Home > What Lacks Is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas
Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049
- 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
1. Introduction
Was Fehlt? asks Jurgen Habermas in the course of his now famous debate about post-secularity, faith and reason with the Munich Jesuits, itself held in the wake of Pope’s Benedict XVI’s still more famous (and infamous, for some) ‘Regensburg address’. What lacks to us today, in an age supposedly governed by reason? Here Habermas takes up the post-religious lament of Brecht and Adorno: how do we supply the role that religion once fulfilled?
Habermas
takes it up in a very different key, because he is aware, in the early
21st C that, far from going away, religion is if anything
returning - in terms of numbers in the third world, and in terms of
public influence in the West. This return is by no means always benign:
religious extremism is returning also. Yet in a new combination, secular
extremism has reached a new pitch of intensity and we are also seeing
the rise of an increasingly militant naturalism. Both these phenomena
Habermas understandably regards as threatening to a reasonable humanism.
In the face of this threat he wishes to defend and re-fortify its neutral,
secular ground . However, he continues to be haunted by the Brechtian
lack. In the face of this lack he no longer suggests merely a novel
substitute for lost faith, but rather that reason must continue to draw
upon faith’s resources. Religion is not going to go away and we need
not only reasonable forms of religion but also a rational respect for
faith if human beings and the planet are to have a sane future.
This seems immediately compelling.
However, I shall argue below that what is problematic about Habermas’s
proposals is the sharp divide that he assumes between faith and reason,
on the basis of a presumed non-surpassability of the post-metaphysical
era inaugurated by Kant. He understands both Pope Benedict’s revival
of a metaphysical mediation between faith and reason and
newly over-extended ontological naturalism to be violations of the ‘limits
of pure reason’.
In what follows, I shall further
contend that Habermas is already outdated in the face of a manifest
revival of metaphysics and that both a revived blend of Greek reason
with Biblical faith and an ambitious naturalism are coherent,
though rival programmes. Either idiom, I shall suggest, permits a much
greater mediation between faith and reason than Habermas allows and
does so especially in terms of the role given to feeling.
Morever, if we read David Hume aright (which is to say in a drastically
revisionary fashion) we shall see that such a perspective is by no means
entirely alien to the Enlightenment legacy, to which Kant need not,
after all, be regarded as the primary witness.
I shall try to show how when
faith and reason are mediated by feeling they are actually less likely
to take sinister forms than when they are corralled against each other.
Finally I shall suggest that Habermas’s own pragmatised transcendentalism,
far from being a bulwark against anti-humanist reduction, is entirely
subject to such reduction. By contrast, the right sort of naturalism
can lend itself to a spiritualising elevation.
Was fehlt ? I shall
therefore claim, in an inter-linguistic play on verbal affinities, is
‘feeling’, a notion imbued with a sense of our experience of ‘the
other’, both as lack and as presence.
2. Habermas and the Lack
Within Reason: the Debate with Ratzinger and the Munich Jesuits
Habermas’s approach to our
current global dilemmas is sensitive, even anguished, and highly acute.
As he observes: ‘At the level of elementary interactions, a gap seems
to be opening up between a prickly moral consciousness and impotence
in the face of the structurally imposed switch to strategic conduct.’
Exactly so: one has here a
kind of sterile oscillation between a ruling ruthlessness on the one
hand and impotent moralistic whining on the other. The ruthlessness
is the result of the ever-greater submission of more and more spheres
of human life to an instrumentalist and capitalist logic, which Habermas
fears is increasingly driven by a revived social Darwinism. In the face
of this ruthlessness, moral reserve retreats into the private domain
and takes the form of a stuttering series of complaints that too often
are merely about the supposed restriction of certain individual and
groups from full participation in the mass instrumentalising process.
It is a considerable tribute
to his intellectual integrity that Habermas sees that perhaps the greatest
exception here is religious groups who continue to foster impulses towards
moral action on a collective scale. For this reason one has to ask,
what it is which they provide that is otherwise ‘lacking’? Habermas’s
answer, broadly speaking, is that they provide vivid pictures and motivating
stories for individuals, and above all that they provide images of community
that are compelling (‘the body of Christ’ and so forth) but which
exceed the bounds of the mere nation-state – thereby opening up a
universal and global loyalty.
He is clear that human solidarity
now needs these religious resources if it is to fight both religious
and naturalistic fanaticism. However, he asks to what extent it is legitimate
for religious people to speak in terms of their religious visions in
the public domain – and at times his questioning here is in
excess of his answering. Yet on the whole he supplies a rather uncompromising
kind of reply: although secularity must continue to draw, like Hegel,
on religious resources, it must eventually translate these resources
into strictly rational terms for the sake of official legislative debate
and usage. And by rational terms Habermas means the terms of Kantian
critical reason, which render out of court any totalising and cosmological
metaphysical claims.
In order to sustain this demand,
two more protocols must be observed. First, religions must be required
to accept this need for translation, along with the secular neutrality
of the State, the monopoly over ‘fact’ of scientific discourse and
the monopoly on public morality of the norms of communicative action
in terms of free access to conversation and the intention of publicly
verifiable truth. But secondly, this acceptance must be no mere reluctant
resignation. To the contrary, religions must be required so to modify
their dogmas (if they are not already so compliant) as to find specifically
internal, theological ways of embracing the absoluteness of these secular
norms.
Yet correspondingly, secular
reason must be required to admit that it has no remit when it comes
to determining the truth or otherwise of faith. So the trade-off, one
might say, for outlawing the metaphysics of Joseph Ratzinger,
would be that we would equally outlaw the scientism of Richard Dawkins.
A question, of course, arises
about the dubious practicality of such proposals. But more theoretically,
questions arise about their coherence. Everything in fact depends for
Habermas upon the absoluteness of the Kantian revolution which, by banishing
metaphysical mediation, finally gave secular consecration to the Protestant
separation of reason and faith. But in that case, is Habermas covertly
engaging in a new sort of Kulturkampf?
One could argue that this is
indeed so. He is prepared to admit that the great metaphysics of East
and West are of a single axial birth with the world religions. However,
he wishes to say that later ‘a division of labour’ between metaphysics
and Christian theology was worked out. Yet this is immediately to admit
that what we are faced with here is an explicitly Christian event, and
the question arises as to its possible ideological contingency rather
than logical necessity. Habermas chides Ratzinger with a deficient historicism
and yet it is concerning just this issue that Ratzinger is the far more
prodigious historicist. For the current Pope would ascribe to the view
that the dogmatic separation of philosophy from theology is the paradoxical
result of the dubious creation of a category of ‘pure nature’ by
a theology concerned for theological reasons sharply to divide nature
from grace. Equally he would ascribe to the view that a metaphysics
independent of all theology is the result of a specifically theological
establishment after Duns Scotus of being as univocal and so as comprehensible
outside the neoplatonic logic of participation in God.
The fact that the issue between
Habermas and Ratzinger turns in part on this question of genealogy is
clearly confessed by Habermas himself at the end of his essay in the
Munich debates.
There he alludes to the contingent shifts just mentioned, but says that:
But all these claims are historically
dubious. First, the medieval rebirth of Greek science preceded the advent
of univocity and nominalism, and one could even argue that they led
physics initially in an over-mechanistic direction which more neoplatonic
and hermetic influences later corrected, beginning with Isaac Newton.
Secondly, the French and American, to say nothing of older British,
Scandinavian and Swiss contributions to European constitutionalism have
got simply nothing to do with Kant whatsoever! In the third place, historicism
only implies an irreducible pluralism if one disallows the more radically
historicist idea – as admitted by Ratzinger – that events can uniquely
disclose truths.
Meanwhile the approbation of
‘de-Hellenisation’ is revealing. For this phenomenon cannot be prised
apart from a claimed (but arguably spurious) greater fidelity to the
Biblical legacy, sundered from Greek metaphysics, which is traceable
through Scotus, nominalism and the Reformation. Clearly Habermas cannot
rationally be seen to be assenting to this tendency in theological,
or a fortiori Protestant theological terms. Yet here arises most
acutely the question about the status of his proposed ‘translation’
of theological into secular terms.
Evidently, the above cited
remarks show that at least some of the theology he wants to translate
is Scotist, Ockhamist and Protestant. But in that case, do the secular
variants really struggle entirely free of a specifically religious origin?
Is it not strange that the translations which all Christians
are asked by Habermas to sign up to, are translations of positions at
variance with those of most mainstream Catholic intellectuals? Thus
in order to ascribe to these translations, they would have first to
switch their allegiance from theologically metaphysical positions, which,
according to Habermas, are not translatable into the terms of reason
at all.
In order to make such a drastic
requirement of Catholic Christians, Habermas would have to show that,
far from his Kantian philosophy being rooted in certain older theologico-metaphysical
assumptions, these assumptions were rather initial adumbrations of a
truly critical philosophy. This would be to accord with the position
of the fine intellectual historian Ludger Honnefelder, for whom Scotus’s
writings were the beginning of a critical turn which asked first about
the capacities of human reason as an instrument rather than first about
the division of being.
However, the suspicion must
here lurk that Ratzinger might be able to trump Habermas metacritically
at this juncture. Is Scotus the anticipator of Kant’s new reason or
is Kant still the prisoner of Scotus and Ockham’s theology? It is
after all clear to historians that univocity of being, nominalism and
voluntarism were all taken up for reasons that were as much theological
as philosophical. And all three positions can and are contested within
perfectly respectable contemporary theology and (more decisively) philosophy.
So if, as many historians of philosophy (Honnefelder included) have
now claimed, the Kantian critical turn assumes the validity of these
positions, then its absolute historical hiatus
can be questioned.
The point is not here to adjudicate
on this issue, but rather to throw into doubt Habermas’s rather blithe
(and surely now rather provincial) assumption that those who cannot
accept our ‘post-metaphysical’ situation have somehow failed to
follow certain ineluctable arguments. But to the contrary, it is rather
the octogenarian Pope who (unusually amongst contemporary Germans) now
looks ‘cool’, who seems ‘to get’ the post-postmodern zeitgeist,
without trying, like Habermas to retreat into a modern humanist comfort
zone that is no longer sustainable (see following section). Hence Ratzinger
might well counter to Habermas that to embrace ‘de-Hellenisation’
from a secular vantage point is to fall victim to a theologically exegetical
error that is outright factually wrong. For Hellenic influence is indeed
present within the New Testament from the outset, and nor do contemporary
Biblical critics (outside Germany, at least) any longer in any case
subscribe to 19th C Lutheran delusions about a vast gulf
between the Hellenic and the Hebraic.
