empiricists

The classic Rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) were pretty confident they could get to the metaphysical bottom of things by shutting out ordinary worldly distractions and sensory confusions, thinking hard, and coming up with the foundational (“substantial”) First Principles of everything.

The Empiricists answered with a classic triumvirate of their own: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. They were sure we would need some data, built of sensations and subsequent reflection thereupon, to have any shot at all at knowledge.

That approach led John Locke (no, not that John Locke) to his tabula rasa, Bishop George Berkeley to his “esse ist percipi” slogan and his “don’t blink” philosophy of divine oversight, and David Hume (not Desmond*) to his billiard table and the conclusion that philosophy is a good pastime but ought not be allowed to ruin anybody’s day.

Our text mentions unicorns as an example of an idea Locke would say is drawn from experience, though the beast is mythical. They devoted a whole program on the BBC to unicorns this week, in case you ever wanted to know all about them.

Hume was the freest free-thinker of the bunch, but Locke the Deist said to improve life, do not ask God for help. He also said that everything the churches had added to the claim that there was a creator God is “bunk.”

Locke also inspired Jefferson and Paine et al. That might explain why he snipped the Bible, to get the bunk out.

Jesus would reject all Christianity. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried was Jefferson’s attempt, when he took scissors to the Bible. The resulting  Jefferson Bible, he intended, would reflect “the most sublime and benevolent [and humane and natural] code of morals” yet devised by mortal man, and it would nestle safely behind the sacred wall so many of our self-righteous contemporaries have been so eager to tear down. That’s one founder’s “original intent” they consistently ignore.  He was a Deist, but considered that his personal business and none of the state’s. (Check out Maira Kalman’s tribute to the Sage of Monticello.)

Jennifer Hecht is especially helpful on Hume, noting his debt to Cicero, recounting his remarkable trip to Paris in 1763 (where he met the leading lights of the French Enlightenment, Diderot, d’Holbach et al), and citing his inversion of the usual wisdom concerning morality. Doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow, so

We don’t need religion for morality, and what is more: religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place.

So, he agrees with the DalaiLama:

I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.

Hume’s “ought/is” distinction was in service of moral skepticism, but not an attempt to de-nature our ascriptions of value. He thought Ben Franklin was our first world-class philosopher, btw. Maybe it’s time to trot out again old Ben’s proposal for a new political party, our old ones haven’t worked well together for a very long time. A United Party for Virtue, composed of excellence-seekers “acting only with a view to the good of mankind,” is a pretty dream. (Maira Kalman is a fan, too. And of Jefferson.)

Hume’s pal was Adam Smith, usually cited (praised or excoriated) for his mysterious  “invisible hand” and his seeming apologia for acquisitive  selfishness. But Smith actually was  a Humean about morality and politics:

Smith believed that people are not essentailly selfish or self-interested but are essentially social creatures who act out of sympathy and fellow-feeling for the good of society as a whole. A decent free-enterprise system would only be possible in the context of such a society. PW

Thomas Hobbes didn’t call himself an atheist but his Leviathanstate was widely perceived to be a God substitute, an authority to keep us all in awe. Hell, he said, was just a fantasy to control people. Foolish people, “they that make little or no enquiry into the natural causes of things…”

Voltaire, a Deist who found no grounds for believing in a worship-worthy Creator, probably inspired more people to reject their childhood religion than anyone else at that time… “Ecrasez l’infame!”

Hume in 3 minutes:

& Locke, & Descartes… Voltaire… Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his dog… show me… Lost*… body language… rationalists & empiricists R.I.P.

My view is that the classic empiricists fail, for not being “radical” enough. More on that when we come to William James‘s “radical empiricism.” Suffice for now to invoke the spirit of Emerson, which is to my mind the quintessential spirit of empiricism (nothwithstanding his having called himself a Kantian transcendentalist):

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.

rationalists & empiricists, R.I.P.

Happy St. Pat’s Day, & Happy Birthday, Sis!

We were talking about Thomas Hobbes on Monday, about his negative evaluation of human nature as conducing to that “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short” state of nature we supposedly contracted out of. This stands in such striking contrast to David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s notion that humans are naturally un-selfish (and that that’s why we can even begin to entertain the thought of a free-market economy).

I pick on Hobbes at every opportunity, for being so down on the human race. But he’s kind of a role model anyway. Simon Critchley notes: he walked vigorously every day in order to work up a sweat and lived to 91, in the desolate 17th century (when most were lucky to hit 40).  And he had a sharp wit. His epitaph of choice: “This is the true philosopher’s stone.” Don’t tell Harry Potter.

