The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ the whole of nature.”⁴ The sum of Hume’s argument is that by experience we know that there is an order in nature, but we cannot know how it comes to be. It is therefore presumptuous to try to distinguish matter from mind, to say that one lacks order and the other imposes it. The very distinction is beyond our capacities. Even Father Malebranche, he pointed out, considered it blasphemous to call God a spirit, and argued that He was neither spirit nor matter, but simply, “ ‘He that is,’ or, in other words, Being without restriction, all Being, the Being infinite and universal.”¹ It was far better to rest with a more modest theory, and ascribe “an eternal inherent principle or order to the world, though attended with great and continual revolutions and alterations.” This, by being so general, solved all difficulties; it was perhaps “not entirely complete and satisfactory,” but it was at least a “theory that we must sooner or later, have recourse to, whatever system we embrace.”² For we know only that “everything is surely governed by steady inviolable laws.” If we could know the “inmost essence of things,” we would then “discover a scene, of which, at present we can have no idea.”³

      Hume preferred to leave the various arguments in his dialogue more or less in balance, not merely because he might thereby avoid offending popular opinion, but because, above all, he wanted to say that in the end we can but acknowledge a mystery. Neither spirit nor matter was to be made supreme. He had indeed attacked the argument from design, that argument for God’s existence which the faithful regarded as the very heart of religion. And yet he was not an atheist strictly speaking, but a true defender of religion in its most generic meaning, as a sense of wonder. For he insisted that understanding the order of the universe was not within man’s power:

      The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgement appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure regions of philosophy.¹

      Hume had used the “experimental method” not to confirm but to thwart the scientific spirit. For the scientist, however much he may assert that he wishes merely to observe the phenomena of this world, however much he denies the possibility of explaining them, is driven by the momentum of his own work into attempting to discover all or believing he could. He may say that his general laws describe nothing real, but even if he himself refrains from doing so, his disciples, as Newton’s did, will take the reality of his scientific laws for granted. But Hume not only insisted on a fundamental, impenetrable mystery; he not only disintegrated the very power that was supposed to give men access to certain and undeniable truth. He denied also the sort of world that the scientists, from Copernicus on, had been creating.

      Although insofar as he expelled formal and final causes Hume spoke for the new experimental science, in another way he was behind his time. On the one hand, he admired Newton for the wrong reasons: “While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain.”² On the other hand, despite his criticism of “the mechanical philosophy,” Hume had taken his stand with Newton’s opponents who refused to accept a mathematical force. He used Newton’s own method to declare himself against the timeless world of immaterial forces that Newton, in completing the world view of the new science, proposed to substitute for a simpler, mechanical world, where men did not venture beyond everyday experience. The effect of Newtonism was to abolish the world of more or less, of qualities and sense perception, of concentration on our daily life, and to replace it by an Archimedean universe of precision, of quantity, and rest, where there is a place for everything but humanity. It substituted a mathematical nature for a physical nature, a world of being for a world of becoming and change. It reduced motion from a process of change that affected bodies and differed from rest to a status as permanent and indestructible as rest. Motion became a changeless change in a timeless time. It was no longer the motion of daily experience.

      But Hume, as a philosopher of becoming, not of being, preferred the world he could feel about him to the Platonic idea of a mathematical world. His standpoint was more nearly that of the artist than of the philosopher—he was more concerned to remember the particular experiences behind abstract ideas than to organize experience under concepts. In the world as he saw it, all qualities are mixed and confused; there are no distinctions of kind, but only of degree: “Nothing in this world is perpetual; Every thing, however seemingly firm, is in continual flux and change.”¹

CHAPTER 5

       Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions

      Having tumbled reason from her high throne to set her on earth judging facts and thus removed the divine imprint from man’s soul, Hume used the same means to show that man bore no mark of Satan. For man restored to nature, he described a virtue that required no struggle with sin, no repression, no divine intervention, nothing but what could come naturally to human beings.

      The passions, in which Hume casually included animal instincts and passions, along with moral sentiments and natural beliefs, were reduced, like everything else, to a form of sensation. Instead of being the unruly elements of the soul, opposed to reason, they became innocuous “reflective impressions.” They arose, Hume said, as internal responses to “original impressions,” that is, to sensations caused by external objects or operations of the body. In other words, they were responses to bodily pleasures and pains. Some, like the sense of beauty and deformity, were calm; others, like love and hatred, grief, joy, pride and humility, were violent; all were equally natural and capable of being beneficial. They were secondary, internal, reflective impressions and neither good nor evil. They were the results of causes that “operated after the same manner thro’ the whole animal creation”¹ and were therefore, like reason, common to man and animals.

      By describing passions as responses to impressions, Hume made it impossible for them to be ruled by reason. Reason, in Hume’s sense, could only judge abstract relations between ideas, or the relations between ideas and matters of fact. With neither of these judgements could reason excite desire or aversion, that is, give rise to passion or influence it.² Passions themselves are called into being by nothing but impressions, and they can be opposed only by contrary passions. What is taken for the combat between reason and passion, Hume explained, is in reality a “calm” passion opposing a “violent” one: “Thus it appears that the principle which opposes our passions cannot be the same with reason, and is only call’d so in an improper sense. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”¹ Man is not then a divided nature but all one, and he is moved, not by two opposing principles, but by a variety of sensations.²

      Thus Hume denied the basis for the traditional account of virtue. He had ruled out even the possibility of giving reason ascendancy in Spinoza’s manner. Spinoza, too, had reversed the order of reason and passion, but in his account the master governing passion is the passion to act rationally for its own sake. In the end, Spinoza differentiated man from beast, and the free man from the slave, by his power of making reason and judgement control action and passion. For the only passion reason could not examine was the passion to reason. According to Hume, however, reason is always controlled by passion, by any and every desire which may happen to employ reason as a means to its fulfilment. Reason could never make an all-inclusive survey of all passions or desires.

      Yet СКАЧАТЬ