Therefore it must remain highly
doubtful as to whether Habermas has successfully shown that the Pope’s
alternative pre-modern model for the mediation of faith and reason is
no longer critically viable. Is genuinely objective reason just a matter
of conforming to pragmatically normative criteria for communication,
as Habermas teaches? Or is our ‘communication’ of reason true to
the degree that it participates in the infinite communication of the
Logos by the divine Father who created finite reality, as Ratzinger
suggests? There is great prima facie
plausibility in the latter’s claim that this idea alone rendered reason
coterminous with being itself and suggested an unlimited diversity and
scope for the reach of reason.
How ironic indeed that we are
therefore faced with a debate between a religious rationalism arguing
for the limitless sway of reason and a secular rationalism arguing for
the limits of reason and yet a sublime respect for a faith that lies
ineffably outside reason altogether! Is it the limitation and
yet confinement of reason to a formal check that guards against terror,
or is it rather the advocacy of a generous extension of reason both
in reach and kind?
I shall argue below that the
latter position of Ratzinger is the better safeguard. In arguing it,
he is perhaps, as a contemporary German, somewhat unusual. But besides
exhibiting many French influences, he in addition draws upon longstanding
traditions of German Catholic Romanticism that were deeply critical
of Kant in the ultimate wake of the Lutheran pietists Jacobi and Hamann
– who drew much inspiration from David Hume. For comprehending part
of the reason why I have singled-out Hume in this essay, it is important
to bear this ‘romanticism’ of the Pope in mind.
For what it implies is that
it is not enough simply to try to ‘reinstate’ and ‘rework’ a
pre-critical (pre Scotist, pre-nominalist, pre-Kantian) outlook, since
one has to ask just how it was possible for the latter to arise. What
I think can be argued here is that the ‘critical’ view arose because
of an increasing sundering of reason from the emotive and the aesthetic,
and a corresponding sundering between reason and a will increasingly
viewed as pure ‘choice’ and ‘decision’. In order, therefore,
to recover, as Ratzinger desires, a ‘broader’ reason, it is necessary
to insist, in a ‘romantic’ fashion, upon the embedding of reason
in the emotive, the aesthetic, the linguistic, the social, the historic
and the natural, far more explicitly than did even the ‘high metaphysical’
synthesis of faith and reason than preceded the Scotist rupture.
In choosing (even though it
might seem perverse) Hume to make this point, I am deliberately trying
to show how the ‘romantic’ current, far from being marginal (or
dependent upon the Kantian shift) begins well back in the ‘enlightenment’
or arguably the ‘pre-enlightenment’, which already entertained doubts
about both the consequences of the late medieval Christian legacy and
the naturalist reaction against it. In this way I hope to show that
‘an alternative to Kant’ is neither eccentric, nor in any simplistic
way ‘counter modern’.
As both Augustinian and Romantic,
the Pope differs markedly from Habermas’s Jesuit Munich interlocutors
who are mostly themselves far too Kantian and try somewhat incoherently
to combine Kant with premodern Catholic philosophy.
However, the one non-Jesuit
interlocutor in the collection – Michael Reder -- makes important
critical points. These are threefold: first, Habermas’s rejection
of religion’s public right to speak in its own voice is a sub-category
of his insistence that public virtue is a matter of Kantian Moralität
and not Hegelian Sittlichkeit.
In other words, Habermas will not allow that there can be any publicly
rational adjudication as to the common good and the shared ends of human
flourishing. Reder rightly notes that this seems to take no account
of the revival of the claims of virtue-ethics. Secondly, Reder suggests
that Habermas also ignores the idea that reason can speak negatively
of the infinite by realizing that in the face of the infinite the usual
logic of non-contradiction breaks down, as suggested by Nicholas of
Cusa. Yet here Redel also presents Cusa anachronistically as a Kantian
who asked epistemological questions about the possible reach of our
intellect and so as articulating a sublime gulf between its positive
finite and its negative infinite reach. But in reality, Nicholas was
still situating the human mind metaphysically within a finitude that
he newly grasped as paradoxically extending of itself, as finite, into
the infinite. Accordingly, his idea of contradictory utterance does
not express an impassable barrier so much as an analogical mediation
that can be mystically traversed. He was more the Renaissance renewer
of neoplatonic tradition than an advance articulator of the post-metaphysical.
Were he but the latter, then his example would be of little use in qualifying
Habermas, because it would still leave reason sundered from faith. Reason
would merely sketch out a space for faith to fill with its own exclusive
content.
Redel’s third point is the
most crucial: this is that, following Schleiermacher, we can understand
‘feeling’ as a category intermediate between faith and reason. Once
more, however, Redel puts things in an overly negative ‘critical’
fashion, presenting Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling of absolute dependence’
in terms of a failure of autonomous self-grounding reaching out to a
Kantian sublime, rather than as a mode of cognitive relationship to
the whole of immanent reality, as Schleiermacher actually articulated
it, following Spinoza’s ‘third kind of knowledge’. All the same,
it is true that Schleiermacher did not ultimately escape the Kantian
lure, and so increasingly presented this experience of cosmic dependence
and interdependence as specifically ‘religious’, rather than being
the entire horizon of our human condition, both cognitive and practical,
as the Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers
originally intended. The trouble with Schleiermacher was that, when
he cleaved to this more interesting vision he lost the subjectively
personal in the pantheistically immanent, but when he later confined
feeling to ‘a religious category’ he lost the sense that all reason
is a mode of feeling.
I shall argue below that such
a thesis had already been presented in a far more comprehensive fashion
by David Hume, and in a manner that does not evidently reduce the personal
since it does not necessarily lose its guarantee by the transcendent.
Redel is only able to put forward
feeling as offering a kind of bridge to faith, in a manner that still
leaves faith and reason profoundly divided. But (a retrieved and genuine)
Humean model, I shall argue, allows us to see that reason and faith
are always thoroughly entangled and also provides a social model that
allows for this entanglement.
But before invoking Hume against
both Kant and Habermas, I shall try to suggest reasons why the latter’s
notion of public discursive neutrality is philosophically incoherent.
3. Questioning Discursive
Neutrality
As already stated, Habermas
is acutely aware that we live in a period where the humanist consensus
is being challenged both by naturalisms and by more militant forms of
faith. In the face of this circumstance he proposes that we need to
reinstate a firm Kantian distinction between what belongs to discursive
reason on the one hand, and to ineffable faith on the other. Discursive
reason should recognise that it operates within strict limits and therefore
is not competent to pronounce against either metaphysically naturalist
or religious positions. Both must be allowed to speak in their own voices
in the public domain (and one should welcome Habermas’s step beyond
Rawls in saying this) and yet -- problematically from the point
of view of democratic inclusion - official constitutional debate and
decision-making must be conducted within the terms of ‘neutral’
discourse. The latter is notably an emotion-free discourse, following
Kant’s views about the moral law. For despite the contortions that
Kant went through in relation to the role of feeling with respect to
the ethical, this played for him either a negative role as the feeling
of the emptily sublime ushering us into the presence of the moral
law, or a subordinate role in terms of our ‘feeling’ that the moral
should be harmonised with the sensorily pleasurable and the emotionally
satisfying.
It might be questioned, however,
whether this adherence to a basic Kantian principle really does justice
to the double novelty of the cultural situation in the 21st C, of which
Habermas is so acutely aware. Essentially there is nothing new about
his Kantian proposal to sustain an agnostic neutrality in public discourse,
free of metaphysical commitments of either a naturalistic or a spiritualistic
kind. Such ‘transcendentalist’ neutrality was already often the
norm (explicit or implicit) in the official assumptions of the preceding
century. All that Habermas does, in effect, is to call defensively for
the reiteration of a now threatened status quo.
But this may be to underestimate the way in which the seemingly contradictory
return of naturalism and religion at one and the same time puts both
intellectual and sociological pressure upon the very possibility of
a ‘neutral’ discursive space. In contrast to Habermas, the young
French (and atheist) philosopher, Quentin Meillasoux, whose work follows
somewhat in the wake of that of Alain Badiou, has suggested two reasons
for the current collapse of methodological agnosticism – reasons which
it would be hard critically to surmount.
The first reason is, intellectual:
the terms of ‘transcendentalist’ neutrality have been deconstructed
within both Analytic and Continental philosophy, and therefore ‘post-metaphysical’
philosophy is collapsing – ironically because it has been exposed
as the very consummation of the metaphysical as a supposedly autonomous
and non-theological discourse about being. This is because the quest
for certainty about being must inevitably collapse into the quest for
certainty about knowledge and therefore a methodologically secular metaphysics
mutates into a foundational epistemology. The latter relies upon showing
how there is a proper fit between our minds, when critically regulated,
and reality as it appears to our understanding. Yet it no longer seems
plausible that there is a ‘correlation’ between the way our minds
work and objectively given appearances. Instead, philosophy (again
both Analytic and Continental) is proposing full-blooded accounts of
nature which incorporate (with various degrees of reduction) an account
of the human mind. Kantian anthropocentrism and finitism now appears
to be unscientific and indeed to revert to the pre-Copernican. Conversely
(one might add to Meillassoux), if one wishes to defend the spiritual
character of mind, it is not possible to appeal to some supposedly ‘given’
transcendental circumstances: one would need instead a speculatively
metaphysical account of the reality of mind and soul.
Hence if naturalism and religion
are squeezing out the agnostic middle, this is not because the bounds
of reason are being transgressed; it is rather because reason (with
good reasons) no longer tends to credit such bounds, since if there
is no demonstrable ‘correlation’ between intellectual category and
pheneomenal content, it is no longer possible to set the Kantian critical
test of ‘schematisation’ in order to distinguish between those concepts
which do and those which do not violate our finitude.
So reason is being once more
infinitised – but this occurs from two opposite directions: by either
a naturalistic or a spiritualist metaphysic. In each case it is argued
that a claim for limits is paradoxically self-refuting, as one must
exceed a limit in order to know that it is absolute. In the naturalist
case it is further suggested that our post-Cantorian ability to think
the mathematically infinite suggests also an ability to think the natural
infinite, if it is true that mathematics is the language of nature
In the spiritualist case it is suggested that since limits cannot be
shown, we must assume that a God-given soul can aspire somewhat outside
their bounds. This does not at all mean, however, that such bold speculative
programmes can be exhaustively justified from a rational point of view.
To the contrary, their best practitioners admit that a certain stance
of ‘faith’ is involved in their pursuit.
The second reason is sociological.