Descartes didn’t fare so well, dying at (yikes!) 53.  But no wonder, with this attitude: “My soul, you have been held captive a long time… leave the prison… relinquish the burden of this body.”

Before giving up his ghost, Descartes corresponded with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. She pushed him on his problematic dualism: If the thinking mind is separate from the extended body, then how do mind and body interact? She was among the first of many to be underwhelmed by his speculative response that maybe it happens in the pineal gland.

Critchley says Descartes refused to take seriously Gassendi‘s objection that our ideas, even the clear-and-distinct ones, might be out of touch with reality. Well, though… he at least pretended to take it seriously, to motivate his “meditations” with hyperbolic doubt. I find that strategy suspect, and think we’re right to consider ourselves “in touch” most of the time. That doesn’t mean we can ever be indubitably certain that all our ideas are correct. It does imply that we should not  invent reasons to doubt in our studies what we cannot deny in our lives.

La Rochefoucauld thought the philosophers protested too much, those who tried so fervently to convince us that death is nothing to fear. “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” And neither can safely be disregarded.

Blaise Pascal‘s snapshot of the human condition is bleak, but also reminiscent of Plato’s cave-dwellers: “Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of others.” If you’ve heard of his wager you probably thought he was a hyper -rationalist, but for Pascal reason is limited and cannot establish its own first principles… left to itself it leads to endless and unanswerable scepticism.” So maybe David Hume was being disingenous when he declared reason beside the point.

Where did Leibniz get his “monad” idea? Possibly from Anne Conway, who argued against materialism and against any distinction between mind and matter. What did Bertrand Russell think of Leibniz? “Optimistic, orthodox, fantastic and shallow.” Similarly, William James called Leibniz’s theodicy “superficiality incarnate.” Some have construed Leibniz’s bizarre monadology as a front for a very orthodox conception of God as master-planner and micro-manager. Ironic, then, that the name “Leibniz” was popularly derided as “glaubt nichts,” or unbeliever.

John Locke was much more modest and circumspect about the scope of philosophy, tracing ideas to each individual’s idiosyncratic “sensation and reflection.” But he didn’t think he could prove it, and that opened the door to critics who wanted to nail things (and ideas) down more definitively.

Spinoza said a free human being is one who lives according to reason alone and is not governed by fear. That would seem to exclude Hume, who insisted that life is not lived by reason alone (or even by reason in the greatest measure) and that death is the transformation of one natural being (a living human being) into another natural being (the corpse as natural being). Pardon me if I don’t find that entirely consoling.

How civilized are humans, really? According to Vico, there is a constant danger of a cataclysmic return to a new age of the beasts.

English freethinker John Toland invented the term “pantheism,” commonly taken for atheism but  really a form of spiritual materialism. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing.

For George Berkeley, the independent reality of the material world is nowhere affirmed in the Bible. So, being a strict constructionist, he found nothing real in death. Again, pardon me if I don’t find that wholly persuasive.

Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks to kick.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Thanks in advance for not asking when your papers will be graded. The invariable answer, of course, is: ASAP. (That’s “the memo”– the one I’ll refer you to, if you ask me that question.)

show me

School’s back in session today. I hope Spring Break recharged everyone’s batteries. Mine had its moments, although it didn’t quite rise to earlier expectations. It was, in fact, the sort of week that can reconfirm a skeptic.

I’m from Missouri, you have to show me something. Honestly, though, my own experience doesn’t bear out that state’s reputation for skeptical self-circumspection. In fact, St. Louis in the 19th century was a hotbed of Hegelianism.

Maybe that’s why my fellow undergrad philosophy majors and I communed every Friday afternoon (c. 1978) at a now long-gone little deli/pub on the Mizzou campus in an informal thinking-and-drinking club we pretentiously dubbed the Hegel Society. What did we know? (We should have been the Montaigne Society!)

Be all that as it may, today we turn our attention to classical British empiricism (not yet radicalized by William James).

John Locke (1632-1704) gave us the tabula rasa, assumed that the mind was a blank tablet… an empty closet illuminated only by the light that enters from the outside. Don’t get Steve Pinker started…

Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an odd empiricist, since he was also what empiricists usually are not: a metaphysical idealist. “To be is to be perceived.” Except when it’s not. I still like Dr. Johnson’s “refutation.”

