From the Treatise, Book II, Part III, Section 3, Of the Influencing Motives of the Will
As I see it Hume’s argument is that the alleged primacy of reason over passion (his target in this section) is incorrect because a passion doesn’t need reason to be experienced. When one experiences a passion one has no need of representational ideas, the metaphysical domain of reason, one only needs the experience of the passion itself.
My problem is with quite what Hume means by ‘ideas’ here, because he could potentially be opening himself up to the criticism that the disagreement between the ideas and the objects is spurious, that all are simply appearances of one sort or another, that all are equivalently experienced. I’ll go back in the text to the section where he defines what he means by ideas, but I don’t recall a straighforward answer to such a criticism. If anyone has any suggestions in the meantime I’d appreciate them.
I think he is illustrating the distinction and difference between an immediately sensed and recognized emotional state and that response as opposed to a detached and thought out state of reasoned response (about whatever experienced emotion or whatever…)…
reason for hume is a different focus… but that focus is never immediate…
and to be driven by emotion is to be immediately driven… to be driven by reason (as flawed as hume thought that would be) is a compunding of the mistake…
i reduced that to where you seem to have failed to understand it. hume argues that we are driven by an innate appetite, which would be analgous to what we now more commonly call our instincts.
alternately stated, think of the appetites, or passions, as being at the bottom of mazlow’s heirarchy, if you will. they never go away, you build from the base.
as impenitent stated, reason isitself being questioned here - in hume’s skeptical mindset.
further, you should review how hume argues about the self and perception. drastically overstated, it is particularly the idea of the bundled self as being mostly a product of perception. hume is really making a brain in a vat argument, in a sense/
anyways, i read that statement as hume saying don’t deny what it is that makes you human. in that sense, that is the DENIAL of reason over the appetites. think about this in a more dialectic manner, in other words.
i am only going to ask you this once, please do not vivisect my posts, i will not respond if you do it once more.
i stated “innate appetitites” which you have mysteriosly turned into “innate self,” when i go on to talk about how the self is not innate. why do you continue to make strawman with nonsensical obfuscations to posts? it is horrendous and the product of either the disingenuine or of the sophist, so STOP IT PLEASE.
think about this example, and re-read the passage.
…
you can reason yourself into a hunger strike, but are you still hungry and thirsty? if so, how does that mean that reason has, as you say, “primacy” over the passions, over the appetites?
…
if you can reason yourself to death, what does that mean about the mind and body when it comes to"reason"? the self is the product of both, and this needs to accounted for ethically if we use some early variant of utilitarianism that will take into account a notion of “good”. clearly, reason is important but not primary in determining “good”.
is it “good” to starve yourself to death, to deny your thirst? just think about it some more.
Okay, I won’t vivisect your posts, I’ll do numbered points…
Nowhere that I’ve read does Hume argue for any kind of innate motive, innate appetite, innate selfhod, innate feeling, anything like that. If you have some text that contradicts this then present it. You have a habit of saying ‘X said/argued for Y’ by assertion, without providing references and in direct contradiction with what has already been cited. By a ‘habit’ I mean that I’ve seen you do it 4 or 5 times.
The very notion of innate appetites would seem to violate Hume’s critique of induction
Your example doesn’t in any way answer my query about whether Hume’s upholding of the binary opposition reason/passion is at odds with his argument.
Your argument doesn’t seem to bear much relation to what Hume has said. Not from where I’m sitting. Kindly don’t get angry - we’ve already had one thread locked.
yes, reason (for hume) unnecessarily complicates things… but the problem is simpler than that… is that which is sensed immediately reasonable? or is that which is sensed compounded into linguistic categories and shuffled mentally along avenues of reason to find the appropriate conclusion?
fire hits flesh- move flesh … instant reflex (moved by passion)
or
fire hits flesh-
categorize fire, flesh… play the terms in the mind along the lines of reason to conclude that fire burns flesh and that fire burns flesh is bad and to stop fire burning flesh is good, and to stop fire burning flesh, move flesh- good is desireable so to meet the desire, it would be reasonable to stop fire burning flesh, so the reasonable conclusion would be to move flesh (moved by reason)
That does clear things up somewhat and I suppose I do get more or less’s point about eating. Sure, one cannot reason one’s way to hunger. And as Hume says
So you can’t reason your way out of hunger either.
It’s like Bart at the top of the slope, thinking about jumping Springfield Gorge. Reason can’t tell him whether or not he’ll be successful and whether or not this desire that he has to roll down the slope on his skateboard is a good one, all he has is the desire, the skateboard, the slope and the Gorge.