Speculative metaphysics is not a leisurely pastime – to the contrary,
it is directly linked to people’s pragmatic need to direct their life
by certain definite beliefs about reality. Metaphysically agnostic philosophy,
once can argue, has allowed religious extremism to fill a certain void,
because it supplies a hunger that is as much one for a meaningfulness
of reality as for an emotional and expressive dwelling within reality.
Moreover, simply formal discursive conditions for politics and formal
respect for rights does not deal with the fact that certain substantive
choices and views have necessarily to prevail. Hence if one restricts
reason to the formal and insists that it operates only within knowable
boundaries, one will encourage entirely irrational and purely emotive
political movements to take centre-stage by exploiting procedurally
rational norms against the intentions of those who set up those norms
in the first place. This is what the Nazis did: Weimar was thoroughly
‘Kantian’ and Habermas repeats the error of Weimar even though he
imagines that his philosophy guards against any resurgence of totalitarianism.
For the culture of Weimar was notoriously characterised by a drift of
negative freedom towards decadence and nihilism. Nazism at once esoterically
perpetuated this drift and exoterically put an end to it.
The sharp separation of reason
and faith is therefore dangerous for a politics that is ‘liberal’
in the sense of constitutional. It implies that faith at its core is
‘non-rational’ and beyond the reach of any sort of argument, while
also implying that reason cannot really have a say on issues of crucial
substantive preference. But in reality reason and faith are always intertwined
in a beneficial way, even if this hard to formulate theoretically. Reason
has to make certain assumptions and has to trust in the reasonableness
of the real – as indeed Kant himself acknowledged. Faith has continuously
to think through the coherence of its own intuitions in a process that
often modifies those intuitions themselves. So if critical faith has
to become a more reflective mode of feeling, then reason has always
to some degree to feel its ways forward. What reason at first seeks
to know, it already knows obscurely, as Plato taught in the Meno
– which is to say that it feels it: Plato says through the reach of
eros.
The mediating role of feeling
gives the lie to the Habermasian idea that one requires a content-neutral
formal framework in order that arguments between apparently incommensurable
positions may take place. For all arguments short of tautology have
to assume an area of given agreement in a merely ad hoc
fashion, and to win an argument usually means (following Socrates) that
one shows someone that something he imagines he thinks contradicts something
which he thinks more habitually and fundamentally. Outside a horizon
of shared faith no arguments would get off the ground and shared faith
means something like ‘common feeling’.
4. From Kant to Hume: the
Alternative Mediation of Feeling
The Kantian agnostic notion
of public space is feeling-neutral, yet this is not the only ‘enlightened’
model to hand. Both the Scottish and the Italian Enlightenments saw
the public sphere as primarily one of ‘sympathy’. Often this just
meant imaginative projection or animal instinct and this predominantly
Stoic perspective tended to neglect questions of teleology or of shared
‘ends’ and shared attitudes as to substantive human goods. Such
a pluralism of emotion would seem to suggest that the play of sympathy
still requires a formal regulation, or else publicly-relevant sympathy
must be restricted to a utilitarian concern for the maximisation of
sensory pleasure and the diminution of sensory pain. For this reason
the lingering Roman cast of much 18th C ethical thought inevitably
drifted towards subjective rights in one direction and towards utilitarianism
in the other. But where this is the case, then ‘the feeling of sympathy’
provides no real alternative to formalist neutrality save in terms of
a crudely materialist reduction that would simply deny the pertinence
of all faith-commitments, of whatever kind.
Here, though, one can argue
that David Hume was an exception, and that the centrality of sympathy
in his thought is somewhat guarded against a displacement in primacy
by subjective right and egoistic happiness. The key to this difference
is a certain marrying of sympathy with teleology. For in the case
of Hume, in the long-term wake of Benjamin Whichcote through the Earl
of Shaftesbury, ‘sympathy’ at times seems to be a self-grounding
end in itself, and the sympathetic links between people to be something
that reason cannot really grasp. While we are to ‘sympathise’ with
public ‘utility’, the ‘public’ is itself only composed through
the reciprocal bonds of sympathy, which are irreducible to any mere
‘original instincts of the human mind’, or, in other words, any
projected egoism. Hence Hume’s human ‘sympathy’ remains
(extraordinarily enough) a kind of ‘occult’ sympathy, in continuity
with the inscrutable binding powers within nature: ‘the coherence
and apparent sympathy in all the parts of this world’. (By historical
derivation ‘sympathy’ in Platonic, Stoic and Hermetic thought meant
the secret power that binds together the cosmos, the body and human
society.)
One can link this with the
entire nature of Hume’s philosophy and suggest that our current situation
is ‘Humean’ and not Kantian, both in intellectual and sociological
terms. But in order to make this claim, and fully to show how sympathy
as irreducible goal is consonant with Hume’s entire philosophy, one
must briefly sketch out a revisionist account of the nature of this
philosophy, which rescues it from the usual empiricist, egocentric and
materialistic constructs.
Intellectually-speaking, Hume,
unlike Kant, attempted a full-blooded ‘experimentalist’ approach
to human nature and the human mind. This meant that he was prepared
to account for human understanding in terms of pre-human natural processes.
At the same time, he endeavoured to think a nominalist ontology, with
which much of modern science had long been linked, through to its very
limits.
It might be thought that Hume’s
naturalism is in natural harmony with his nominalism. However,
that turns out not to be the case, For in order to explain human
nature scientifically he must do so in terms of ‘atomic’ individual
substances and efficient causality. Yet Hume shows that nominalism is
as fatal for individual substance as it is for universals and real relations;
and for efficient as it is for formal, teleological and material cause.
In this way he turns Ockham’s minimising rationalist instrument against
Aristotle against even Ockham’s legacy itself. Hence he says that
there are, rationally speaking, only bundles of qualities and no ‘substance’,
and that any inherent ‘link’ between cause and effect is just as
occult and merely nominal as scholastic ideas of specific form, which
had frequently been derided as obscurely tautologous (a tree is a tree
because it has the form of a tree etc) ever since the 17th
C.
Given this circumstance, Hume has been read in three different ways:
For this third and highly revisionary
perspective it is as if he knocked over all the furniture inside the
Western intellectual house and then exited into the sunlight through
a front door marked ‘reason’ with a triumphantly complacent sceptical
smirk on his face... but then, when no one was looking, sneaked round
to the back where the garden lay in shadows, and was conducted by a
Jacobite servant through a backdoor marked ‘feeling’ and then proceeded
to put back in place at least some of the furniture he had earlier abused...
In fact, on this view, Hume rescues modern scientific rationality only
through linking it once more (albeit obscurely) to a traditional metaphysic
by ascribing a new, ontologically-disclosive role to ‘feeling’.
The first two views assume
that Hume was only a sceptical rationalist. The third claims that he
advanced beyond scepticism in the name of feeling and the view that
feeling not reason (reason being but a variant of feeling) is what
truly reveals to us the real. We require politically this irreducibility
of feeling if we are not once more to surrender to either a formalism
of reason or a reductionism of the senses – neither of which will
be hospitable to the presence of religious, or even substantively ideal
reasonings within the public realm.
Any truly attentive reading
of Hume suggests strongly that the third reading is the correct one.
The positivist reading is false because Hume is clear that even constant
conjuncture is something ineffably experienced and established according
to habitual imagination and not something rationally known. This mode
of empirical connection is for him in the end extra-rational. It is
emotionally sensed and not merely ‘imagined’, precisely because
the imagination performs a mysterious work in excess of rational probability
by assuming that an absolutely novel instance will fall into the same
‘historical’ sequence of cause and effect as instances have been
taken to so fall in the past: thus we ‘feel’ the link of cause and
effect and do not merely ‘speculate’ that what is constantly conjoined
might be in some way connected.
It is of course this sense
of a ‘connection’ that Kant elaborated into a rational a priori,
and yet the Kantian rendering of Hume is also false, because there is
simply no warrant to suppose that the biases of our mind are anything
other than natural, or that the phenomena we know are not the things
themselves – as they explicitly are for Hume. ‘Correlationism’
in Kant between rational category and sensory information remains a
mode of pre-established harmony and the unsophisticated core of
Kant’s (astonishing) surface sophistication is that it is only
his own variant on a speculative monadology that contradictorily permits
the ‘banishing’ of speculation. This is because one requires the
idea of a noumenal (monadically spiritual) realm in order first to be
able to declare that phenomena do not disclose noumena (‘things in
themsleves’), and secondly to be able to suppose that the human spirit,
as noumenally self-determining beyond the sphere of natural causality,
can stand outside and so perceive the ‘bounds’ of the phenomenal
and the categories supposed to apply to it.
Hume, by contrast, never denies
the full ontological (‘noumenal’ as well as ‘phenomenal’) reality
of causation, substance, personal identity or the soul: he doubts them
all, but in the end finds a new way to affirm them. In a Baconian
tradition he sees knowledge as to do with experience and making, but
insists (in a Socratic-Platonic lineage as he indicates) that what we
most experience and make is ourselves. Even though he takes it that
we are but part of a chain of natural causation, he says that the best
clue to the nature of the latter lies within own self-experience. But
within ourselves the experience of own consecutive causal action is
a matter of feeling, habit and imagination. One might say that ‘we
are led according to a consistent pattern to make ourselves up’.
In one place in the Treatise
Hume indicates quite clearly that we have to assume that causality in
nature is something analogous to this human process: ‘I do not ascribe
to the will that unintelligible necessity which is suppos’d to lie
in matter. But I ascribe to matter, that intelligible quality, call
it necessity or not, which the most rigorous orthodoxy must or does
allow to belong to the will. I change nothing, therefore, in the receiv’d
systems with regard to the will, but only with regard to material objects’.
In other words, Hume insists in an ‘intellectualist’ manner that
the will never exercises pure ‘free choice’ but is always in some
fashion ‘compelled’. Yet this cannot mean that he reduces the will
to determination by efficient causality, because he has already deconstructed
the latter. So even though he is arguing for a naturalistic account
of willing, it is still in terms of our experience of willing that we
must try to decipher causality and not vice-versa. Therefore he is a
revisionist not with respect to orthodox psychology, but with
respect to the philosophy of nature: in nature herself there must reside
something analogous to ‘will’. It follows that the primacy of feeling
in Hume entails also a species of vitalism, as the Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion in several places indicate.