David Hume (1711-1776) saw the limits of reason and resolved to live skeptically in response. Hume’s skepticism was, paradoxically, the clearest example of solid, self-scrutinizing Enlightenment thinking. Our most basic beliefs and behaviors rest on a foundation not of a priori Cartesian certainties but upon custom, habit, social tradition, and common sense.

“It is not against reason that I should prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.” But I definitely should not prefer it.

That’s what Hume’s pal the economist would have said, too.

Adam Smith (1723-1790). The American ideology has always invoked the magical authority of his “invisible hand” in support of the proposition that individuals behaving selfishly in free markets would invariably result in “the overall good of society,” thus always and paradoxically  ratcheting up the spiral of freedom  for ambitious individuals on their respective missions of personal acquisition and self-aggrandizement.

Actually, though, Smith– David Hume’s best friend– agreed with the skeptic that free-market capitalism can only secure a rich andrewarding freedom in the largest sense when individuals seek to coordinate their respective entrepreneurial aspirations with the well-being of the community at large. Contrary to inherited convention, Smith believed that people are not essentially selfish or self-interested but are essentially social creatures who act out of sympathy and fellow-feeling for the good of society as a whole. A decent free-enterprise system would only be possible in the context of such a society.

more reality

Or less…

I gave short shrift to the pre-Socratics, but Democritus (c.460-360 BCE)  was a genuine visionary. He “developed a picture of the world that is remarkably close to our current scientific views.” He never appeared in public without laughing at human folly, hence his moniker “The Laughing Philosopher.” (Looks a little grim here, the sculptor may have been unsympathetic.) He had the last laugh, if it’s true that he lived past 100. He had good atoms.

“With Democritus the attempt to deanimate and demythologize the world was complete.” His “soul” was insubstantial except when embodied, and then was more like a breath than a spirit. “I would rather understand one cause,” he said, “than be King of Persia.” Carl Sagan celebrated him on Cosmos.

“With Democritus the attempt to deanimate and

demythologize the world was complete…”

Greek “soul” was insubstantial except when embodied,

and then was a “mere breath”…

Many of Democritus’ successors developed views remarkably inimical to current scientific wisdom.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) thought it useful to doubt the reality of everything; he was a mind-body dualist; and he demanded indubitable certainty as the gold-standard of scientific knowledge. All of these views have been doubted, if not flatly rejected, by most scientifically-minded moderns. His famed Meditations seem circular. (Here he is, squashed and truncated.)

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) thought everything was part of one universal reality (or metaphysical substance). He was a pantheist. We’ve noted that Einstein was a fan: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” It may well be that “Spinoza’s God” continues to capture more scientific respect than any more traditional alternative.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), aka “Dr. Pangloss” in Candide, thought reality was almost  infinitely various, but also boxed and sealed. We are “monads,” self-contained substances (not unlike Neo, pre-Morpheus) experiencing a pre-arranged harmony

of perceptions orchestrated by a very controlling Master Monad. We have “no windows.”

George Berkeley (1685-1753) said esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived.” Don’t blink, God, or we’ll wink out of existence. The lexicographer and wit Samuel Johnson thought he had a practical refutation of Berkeley’s idealism.  He missed the point, but made one too: your philosophy of reality really ought to make a discernible difference in your experience of life .

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said “things in themselves” (tits, as I’m afraid my undergraduate Kant professor taught me to abbreviate them) are out of reach. We deal strictly in phenomena, or appearances. But the good news for Kant is that we can be sure that appearances are not deceptive in at least one crucial respect: they appear as they must, in the light of our own categorical nature. We constitute the world through the categories our collective minds impose upon them, and thus are normally in touch with reality when we ply our minds and use our reason.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) saw the world as a kind of universal Spirit, coming to maturity through the clash and conflicts of human history. He was the ultimate Systematic philosopher and devotee of Rationality, the antithesis of Kierkegaard (though some scholars have begun to challenge this). He made Schopenhauer crazy.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) “turned Hegel on his head,” seeing the world mainly in material terms. History was for him, as for Hegel, a grand unfolding process (“dialectic”) tending toward some higher “synthesis”  that would represent our apotheosis as a species. But as we know, his particular political synthesis has met with some resistance in recent decades.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)– separated at birth from Ebenezer Scrooge– was the pessimist-par excellence: life (on his view) is no good, without purpose, the clatter of pointless striving will. But he wasn’t a total scrooge: he loved little dogs, and (as we’ll see) as a young man he loved at least one or two other human beings. That’s why Alain de Botton chooses him to exemplify “consolation for a broken heart.”