who knew something more than hypotheses, who took the trouble to look at man as he really was, could see that the established formulas for human life had inflicted useless pain because they were not suited to the true human condition. There is no better statement of Hume’s guiding motive in his philosophical enterprise than his statement opening Book II of the Treatise:
Nothing is more usual in philosophy and even in common life than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform to its dictates. Every rational creature, ’tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, ’till it be entirely subdu’d or at least brought to conformity with that superior principle … nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, and popular declamations, than this supposed preeminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been display’d to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.1
In fact, Hume did more in the end. He established the principles of human nature on an entirely new foundation; not content with “taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier,” he marched up “directly to the capital or centre” of the sciences.2 He attacked the basis of all traditional notions on which children had been brought up and societies governed, men discussed, praised, and blamed. He did not care to deny the existence of God. What he proposed was far more radical than any declared atheism.
It was no wonder that he drove himself feverishly, and then suffered depression, illness, and doubt. Shortly before leaving for France he wrote to Dr. Cheyne that at the age of eighteen,
there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought which transported me beyond Measure, and made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it.… I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, and depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue and of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, and the Source from which I wou’d derive every Truth in Criticism as well as Morality… within these three Years, I find I have scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own Inventions. This with the Reading most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French, and English, and acquiring the Italian, you may think a sufficient Business for one in perfect Health. … But my Disease was a cruel Incumbrance on me.
He found himself, Hume explained, unable to concentrate, strangely ill at ease, and generally incapable of delivering his opinions “with such Elegance & Neatness as to draw to me the Attention of the World, & I wou’d rather live & dye in Obscurity than produce them maim’d & imperfect.”3 It was fitting that Hume should have recovered the strength to complete his task in France.
To achieve his purpose, Hume had to show that man had no extraordinary powers like those claimed for him by others. Philosophers as well as the vulgar, Hume declared, felt obliged to assign “some invisible intelligent principle” for anything that surprised them. As they could not understand the effect either of the mind on the body, or of the body on the mind, they asserted that “the Deity is the immediate cause of the union between soul and body.” Sometimes philosophers felt impelled to go further, Hume continued boldly, and they extended “the same inference to the mind itself, in its internal operation.” They described ideas as “nothing but a revelation made to us by our maker.” Rather than trace an idea to the influence of human will, they spoke only of the “universal creator, who discovers it to the mind, and renders it present to us. Thus, according to these philosophers, everything is full of God.”1 Hume meant to cut the ties between man and God, and restore man to a purely human nature, such as the pagans found sufficient before Christianity removed man into a higher, more spiritual sphere.
It would seem that Hume’s way had been well prepared by Hobbes and Locke, because they are commonly described as empiricists and iconoclasts who broke decisively with the Christian picture of man. Unlike continental philosophers, they were concerned not so much to satisfy purely intellectual curiosity, to discover the true constitution of knowledge or the essence of things, as to condemn certain prevailing intellectual fallacies and their unfortunate moral consequences. They wished in different ways to restrain human speculation within its proper confines, and to correct what Locke called the disposition of men to “let loose their thoughts into the vast ocean of Being.” But from Hume’s standpoint, neither of them provided anything more than a variation on the traditional view.
Hobbes spoke of reasoning, rather than of reason, and he described man as fundamentally a creature of passion, whose well-being was promoted by passion as much as by reasoning; and he was, in a sense, as persuaded of human fallibility as Montaigne. In this respect he belongs, as Hume does, to the sceptical late scholastic tradition.1 But not only was his emphasis on man’s brutishness uncongenial to Hume; Hobbes offered nothing useful to Hume because his attention was centred on the achievements of reasoning, rather than on exploring the implications of his view that reasoning was concerned solely with causes and effects. Although he defined philosophy modestly as “the establishment by reasoning of true fictions,” he retained unbounded confidence in the truths he allowed it to establish. Hume’s concern was entirely with the nature and limits of reason, and it led him to reverse Hobbes’s conclusions. It made him antagonistic to Hobbes’s geometrical style of argument and to his whole dogmatic manner of dealing with human questions.
Locke’s philosophy was more nearly to Hume’s purpose. He was in the first place temperamentally more congenial, not so possessed as Hobbes was by the pursuit of system, and more inclined to emphasize the folly of human ambitions. Although his philosophy was used by Clarke and others to bolster systems that Hume equated with scholasticism, it was directed against the arrogant verbalism of the schools, the Deism of Lord Herbert founded on innate principles, the sermons and political orations that elevated current prejudices into immutable truths. By attacking the belief in innate ideas and principles, and tracing human knowledge to its origins in sense, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding stripped away the protection enjoyed by a number of empty abstractions and inherited prejudices, and made it respectable to question elaborate systems. Thus it sanctioned the doubts of those beginning to grow restless under the rule of dogmatic theology, whether of the middle ages or of the Puritans. The disposition that Hume and Locke shared was perfectly expressed in Locke’s statement:
proud man, not content with that knowledge he was СКАЧАТЬ