This therefore reverses not
only his scepticism as regards causation but also as regards constitutive
relation. Reason can only make sense of individual items that are shifting
and unstable but utterly isolated, and in no way intrinsically connected
with anything else. The same must be true, rationally speaking, of our
‘impressions’; yet we ‘feel’ certain unshakeable links between
them in various ways. The feeling of association that sustains the link
between cause and effect in our experience of thoughts then leads to
a legitimate projection of intrinsic association also into the world
of things, since we are otherwise unable to make sense of our experience
of causality and the way in which its constantly conjoined elements
seem to involve an emotive coherence that is in excess of rational linkage,
as already explained. Hence while the denial of internal relation lies
at the heart of Hume’s thought insofar as it is a merely rational
empiricism, a certain ‘internal’ (or better, ‘constitutive’)
relation returns within his thought insofar as it is an extra-sceptical
empiricism of feeling that even points us back towards a metaphysical
realism in the broad sense of affirming a structure to objective reality
that is independent of our perceptions of that reality. Significant
in this respect is the fact that Hume declares that the crucial difference
between mere fictions, apparitions, dreams and reality is nothing other
than the strength of feeling we have in the face of the real, despite
the fact that every experience of the real is only conveyed by a series
of impressions that we imaginatively
put together. It is as if Hume is saying that reality is simply a very
convincing and continuous story that frames all the other stories because
we feel that it does so with an unshakeable vividness. A story that
we have to take to be true, like Vico’s vera narratio.
Hume, then, is saying that
all thought is feeling (and reason is tempered feeling); that we must
trust at least some of our most constant feelings and that there
may be something ‘like’ feeling already in pre-human nature. (This
concurs with the fact that he affirms and does not at all deny ‘design’
in nature, while seeing this as far more immanent that did the Paleyite
approach). Clearly Hume parted company with rationalism by empirically
observing that reflection cannot seriously break with habit, and that
even the most basic assumed stabilities (substance, the self, causation)
depend upon dispositional consistencies and not upon sheer intuited
‘givenness’. But he also began
to break with empiricism by allowing (albeit in a highly reserved fashion)
that, in being slaves to habit, human beings must acknowledge the workings
of a natural power constituted through time that exceeds
our capacity to observe it. This is why Jacobi argued that Hume was
effectively showing that all reason requires faith and why Maine de
Biran and then Félix Ravaisson developed Humean insights regarding
causality and potency in a more specifically vitalist direction which
eventually led variously to Bergson and Blondel. Nature is a matter
of sedimented habits and not laws: on this assumption it became possible
for Ravaisson to reconcile Hume with Aristotle and restore a ‘classical’
metaphysics in terms of the view that all reality is a matter of mutually
affective (passive and active) response, in which habit is both
degeneration (as identical repetition) and elevation (as non-identical
repetition). Ravaisson (who was close to Schelling in certain respects)
in effect brought Jacobi and Biran’s Humeanism together. He did so
by suggesting that one can only explain how habit is fundamental even
though it must be established, or why there is ‘a habit of contracting
habits’, if we invoke theological notions of grace within cosmology
itself. This is because it is theology
that, in terms of grace, thinks the paradox of ‘a habit at the origin’.
Thus for Aquinas grace was a ‘supernaturally infused habit’ or
aliquod habituale donum (ST I.II Q. 109, a. 9 resp; 110 a. 2 resp)
and he subverted Aristotle by proclaiming that our only uncontaminated
good -- which is not just charity, but also perfectly authentic justice
and prudence -- involves, under grace, the seeming impossibility of
a habit that can ‘suddenly’ begin and as suddenly be lost. Ravaisson,
deploys this model to conclude that, if all temporal, evolutionary being
is habitual, then its deepest character must be that of ‘grace’
which implies for him at once both ‘gift’ and ‘beauty’.
With respect to Aristotelian
metaphysics, there are certain indications in Hume that one can, after
all, ‘feel’ the operation of formal and final as well as of efficient
causality. This is a logical development of his view that efficiency
has to do with a repeated pattern. For if there is a pattern, then there
is a substantively constituting form and if there is a groundless passion
then it must at least ‘presume’ a teleological direction in order
for it to be operative. Indeed, since it is our sympathies that would
attune us to natural reality, and since the teleological establishment
of the community of sympathy is irreducible to interest, instinct or
projected egoism, then it would appear that (as Gilles Deleuze argued
in 1952) Hume thought that nature teleologically fulfilled itself in
the human civitas.
Moreover, Hume effectively
re-establishes ‘substance’ in terms of the view that infinite divisibility
is not really thinkable for the feeling intellect, and therefore should
not be taken as real. There is no endorsement of an atomism here, much
less any exaltation of ‘difference’, as Deleuze at times argues,
since we only think at all and only make sense of the world in terms
of constitutive relations, despite the fact that the cold emotion of
an abstracted pure reason must conclude to a strict nominalism that
recognises relations only of an accidental, external kind. Hume
indicates, rather like Aristotle, how in any genus,
in order for it to be a genus, we have to suppose ultimate stable
constituents – as, for example, geometry must
presuppose indivisible points and lines, even though this indivisibility
is not rationally thinkable and must even be rationally negated.
Within the terms of this genuinely
Humean perspective (properly developed in terms of a Jacobian-Biranian
hybrid) one can see how ‘feeling’ operates as the crucial third
term in two respects. First (as Bergson saw), between matter in motion
and mind that experiences ‘meanings’. It is not that mind ‘represents’
an external world; it is rather that natural habits in us turn reflective,
more intense and more adaptable. In a footnote on the second page of
the Treatise, Hume actually rejects
Lockean ‘ideas’ and his favoured term ‘impression’ for patterned
or structured cognitive content is initially agnostic about the sufficient
origin of these impressions. They are not
sense impressions nor representations, even though they are assumed
to be in part of sensory derivation: they are rather more like ‘phenomena’
in Husserl’s sense though without his subjectivism, since they are
not sharply distinguished from external ‘objects’. (Indeed it was
the influence of Hume which allowed Husserl to break with neo-Kantianism).
In this context, Jerry Fodor’s
neo-positivist use of Hume to support a ‘representationalism’ of
the brain is completely erroneous and shamelessly deploys only the first
part of the Treatise. For Hume is not
a sceptic about metaphysics and a dogmatician about morals. Instead,
he is a sceptic concerning reason in both domains, but a trusting proponent
of feeling and ‘sympathy’ in both domains also. Sympathy retains
for him both Stoic and Platonic connotations and we fail to note that
he was a self-declared ‘academic sceptic’ like Cicero – this means
a sceptic of the Platonic school.
A kind of incredibly apophatic Platonist one might almost say. Hence
in his account of philosophies which is clearly in order of merit,
Hume put scepticism at the top followed by Platonism and then Stoicism
with Epicureanism at the bottom. Like Vico and Doria in Naples, he incorporated
elements of Hobbes and so of Epicurus, but finally rejects this mode
of materialism as ‘uncivil’ – as too linked with a selfish individualism.
This academic scepticism has
its political equivalent in his ‘speculative Toryism’ and support
for the ancient if not the modern House of Stuart. Hume thought that
human society only exists through the ability of monarchic or aristocratic
families to combine particular with general sympathy – otherwise the
range of human sympathy is too restricted to accommodate justice. Hence
he considers, unlike Locke, Rousseau or Kant, that the core of political
society is a matter of substantive feeling – no mere formality could
ever at bottom move human beings to collective action. It follows that
a Humean repose to Habermas would include the point that political order
depends always less on any formal procedure than on a ‘political class’
however constituted or to whatever degree dispersed – that is, a class
of people able to link their personal destinies with the destiny of
the whole of their society: local, national or global.
For Hume’s rejection of contract
theory entails the view that any merely procedural set of norms, such
as Habermas’s protocols of free communication, and tacit aiming towards
publicly recognisable truth, provides no basis on which the necessary
content of such communication and truth-proposing can arise. Equally,
it provides no guarantee that human beings, normally bound within local
circles of prejudice, will in fact embrace such protocols. To mend these
lacunae, from a Humean perspective, one must invoke sympathy twice
over. First, a shared sympathetic horizon must arise, whose substantive
content will alone provide an adequate framework of binding social norms,
even though it cannot be established through the formal rules of communicative
action. Secondly, such a horizon can only emerge if a group of people
(however small or large) are able imaginatively to extend their immediate
sympathies towards a much larger social group.
In this way Hume -- in a no
doubt over-Stoicised fashion -- still retained an antique and ‘aristocratic’
virtue - perspective upon the political which Kant abandoned.
Feeling is in the second place
a middle term between reason and faith. Hume the defender of Church
establishment took it that the unity of interest between monarch and
people has to have sacred sanction if people are really to feel its
force. Likewise, in his ethics, the comparison of promise as fiction
to transubstantiation as fiction (he actually says that the latter is
a more rational notion, as less ‘warped’ by the exigencies
of perpetual public interest) is not meant merely sceptically. Rather,
by carrying the sceptical critique of religion in a proto-Nietzschean
fashion through also to ethics and to aspects of our belief in cause
and substantial unity, Hume is at once chastening our all-too human
assumptions and yet at the same time indicating how religion as ‘natural’
is in continuity with the rest of human natural and cultural existence.
It secures our sense of the diversity, unity, order and mystery of life
in terms of the polytheistic, the monotheistic, the extra-humanly designed
and the apophatic – all of which aspects of religiosity Hume explicitly
affirms.
5. Feeling Against Fanaticism
It follows from the above that
the Humean view that what binds us together is shared sympathy cannot
possibly make any easy discriminations (à la Habermas) between
what belongs to the realm of reason and what belongs to the realm of
faith. For just as, in some sense, political society at its core must
always be monarchic/aristocratic, so, also, religion must always be
established: in Europe we disallow public bloody sacrifice and we tend
to ban Scientological offers of high cost chemical salvation not simply
because we are ‘enlightened’, but because at bottom our mode of
‘enlightenment’ still retains a Christian colouring.
If the risk then seems to appear
that fanaticism could win through the democratic process if the latter
is not ‘transcendentally’ bound to the formal use of reason, then
one needs to reflect further. First, how could one ever legislate for
this without in reality suppressing freedom of speech, and forever excluding
those perfectly rational voices who do not accept the Kantian terms
of settlement? Although Habermas talks in the voice of dry reason, he
actually puts forwards the outrageously provincial view that the basis
for global human association forthwith must be universal acceptance
of the Kantian critique of metaphysics! Quite apart from the intuitively
unjust character of this proposal, how does it make pragmatic sense
of the fact that Habermas can enjoy a respectful conversation with Joseph
Ratzinger, even though the latter (unrepententedly wedded to a pre-Kantian
metaphysical synthesis of faith and reason) does not accept the only
basis upon which, according to Habermas, they can be having a proper
conversation.
Secondly, and more crucially,
I have already pointed out how formalism gives substantive claims the
licence to be unreasonable and unaccountable, precisely because something
substantial always rules in the end. In this way Habermas encourages
rather than guards against a dangerous positivity. Faith placed behind
an unpassable sublime barrier is encouraged to be dangerous faith –
as much to be fanaticism as to be a Wittgensteinian fideism or an Iris
Murdoch-style agnosticism, and for just the same reason, which is that
its claims have been declared to be utterly ineffable from the point
of view of public, philosophical reason.
Habermas indeed allows that
religious claims can be ‘translated’ into public terms, but few
religious people will accept the adequacy of such translation, since
it leaves the rational aspect of specifically religious content redundant
and suggests that faith makes no difference at all to the shape of genuine
human action. (It is of course no accident that one exception here might
be certain currents of German Lutheranism which reduce the religious
sense to an inner feeling of assurance of extrinsic justification.)
However, if religious people are not encouraged to explicate their own
specific faith-based logic in the public domain, then their sense that
their faith makes ‘all the difference’ may take on a virulently
fideistic and fundamentalist form.
Moreover, if ‘translation’
means merely into the terms of the norms governing fair
communicative discourse, this translation must always mean the loss
of substantive ‘ethical’ content as well as of religiosity. And
it remains patronising to both religious and
secular people to say that the only humanly ‘shareable’ aspect
of religious truths must be a non-religious one – as if, for example,
an agnostic could have no sense whatsoever of the specific mode
of solidarity generated by the eucharist and the idea of ‘the body
of Christ. It is simply not the case that people of other faiths
or of none can only embrace the insights of, say, Judaism, in a purely
non-religious guise. This disallows the fact that they might well allow
certain intimations of transcendence to be involved in their act of
partial appropriation.
For to define reason quite
apart from faith is to place it also quite apart from feeling, since
it can be convincingly argued after Hume that reason, as much as faith,
arises only as a specific variant upon the experience of feeling which
is always to do with reciprocal recognition of an ‘other’.
If this is the case, then reason partakes of the obscurity as well as
the clarity that is always involved in any experience of emotion. The
latter presents itself as a horizon to be explored and as something
which has to be reflexively-sifted in terms of how far it is to be trusted.
Reason cannot therefore escape being situated within a prospective horizon
nor be exempted from the requirements of trust and risk that require
a certain exercise of faith, as Jacobi argued. Because discursiveness
is always inextricably bound up with emotions and is not austerely trapped
within a series of apprehensible procedural criteria (Habermas cleaves
all too closely to Weber here) there can be partial
degrees of assent as to religious perspectives: for example, in terms
of the feeling that ‘the good’ is rather more than a mere human
fiction. Many people both feel and articulate a sense inherited from
both Platonic and Biblical tradition that ‘goodness’ is a reality
not reducible to the natural and is yet not simply another ‘thing’
in the way that a stone or a building is a thing. At the same time they
draw back (inconsistently or otherwise) from the full affirmation of
a transcendent or supernatural realm.
Of course the kind of Humean
perspective which I am suggesting nonetheless can favour naturalism
as much as it can favour religion. The habituated and the vital might
be sheerly immanent, somehow not requiring grace. This means that, if
transcendentalism is both false and dangerous, that we must now accept
that the public space is one of a clash of rival metaphysics and not
one of polite agnostic neutrality and humanism undergirded by transcendental
philosophy. We live now in the era of Dawkins versus Ratzinger, not
of agnostics and clerics equally savouring the novels of Iris Murdoch,
nor of a continued Teutonic compromise (ever since Kant and Hegel) between
the legacy of the French Revolution and the spirit of Christianity.
However, this does not condemn
us to a future of unmediated violence, and I have already offered arguments
as to why the return of metaphysics can temper violence on the side
of religion, since it requires the world-views of faith also to express
themselves as world-views of reason – a possibility that Habermas
dangerously disallows. But the reason for optimism is
also because the shared horizon of feeling, with its inherent fluidity
permits of many substantive shared outlooks and actually fosters
less conflict than a situation where we will endlessly debate (as
in the history of the United States) whether formal barriers between
faith and reason have been transgressed or not. In the face of the arrival
in the West of Islam we now see far more clearly how our shared modern
Western ethos is both an extension of a Christian ethos besides being
a radical departure from it. The horror of Muslim critics of the West
is often a horror at both these aspects. Thus we cannot have a genuine
debate with Islam unless we allow the porosity of faith and reason and
try to assess the ways in which Islamic faith and reason both is and
is not compatible with Western faith and reason or ways in which it
might become more so.
6. The Elevation of the
Natural
To these sociological considerations
one can add psychological ones. Here also I would argue that Habermas’s
strictures on both naturalism and metaphysics are somewhat misplaced
and that both can offer a better barrier against terror than the humanistic
critical philosophy which he persists in promoting.
In certain ways (going completely
counter to Habermas and his Munich Jesuit interlocutors) naturalism
is less problematic for religion than is transcendentalism. For the
a priori categories of understanding can in principle be themselves
psychologised with the advance of brain science – especially if they
have been already pragmatised, as by Rawls or Habermas. The norms
of communicative action can thereby be reduced to evolutionary purposiveness.
All that would then hold out against such reduction is the issue of
freedom: the freedom of human discourse to construct the language that
denies even the force of the evidence that the human person is pre-determined;
the freedom of the ‘last experimenter’ upon the human brain whose
own decision to experiment can never be neurologically explained without
an infinite series of experiments being carried out. These arguments
defending freedom are valid, but all they defend is a freedom to experiment
or a bare freedom to refuse the force of the evidence (the freedom of
the crank which nonetheless oddly auto-validates his crankiness) without
any practical upshot that would incarnate freedom itself as something
that makes a real difference in the ‘real’ realm of matter in motion.
Therefore no truly substantive
freedom, linked to the reality of a wide range of human emotional and
ethical categories is here established. This is because rationalism,
of which transcendentalism is a mode, is unable to attribute any teleology
to the will other than bare self-assertion. No choosing, outside the
range of formal reason, can be defined by that reason as anything other
than mere subjective predilection. Thus in relation to neural science
all it can do is indicate a bare and contentless
transcendence of the brain by a supposed human mind.
As to both formal and instrumental
reasons themselves, precisely because they can be publicly and exhaustively
expressed in linguistic structures, they are somewhat subject to a reductionist
view as regards consciousness because we could imagine all instrumental
and co-operative uses of reason as taking place unconsciously. It is
at this point that the quasi-transcendental status of governing pragmatic
norms (like Habermas’s rules for a perfect speech community,
or Rawls’s ‘neutral’ principles of justice derived from the supposition
of the ‘veil of ignorance’) slide back towards mere empirical generalisation,
in such a way that they no longer protect the dignity of human freedom
as such, and become instead mere utilitarian accounts of how to coordinate
the clash of inevitably differing animal perspectives. Hence within
the bounds of mere rationalism one can propose, with more or less plausibility,
that consciousness is mere epiphenomenon or even, in some sense,
illusion.
If the quasi-spiritualism of the transcendental approach is subject to such reduction, then conversely it is possible for naturalism to undergo a perfectly coherent elevation.
For if we acknowledge ‘feelings’
in Hume’s sense as always accompanying ‘impressions’ and supplying
them with their relative weight and significance, then we do not have
any ‘bare consciousness’ with which one could possibly dispense,
after the fashion of a camera does not need to be conscious in order
to take a picture. When emotion is brought into consideration then consciousness
is always rather a ‘modification of consciousness’ in such a way
that its qualia belong to a ‘language’ (external as well
as internal) that is entirely incommensurable with the discourse of
firing neurons. Even the bare experience of consciousness is thus incommensurable,
but in the case of feelings one has more than an irreducible spectator,
but rather an entirely irreducible realm of ‘actors’ who are emotionally-inflected
and active states of mind which find expression in the evaluative register
of human discourse.
So far was Hume from pointing
in the direction of the reduction of mind to brain that he actually
says that purely physical explanations of feelings should only
be invoked when these feelings are pathological. This means that he
sustained not only the soul, but also a certain teleology of the soul.
Even though he could give no rational defence of subjective unity, his
affirmation of this inexplicable unity in terms of feeling involves
far more of a narrative and teleological register than the Cartesian
or the Kantian model of self-awareness. Indeed for Hume we make ourselves
up as fictions, but since he denies the reality of any purely self-sustained
will, it follows that for him we are obscurely compelled within
our very own fictionalizing towards certain ends, such that we are also
‘made up’ by forces not under our command. Nor is freedom
here quite denied, because will is for Hume but a more intense manifestation
of the adaptability of natural habit which at bottom he appears to see
as a kind of spontaneity.
Feelings, for Hume, are in
some sense, and to a crucial degree, trustworthy: we can distill true
from false feeling through long processes of experience, comparison,
interacting and rational analysis --- which is yet itself for Hume but
a further feeling about feeling, since he sees ideas as merely reflectively-doubled
impressions, often intensifying their crucially accompanying emotions,
even though they are fainter than their originals in their impressionistic
character. And as trustworthy, we can say, they are therefore
not reducible to brain-processes. But this does not mean that they are
‘yet more interior’ than the brain itself. To the contrary, since
feelings are for Hume prior to identity – identity being a kind of
patterning of feelings – they at first impinge from ‘without’,
or rather they impinge as our insertion within the very stream of passing
reality.
In this way Hume concurs in
advance with the views of modern philosophers who claim that we think
with our bodies and even our whole natural and social environment rather
than with our brains alone. For to imagine, with Fodor, that we think
only with our brains, is to remain the victim of the Lockean ‘mirror
of nature’. It is to think of the brain as a repository of representing
ideas or ‘evidences’ of things, just as Locke thought of the mind
as ‘taking pictures’ of things rather in the way that the eye reflects
visible realities. This is oddly to ‘anthropomorphise’ the brain
which is only a physical organ! All the brain does is encode signals
from the senses and the body in neurological connections. Hence the
reason why researchers discover that there is never any perfectly predictable
one-to-one correlation between thoughts and observably firing neurons,
and that the networks of neurons seem spontaneously to re-order themselves
in parallel to thoughts, is that what goes on in the brain is not
the only, nor even the prime material instantiation of thinking.
For if thoughts as feelings and reflected feelings are in any sense
real, the brain can only be the occasion
for the arising of these things which we should more properly say are
caused by our entire insertion in our environment and our active reception
of this environment -- just as every physical reality constitutes
a ‘prehensive’ active reception of its temporal antecedents and
spatial surroundings. Because neither the brain nor the mind primarily
‘mirrors’, we can see how the crucial aspect of thought is to do
with ‘feeling’ other realities in such a way that one is both responding
to them and asserting oneself in relation to them – in terms of a
rather more ecstatically-inflected version of Spinoza’s Conatus.
Thought is reciprocal – it establishes a real relation, precisely
because it is a species of feeling.
And far from this being an
‘irrational’ conclusion, it is in fact what alone saves metaphysical
realism and a realist basis for science. For in terms of pure reason
it is impossible, as Hume saw, to understand why there are regular links
within nature, and hence one will tend to become sceptical about their
reality. Moreover, the reduction of the mind to brain-processes must
invite scepticism as to whether the brain truly mirrors anything objective
and scepticism as to the very existence of reason itself or the rationality
of reality, once reason has been so denatured that one no longer considers
it to be a spiritual category.
It is perfectly possible and
indeed more logical for naturalism to entertain the view that we do
not think merely with our brains but also with our bodies and with our
environment. However, if consciousness somehow ‘reaches out to things’
in this rather Aristotelian way, then does one not have to speak of
some sort of ‘spiritual exchange’ between action and response taking
place, however rooted this may be in materiality? Is not me thinking
the tree as the tree where the tree is, also me being really moved by
the tree in an ontological dimension of emotion in which the tree is
situated alongside myself? Would not this be the precondition of the
idea that meaning is ‘out there’ in things as John McDowell has
half-suggested? Otherwise one would have to espouse the ‘direct realism’of
the Francisan Peter John Olivi as revived by Thomas Reid: but as explicitly
with Reid, this involves a dubious mode of correlationism that necessitates
some sort of pre-established harmony. Actually Hume is curiously
nearer to Aristotle, as Ravaisson eventually (in effect ) realised:
his ‘feelings’ which seem to migrate from things in order to shape
‘selves’ can, not implausibly, be seen to play in a more affective
mode the rational role of Aristotelian species which is abstracted from
the hylomorphic compound to become pure form within human cognition.
This defence of the ‘outwardness’
of cognition and meaning in terms of the priority of feeling can also
readily concur with the advocacy of panpsychism by various recent analytic
philosophers. If other things besides ourselves belong within the space
of meaning, then, in order to avoid idealism, this will be because something
already approximating to mutual feeling (without necessarily being fully
conscious as we experience consciousness) exists within the physical
world and is indeed its most primary ontological characteristic –
responsible for shaping the sedimented habits that then constitute the
regular shape of the universe, and with which human ‘culture’ is
in essential continuity. This ‘culture’ is
our nature, because the more variegated and yet steadier character of
human habit is only possible through an equally heightened consistency
of habit that is both the manifestation of, and the condition of possibility
for, the exercise of ‘free will’. Both the variety and the consistency
are but an intensification of the very nature of habit that one can
take to be the heart of the natural order. In the light of these
considerations one can see how the clash of naturalistic and religious
visions is a clash that is amply capable of mediation.
For the fact is that a certain Enlightenment (and indeed the
most sophisticated and crucial one; the one that engendered political
economy) - however ultimately unsatisfactory it may be from a Christian
perspective - was already concerned to restore that supra-political
space which had been ‘the Church’ under the new name of ‘civil
society’. And its goal of binding together in ‘sympathy’ was at
least a distorted echo of the earlier binding-together in charity (eschewing
any merely unilateral gesture). Once one has grasped this double point
one can then see that Habermas’s alternative between the post-metaphysical
and the metaphysical, and between the modern secular and the postmodern
‘freely theocratic’, is not an exclusive one after all, even for
genuinely modern times.
For the idea of a ‘community
of feeling’, extended from society to nature and back to society,
is both a Christian and a post-Christian one. Indeed it is our most
crucial European legacy - that lies in essential continuity with the
trajectory of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, rather than the
deviant path of Scotus, Luther and Kant - which we must now both defend
and elaborate.
Bibliography and End – Notes
Jurgen Habermas et al, An Awareness of what is missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
Habermas, ‘A Reply’, in An Awareness of What is Missing, 74.
Habermas, ‘An awareness of what is missing’ in An Awareness of What is Missing, 15-23.
See for all this Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: a Guide for the Perplexed (London: T.and T. Clark, 2010).
Habermas, ‘An awareness of what is missing’, 22-3. For an earlier debate between Habermas and Ratzinger, see The Dialectics of Secularisation: On Reason and Religion (San Franscisco: Ignatius, 2006).
Honnefelder’s complex genealogy is most accessible in his short book based on lectures given in Paris, La métaphysique comme sicnece transcendentale (Paris: PUF, 2002).
See John Milbank, ‘The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’ in Radical Orthodoxy: a New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 21-37 and John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
Michael Reder, ‘How can Faith andReason be distinguished? Remarks on Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion’ in Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing, 36-50.
For an authentic reading of Cusa not through Idealist lenses, se Johannes Hoff, Kontingenz, Berührung, Über schreitung: zur philosophocihen Propädeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues (FReiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 2007).
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: CUP, 1988)
See John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 167, n.20.
Jurgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
For my own understanding of Kant at this point see John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 1-25.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, (London: Continuum, 2009).
See Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 77-122. It is true, however, as Bruni and Zamagni argue, that the Scots lagged behind Neapolitans like Antonio Genovesi (who heard Vico lecture) who developed a ‘civil’ not a ‘political’ economy, such that the market lay fully inside civil society and therefore contract could still be a matter of mutual sympathy and one might (contra Adam Smith) care about the personal well-being of one’s butcher and he about yours. In either case these thinkers deployed Epicurean and Jansenist themes (from Boisguilbert) of how order can be distilled from human selfishness and evil (Smith’s ‘hidden hand’), but in either case also this was qualified by a humanist concern with disinterestedly binding sentiment and deliberate teleological orientation. However, the Neapolitans admittted the latter into the market in a way that the Scots failed to do. Thus Hume bequeathed to Smith too strong a division between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ justice, and because of the supposed limited reach of sympathy attributed too much to the liberal individualist contractualism of the latter. All the same, Hume’s invocation of the role of aristocratic identification of familial with general societal interests, his attribution of acceptance of private property to the force of inherited association, his ideas of emotional attachment to the artificial, plus his more general interweaving of the affective and the fictional in his account of cognition means that this division is arguably somewhat more qualified for him than it is for Smith. One should also mention here that Hume’s appeal to ‘utility’ was not as yet that of Bentham, but rather meant something more like the ‘convenient and fitting’, following the Horatian and Ciceronian coupling utile et dulce.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (Oxford: OUP 1978), III, XII, vi, p. 619 and pp. 618-621.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (New York: Hafner, 1948), XII, p. 86. See also VI, p. 42.
The idea of ‘cosmic sympathy’ associated with the notion of a universal ‘world-fire’, is thought by many commentators to have originated with the Stoic philosopher Posidonius of Rhodes. For a summary of the influence of the notion up to medieval times, see Paul Magdalino and Maria Mavroudi, The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, (London: La Pomme d’OR, 2008), Chapter Two.
We know that when he was in France Hume was regarded as a crypto-Jacobite and even occasionally crypto-Papist opponent of Voltaire’s ‘whiggish’ view of English history in favour of a defence of the Catholic deep past (including Thomas More) and the Stuart recent past ; that Catholic apologists sometimes returned the compliment of Hume’s covert deployment of the Catholic sceptics and finally that Hume’s political thought continued to inspire the thought of the traditionalists in France up to and beyond the French Revolution. This all casts serious doubt on Macintyre’s ascription to Hume of an ‘Anglicising subversion’. See Lawrence L. Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford: OUP, 1965) and Alasdair Macintyre, Whose Justice: Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988), 281-299. Macintyre’s reading of Hume is accurately criticised by Donald W. Livingston: see subsequent footnote. It may well be that Hume is in a certain fashion nearer to Aristotle than is Francis Hutcheson, whereas Macintyre has this the other way round. For Hume regards both sympathy and our sense of beauty as less reducible to egocentric pleasure than does his predecessor.
A variant of such a reading (which I can do little more than roughly sketch in this article) is upheld by the greatest living Hume scholar Donald W. Livingston, who has made the sadly rare attempt to read all of Hume’s works (including the historical ones) together in the round. In his two crucial studies of the Scottish philosopher, Livingston validly compare him to Vico, insofar as both thinkers point out, and draw back from the existential and political consequences of living according to pure reason and suggest that, by contrast, the emotions and the imagination may have an irreducible role in the discerning of truth. See Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: Chicago UP 1984) and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998).
This is why feeling tends to be always blended with the imagination in Hume. See Treatise of Human Nature, I, I, v pp. 12-13: ‘cohesion’ amongst ideas is a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural....’. Hume is not doing ‘epistemology’ but experimental science of mind which renders his perspective upon knowing both naturalistic and ontological. Just like ‘sympathy’, ‘attraction’ is to be found in nature as well as in the human mind. Because ‘cohesion’ is inscrutable for Hume, it is not the case that the ‘constant conjuncture’ of two objects causes us to engender the notion of cause and effect by virtue of probability, since this cannot apply to the absolutely new and singular instance. Rather we imagine a union of ideas according to an impulse which is a ‘principle of association’ or else ‘certain relations’ which are naturally given and cannot be comprehended, since they are the unknowable ground of all human comprehension. Jacobi was right to see that Hume undermined all ‘foundationalism’. See Treatise, I, III, vi-vii, pp. 90-98 and also xii, p. 134; we only ‘transfer the past to the future’ by ‘habit’ and it is habit which informs ‘the first impulse of the imagination’. Later Hume affirms that human reason is but heightened animal instinct and that our assumption of temporal consistency, although it is the very foundation of our ‘reason’ is the work of an instinctual power that thinks in excess of the rational evidence. This instinct is a ‘habit’ that is ‘nothing but one of the principles of nature and derives all its force from that origin’. (I, II, xvi, p. 179). It follows then that though the cause and effect relation is only something that we ‘make up’, that this very making up is the work of a natural causal power which is a kind of habitual flow, not a law-governed efficiency.
See John Milbank, The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 7-35.
I disagree with Edward Caird that Hume’s prime target is the imago dei in human beings. Caird bases this claim on the view that Hume attacks deductive reasoning as linked to notions of direct spiritual insight and the notion of reason as a divine spark. It is true that Hume adopts the model of Baconian inductive reason, but he also subverts it by (a) saying that the empirical knowledge of other things depends upon ‘Socratic’ self-knowledge and (b) saying that our self-experience is of fathomless processes. Therefore reason is not reduced to feeling; rather, reason as the instrument of nominalist reduction is humiliated and feeling gets elevated. In terms now of feeling the idea of insight as direct intuition is sustained and if anything extended. Moreover, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume is prepared equivalently to re-conceptualise God, following Plotinus, as supra-intellectual. See note 23 below and Edward Caird The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), 69-130.
Hume sees his relationship to Bacon as like that of Socrates to Thales: Treatise, Introduction, pp xvi-xvii.
Treatise, I, IV, v, p. 248: ‘motion.....is the cause of thought and perception’.
Treatise, II. III. ii, p. 410.
Dialogues, VI, p. 42. Hume’s alter ego Philo (as he surely is, by and large – and note the Platonic name!) is happy to entertain the notion that the world is like ‘an animal or organized body’ and seems ‘actuated with a like principle of life and motion’ which is a kind of world-soul.
See note 10 above.
I prefer the term ‘constitutive’ to the term ‘internal’ relation, because the former implies a relation that enters into the very substance of a thing (and is not therefore merely accidental and ‘external’) without implying that its relata can be logically deduced from the nature of the thing after the fashion of idealism. For if there is no element of external contingency in a relation then all relations are in the end internal to the one monad of all reality and relationality is after all abolished.
Treatise, Appendix, pp. 623-629; 629: ‘An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us’; I, III, viii pp.98-106; I, IV, ii, pp. 193-218.
Indeed Hume’s historicism is more thoroughgoing than Hegel or Marx’s because he denies that there is any reality beneath established habitual fiction – whether composed by nature or by humanity. In terms of human history there can therefore be no social order outside a continued allegiance to such fictions.
Dialogues, VI-VIII, pp. 42-56; XII, p. 94.
Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair well describe well this sequence regarding habit that passes from Cartesian rationalist scepticism through empiricist scepticism to conclude in affirmed vitalism. However, they fail to allow that the inklings of the third ‘ontological’ move are already there in Hume. See their ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans C.Carlisle and M.Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008, 7 and also their ‘Editor’s Commentary’, 111-112. They rightly say though that Hume already tried to explain association of ideas by habit and not vice versa, such that he was closer to Ravaisson than the latter realised. He underrated the degree to which, via Biran, he was developing a Humean lineage. See also Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 114-116. Toscano also denies that Hume begins to ontologise habit and sees him as concerned only with the observed ‘principle’ of habit and not with its ontogenesis. This reading though is contradicted by Livingston’s demonstration that Hume’s fundamental thinking is ‘historical’ or genetic in character, rather than merely psychological or proto-transcendentalist. Hume thinks that we can only ‘compare’ a present to a past sensation and on this basis establish ‘ideas’ because the past sensation only survives at all by always already being contained within the idea: in other words, because we remember it in ‘narrative connection’ with a present sensation. Although this is to historicise the content of habit and not habit as such, the refusal of the primacy of ‘presented’ association (as with nearly all non-Humean empiricisms) means that habit is self-referring and deliriously abyssal: habits which arise historically are only accounted for by the habit of habit in general. This implies the ultimacy of a genetic account and the constitution of human beings through habit rather than the idea that habits reside ‘inside us’. So however apophatic Hume is about ontogenesis, he still gestures towards it. See Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 91-105. Arguably Toscano misreads Deleuze when he affirms that there is no ‘geneticism’ in Hume: for Deleuze seems to line this up with psychologism and so an account of human genesis that would either be merely ‘internal’ or cultural in character and therefore not an ontogenesis. Since Deleuze clearly himself favours the latter and yet also identifies with Deleuze’s ‘empiricism’ (while refusing the usual psychological readings of Hume), one has to read his saying ‘Genesis must refer to the principles, it is merely the particular character of a principle’ to mean that there can be no ‘rationalistic’ genealogy (not even a Nietzschean one ought to be the implication) that would seek to ground the obscure ‘principles’ which constitute in Hume relations. However, these principles only act historically. An ontology of habit that goes ‘all the way down’ is also an abyssal historicism. See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP 1991). Hume’s ‘historicism’ (which is not constrained to any determined metanarrative as with Hegel or even Nietzsche) also casts a different light upon his distinction of fact from value. For if all thought is for him a matter of historically-constituted feeling, according to an unfathomable process (whose effects we can merely observe) then all thought is a kind of valuation, even though it still registers realities. (One can note here that for Hume, unlike Locke primary qualities are as subjective as secondary ones and yet both can still be taken to be in some sense extra-subjective also: Dialogues, I, IV, iv, 225-231. ) Thus factual discourse differs from evaluative discourse for Hume only in terms of a diversity of feeling. In the one case of the observation of facts we feel objective difference and distance, whereas in the case of ethical and aesthetic valuation we feel both a more intense connection and yet a greater uncertainty as to what in the object occasions in us the sentiment. Yet that this is a matter of objective relating of ourselves to ‘outness’ is not by Hume, as by later positivists, denied.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ‘David Hume on Faith’ 1787, 253-3a38 and Preface to the 1799 version, 537-590; Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, Des Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, TomeVII/ 1 and 2 ed. F.C.T. Moore (Paris: J.Vrin, 2001), 161-168; Influence de l’habitude sur le faculté de penser (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006). Maine de Biran deployed Hume’s scepticism against Locke and Condillac’s empiricist ‘way of ideas’ and followed Hume in the view that we only have an ‘internal’ clue to notions of cause and power as operating in nature. However, he attributed to Hume a complete scepticism as the existence of a mysterious ‘principle’ of force within us and explained this in terms of the neglect of the centrality of touch in favour of the centrality of vision in the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. (In contrast, of course, to Aristotle.) However, he is clear about the way in which Hume himself invites an ontologisation of habit: I would simply argue, along with Deleuze and others, that he underrated the beginning of this move in Hume himself. Biran, however, illustrates very well in Influence the logical sequence which I am advocating: 1. One tries to explain thinking in terms of motion; 2. we discover that the causality of motion cannot be thought; 3. Therefore the closest we get to understanding it is through our immediate experience of mental motion as habit; 4 In consequence, in order to avoid scepticism, we are speculatively justified in projecting habit onto nature as the pre-legal reality of causality and so in developing a vitalist ontology. In Influence Biran refuses any mere associationism or physic alism as inadequate to explain why sensation and action become ‘unconscious’ as habit and why the interruption of habitual sensing and acting is emotionally distressing. He rather accounts for this in terms of ‘a secret activity’ that belongs to ‘the principle of life’ and that results in a sort of sympathetic fusion or ‘equilibrium’ of a sensing organ with the object sensed. As I argue in this essay, the ontologisation of sympathy is also at times hinted at by Hume.
Ravaisson, Of Habit, 123, n . 6 and passim. For the necessity of grace however, he alludes not to Aquinas but to Fénélon. see also Milbank, ‘From the Mystery of Reason to the Priority of Habit’
Dialogues, VIII, pp. 54-55. Arguing against Cleanthes’ ‘extrinsicist’ notion of design, which was typical of theo-mechanistic physics, Philo notably says ‘It is vain......to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain know how an animal could subsist unless its parts were so adjusted? Do we not find that it immediately perishes whever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter, corrupting, tries some new form? It happens indeed that the parts of the world are so well adjusted that some regular form immediately lays claim to this corrupted matter; and if it were not so, could the world subsist?’ Earlier Philo has speculated that the world appears to us as if there were some kind of stabilising principle calming the work of an anarchic ‘actuating force’. Thus alongside a kind of élan vitale, Hume seems to argue for the notion of a formative power at work in each substantial thing that is in excess of materiality: ‘Let us contemplate the matter a little, and we shall see that this adjustment if attained by matter of a seeming stability in the forms, with a real and perpetual revolution or motion of parts, affords a plausible, if not a true, solution of the difficulty [ie the appearance of ‘design’ in nature]’. So against the barbarism of Newtonian theology (though in deliberate keeping with Newton’s admission of the working of unknown ‘active principles’) Hume, in a ‘neo-Renaissance’ fashion hints at a kind of vitalised Aristotelian ontology after all. In terms of reason indeed, as the Treatise argues, we cannot make sense of hylomorphism, yet we cannot really imagine the stability that we see (in nature) without this supposition: nature appears to have an occult attraction for certain patterns into which it typically falls. Likewise in Part VII (pp. 47-51) Philo invokes the finality at work in biological generation as a model for the whole world taken as a kind of ‘animal’ (Gaia as we might now say, following James Lovelock) against Cleanthes’ argument for an extrinsic finality. For more on final causality see XII, pp. 82, 84-86. While refusing the mere external imposition of design, Hume still affirms God as the ultimate designer on the basis of something like the view that, since reason belongs to nature, God must be eminently rational as well as eminently generative in the biological sense. He invokes both Malebranche and Plotinus in the course of a truly remarkable – and remarkably theologically orthodox -- refutation of an idolised God who is a mere infinitisation of human reasoning power: II, p.15; III, pp. 29-30. Hence for Hume, if, by virtue of naturalism one must see biological generation as governing thought, and against Cleanthes Philo says it would be more natural to think of the first principle as an unconscious animal than as a knowing God, by virtue of his scepticism he has to give a certain cautious epistemological primacy to knowing over generation, since knowing is (a) the generative process into which we have the most insight and (b) the one which, within our own experience most achieves a spontaneity of origination. So the most concession to naturalism that Hume’s scepticism will allow is not at all an Epicurean or even a Stoic immanentism, but rather an explicitly neoplatonic view that God lies absolutely as much beyond intellect as he does beyond matter, reinforced by Hume’s citation in the voice of Demea (whose mysticism Phil avowedly shares: Dialogues X, p. 67) of Malebranche’s view that God is just as much eminently matter as he is eminently mind. (One can also note here that in the doctrine of the Trinity, thought and generation absolutely coincide.) Thus Hume always affirms transcendence and never merely immanence, just as Philo defends against Cleanthes the (Thomistic) doctrine of the divine simplicity by denying that God entertains ‘plans’ separate from his own being (Dialogues IV, p. 32). It is partly for these reasons that one should also question the idea that Hume is abandoning the notion of the imago dei rather than redefining it (see note 12 above). His reported declaration to a French host that he had never met an atheist must be linked with his view in the Dialogues that everyone must naturally suppose that there is some sort of vital, driving force behind the entire universe and that we must assume that this is somewhat like the different processes found within the universe -- processes which also obscurely resemble each other. Both vertical and horizontal analogy are therefore affirmed by Hume. In this light he would appear to regard the ‘atheist’ more as a minimal theist who is extremely cautious about these analogies and thereby becomes indistinguishable from a very apophatic theologian. The theist, by contrast, insists more on the likeness, but he can only do so by faith (as Hume stresses) because feelings vary according to degrees of intensity that cannot be strictly measured. As Frédéric Brahami argues, Hume sees this instability of feeling as a far better way of explaining how human thought shifts and develops than that provided by the Lockean representationalist model, which cannot account for how the mind is so readily able to move from the presence of one image to that of another, nor why we habitually link diverse things beyond any scope of reason. One can then argue that Hume sees the dominance of analogy in theological discourse, with its undecidabilty between ‘atheism’ and ‘theism’ as an especially acute manifestation of the indeterminacy of feeling. Because we have at once to affirm and to deny the likeness of the intra-cosmic to the trans-cosmic we can never confidently know ‘just how like’ or ‘just how unlike’ the Creation is to the Creator. It may perhaps be this communicated circumstance which creates an hermeneutic undecidability for the reader as between Hume’s religious scepticism on the one hand and a both apophatic and fideistic piety on the other. See Frédéric Brahami, Le Travail du Scepticisme: Montaigne, Bayle, Hume (Paris: PUF, 2001), 167-234.
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 123-133.
Treatise, I, II, i-v, pp. 26-66.
Treatise, I, I, i, p. 2 footnote 1; I, III, x, p. 106. Edward Caird rightly insists on this point. See The Mind of God and the Works of Man, loc.cit.
Jerry Fodor, Hume Variations (Oxford: OUP 2003).
Besides Hume’s citing of Plotinus in the Dialogues, his use of the Platonic-Ciceronian dialogue form and his speaking through the mouth of ‘Philo’, one can cite his approving mention of the Origenist, Platonist, Freemason and Catholic covert, his fellow Scot, the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsey in a footnote to The Natural History of Religion. See Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford: OUP, 1993), The Natural History of Religion, Note 1, p.p. 190-193. Hume’s citation of Ramsey’s description of the immorality of a ‘positivist’, voluntarist theology has been taken as merely ironic. Yet this seems surely over-simplistic, because in the Dialogues Hume abundantly shows himself aware of how something like Ramsey’s Origenism could lay claim to being a far more ancient and authentic mode of religiosity. He became friends with Ramsey during his Paris sojourn.
David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1987), XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, ‘The Ecpicruean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, ‘The Sceptic’, pp. 138-180.
Although he breaks important new ground in his systematic comparison of the Edinburgh and Neapolitan Enlightenments, and specifically between Hume and Vico, John Robertson wrongly assimilates Vico to Hume’s supposedly more explicit Epicureanism, instead of assimilating Hume to Vico’s clearly more explicit Platonism. Even though Vico incorporates elements of the French Augustinian synthesis of Augustine with Epicurus (notably in his vision of feral fallen man), both his theology and his ontology are more Platonic-humanist than Jansenist or semi-Jansenist. See John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge: CUP 2005). And even though Hume can appear to take the opposite side to Vico in the great debate over Pierre Bayle’s question about a possible society of atheists, his grounding of the ethical in feeling and imagination tends to approximate it to the religious sense, which Hume also (like Vico) grounds in feeling and imagination. Moreover, most of his polemic is directed against the idea of any necessary connection between religion and ethical goodness -- the point being to discriminate between forms of religion, not to recommend a virtuous atheism. See David Hume, The Natural History of Religion,
Treatise, III, II, vii-x, pp. 534-567.
Essays, VII, VIII and XI, ‘Whether the British Government inclines more to absolute monarchy or to a republic’, ‘Of parties in general’ and ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, pp. 47-72
Treatise, III, II, v, pp. 524-525.
The Natural History of Religion, passim. Religion, for Hume, secures our sense of the diversity, unity, order and mystery of life in terms of the polytheistic, the monotheistic, the extra-humanly designed and the apophatic. He argues that the ancient gods were little more than modern Scottish fairies, and in either case he contends that the recognition of such preternatural beings may be a perfectly rational acknowledgement of hidden psychic forces within nature. Polytheism has the ethical value of sustaining both social tolerance and bravery, as we can more easily imitate the heroism of the gods than the ineffability of ‘God’. The order of the universe, however, demands monothesitic assent and morally speaking monotheism better sustains political unity. Yet pure monotheism, which is philosophical, is at variance with human capacities, and therefore must be qualified by the mediation of angels, daemons, saints and sacraments. These, in turn, when they overproliferate, become superstitiously absurd and this one gets an event like the Reformation. Not only does this idea of the flux and reflux of polytheism seem akin to Vico’s corso and ricorso between imagination and reason in human religious and social history, it also suggests a kind of Catholic or perhaps Episcopalian balance between the monotheistic and the polytheistic. Hume rejected both Papal superstitition as proceeding from an excess of melancholy, and Protestant enthusiasm as stemming from an excess of commercial success and material well-being. (Anticipating Weber here!) Yet Part XI of the Dialogues implies clearly a still Augustinian and Baylean bias towards the ‘Catholic’ (in Humean terms) primacy of melancholia in the face of overwhelming natural suffering and human iniquity. Although Philo defends traditional religion in terms of its mysticism and ontological-cosmological arguments against modern debased attempts to see God as a supreme but extrinsic and ontic designing influence, he still denies against Demea that the ‘proofs for God’s existence’ emphatically point to God rather than to a self-designing nature. So if we ‘feel’ the superiority of human habits and aims and suspect their elevation beyond analogous forces in nature, it is finally a certain melancholic refusal of nature and search for salvation which causes to embrace the mysticism and affirm the proofs. As he is clearly represented, Philo is more sceptical than the apophatic Demea only because he is also more fideistic. So true religion for Hume is a melancholy seeking refuge in the abstract sublime, which nonetheless pulls back from Catholic superstition in the direction of the beauty of this-worldly sympathy and yet then restrains in turn the self-congratulating yearning towards enthusiasm. If this sounds like Anglicanism, then there is no entirely conclusive reason to deny that Hume also thought it was orthodox Christianity. (With respect to miracles, the point is that there is never any convincing reason to affirm them...............) Indeed the only explicit Christian doctrine which Hume denied on grounds of faith as well as reason was that of the eternal punishment – objecting that fear of this does nothing to elevate human virtue and that it implies a contempt of the divine person. For this reason he seems to endorse his friend the Chevalier Ramsay’s Origenism. See note 31 above.
Just as, for Hume, human beings as creatures of feeling do not really know quite how atheistic or theistic they are, so also they never really know how far they are in the domain of esoteric faith and how far in that of exoteric reason.
On the relationship between transcendentalism and pragmatism in both Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, see Jean-Marc Ferry, Philosophie de la communication I (Paris: Cerf, 1994). For a scintillating account of the way in which John Rawls’ pragmatising of Kant’s transcedentalism creates fatal problems for his account of justice, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), 15-65.
As is rightly argued by Colin McGinn in his book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
Treatise, I, II, v, pp. 60-61. Hume declares that he has normally refrained from describing the operation of thought in physiological terms. This is clearly because he sees the mind – as a faculty of the soul – as irreducible to the physiological: it is a spiritual power which interacts with the body by means of intermediate vitalistic ‘animal spirits’. Thus he says here that ‘as the mind is endowed with a power of exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it despatches the [animal] spirits into that reach of the brain, in which the idea is placed; these spirits always excite the idea, when they run precisely into the proper traces, and rummage that cell, which belongs to the idea’. It is only mistakes that arise from sheerly physiological influences: ‘the animal spirits, falling into contiguous traces, present other related ideas in lieu of that which the mind first desir’d to survey’.
Treatise, I, I, vi, p. 261: ‘our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures’. Hume has just – like Plato – compared the human psyche to a ‘republic’ containing several members who are synchronically-speaking hierarchically arranged in ‘reciprocal ties’ and diachronically-speaking connected by sequences of cause and effect. The self is this both a drama and a narrative and its only substantial identity lies in this continuity, not, as for Locke, in any ‘punctuality’. And see again Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of the Common Life, 91-111.
Treatise, II, III, i-iii, pp.399-418.
* Treatise, I, I, i, pp.1-7. Hume was perhaps the first person to use the term ‘emotion’ besides the more traditional terms ‘feeling’ and ‘passion’. However, little seems to hang upon this new usage. Soon, however, ‘emotion’ in other Scottish thinkers, beginning with Thomas Brown, came to imply something definitely caused by physical ‘motions’ such that the resultant ‘feelings’ could not be taken to offer any clues whatsoever about reality. (See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, Cambridge, CUP, 2003, 98-134) This constitutes an enormous shift towards a radical subjectivism that took firm root in the 19th C and arguably renders even the 18th C ‘ancient’ and in ultimate continuity with the preceding millenia by comparison. For in that century ‘sympathy’ was still seen as disclosive of the states of being of other persons and even of natural realities: both things remain true for Hume. In the 18th C the passions still mediated, and hence the association of passion with the externality of music was absolutely crucial: ‘what passions cannot music raise and quell?’ asks John Dryden in his Ode for St Cecilia that was set to music by many, including of course both Purcell and Handel. Arguably, music itself is denatured when it becomes regarded merely as a physical and mechanical arouser of ‘emotions’ in the later Romantic period. This may be one clue to our fascination with ‘early music’: in it we actually uncannily ‘hear’ and so experience an older ‘participatory’ ontology (in Owen Barfield’s sense of an intrinsic link between meaning and objectivity, humanity and nature). Compare, for example, Carette’s Baroque sonata ‘On the Pleasures of Solitude’ which, despite its subject-matter, remains part of a dance, with Mahler’s Late Romantic piece ‘Blue Flower’ which, even though it is ostensibly referential, sounds both sentimental and solipsistic.
See Alva Noë, Out of our Heads (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind (Oxford: OUP, 2008); Michael Tye, Consciousness Revisited (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2009).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 19-20.
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP 1994) 108-126. McDowell refuses however to make the ontological moves which would accommodate his insights about meaning in terms of allowing an ontology of nature in excess of the conclusions of natural science.
‘Hylomorphic’ alludes to the Aristotelian view that every terrestrial reality is composedof ‘form’ and ‘matter’ which as unformed is in itself a mysterious negativity. Aristolte also thought that in the process of knowledge the form appears in the space of comprehending mind as still the ‘same’ form, but now abstracted from matter. Hnce this is generally known as a theory of ‘knowledge by identity’.
See David Skrbina, Panpsychism and the West (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2005), 249-269.
See Vladimir Soloviev, The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge trans. Valeria Z. Nollan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 53-54. Soloviev explained that ‘free theocracy’ means that ‘the Church as such does not interfere in governmental and economic matters, but provides for the government and district council [!] a higher purpose and absolute norm for their activities’.
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