Because Hume so rarely talks explicitly about language (as Derrida does in his critique of Reason) I’m finding it harder to pin down how he is holding reason on the table as he hovers over it with the knife.
ethics then, being ethical choice… think of it in dynamics and not statics, so temporality is assumed as choice is always a process. would it make sense if i said to you that hume is arguing [by which i mean constructing] about the notion of an “ethical self”?
its important to first use the butterfly net of collecting the meaning of hume before you yourself hover over him with the knife of dekonstruktion.
and so it goes:
body = instincts / innate appetites causal to passions
mind = reason / interpretor of passions, not causal
mind + body = bundled self
and so, i generalize that when hume feels a synthesis is acheived, by which we woulnd interpretet as either “happiness” or as “good,” this is likely an ethical choice. thus, an ethical choice being self-intereted and informed has to take into account the fact that the self is always perceiving. do remember the is/ought problem.
it is in this sense that this informs the category of “moral sympathy” in which humean ethics defines, and to me, personifies. hume clearly believes we also have a innate sympathy to our fellow man. this is, according to hume, as innate as our appetites as we our bound to our fellow man systemically and as process. this informs a completely differnet type of “self-interest” as it includes a sympathetic other interest.
it is from this point of view that this is a specific ethical system that i like to describe as “properly understood self-interest” - and is a far cry from acting in pure self-interest, or ethical egoism. hume, and yes even his much misunderstood contemporory adam smith, clearly are not arguing for ethical egoism or “self-interest” as we typically use the term nowadays.
in this sense, there is an assumed sense of “acting in good faith” in self-interest as it assumes we have an innate “moral” sympathy, and that this provides the basis for ethical interaction as its an innate “other interest.”
this is at the core of the modern human nature / self-interest ethical debate, and is a poorly understood notion overall.
hume, the much maligned skeptic, is holds to a rather optimistic sense of moral sympathy in self-interest which i hold to be dichotomous to hobbes - by which hume is in league with locke and a classical liberal tradition.
if i have not made it clear by this point, i think hume kicks ass. this does not mean i think he is necessarily “right,” however, he may be “more correct” than any of his contemporaries, imho. and this informs kant - whom builds upon, and also tries to deny hume, in many, many ways. but, that’s just a side note, and irrelevant to understanding hume on his own merits.
AFTER you understand his argument, you may commence with your dekonstruktivist ways. first, appreciate the construction, please/
1 - You haven’t a clue what you are talking about.
2 - Hume’s bundle theory of the self was not a reconciliation of reason and passion. It was the argument the self consists of nothing other than a bundle of perceptions and experiences. You’ve simply got this wrong.
3 - Once again: Nowhere that I’ve read (or for that matter, heard) does Hume defend anything like innate passions or innate appetites. Put up or shut up, the pressure is on you to defend your reading.
4 - Hume doesn’t talk about a synthesis of reason and passion, he talks of reason not being needed at all. Not a synthesis. You clearly haven’t read the text to which I’m referring.
5 - ‘Hume clearly believes that we have an innate sympathy for our fellow man’ - if it is so clear then you’ll have no problem citing a text or two to demonstrate this…
6 - You are hardly one to criticise others for ‘poorly understood notions’ - you’ve made wild claims about Nietzsche and Hume’s philosophy which aren’t in any way supported by the texts and have ignored EVERY one of my requests for a proper discussion based in text.
7 - Hume is not in the classic liberal tradition. This is surely an attempt at a joke…
I understand his argument much better than you do, this much is clear. Kindly cite texts and don’t just assert that ‘Hume meant X when he talked of a bundle theory of the self’ or ‘Nietzsche meant nihilism when he talked of slave morality’. It doesn’t impress anyone, it doesn’t add weight to your arguments and whatismore it only makes you look like a blowhard who hasn’t done his homework. I’m no Hume expert, but I know that what you’ve told me is almost entirely incorrect. Deconstruction or no deconstruction, you are wrong on almost every point.
you are quite fond of the yapping dog routine, aren’t you? 'tis a shame, i think you ego deludes your ablity to think, learn, and reason. you also seem to have trouble distinguishing between an opinion, and a “like” versus an “as” claim/statement. you really should calm down, and stay on subject.
1 - so says the clueless and admittedly confused…
2 - i claimed nothing of the sort, hume is rather dimissive of the self
3 - frankly i cannot believe you are saying that, as you’ve also said you have not read much of him!? stunning!
4 - no, of course not. his point is NOT that reason “does not matter,” is that reason is not NECESSARY for moral choice. that reason is sufficient, or plays a role, is quite important in his overall works. reason is not primary, in must be in service to our moral sentitiment due to the problems of reasoning.
5 - see 3.
6 - more yapping, and nietzsche!?
7 - it is a joke that you think hume is not part of the liberal tradition! he is often considered to be the first modern conservative thinker in liberalism! ahhhh! he’s one of the most important liberals of his time!
the rest of your prattle is unworthy, and that bizarre nietzsche claim was yours, not mine. i give you two suggestions:
but frankly, i would like you to explain, from your own passage, just what you think Hume means by the “original existence” of the passions? come now, it’s right in front of you!
Precisely. I’ve read the text and admit that I’m unsure, you haven’t read the text and claim that you are sure
You are either an idiot or a liar. (from your earlier post)
This hardly constitutes a valid response to a request for evidence from the text. I’ll take this as meaning you are incapable of citing texts to back up your claims about philosophers.
I didn’t say that reason doesn’t matter, I said that it was not needed. You go on to shout at me that his point is that it isn’t necessary… i.e. not needed… i.e. what I said.
You haven’t a clue, have you? You intially claimed that Hume’s objective was a synthesis of reason and passion so I corrected you by saying that his point was that reason wasn’t needed. So you chastised me for saying that reason doesn’t matter (something that I never said) and acted like you were correcting me by repeating my correction of your earlier statement. You are either an idiot or a liar.
You mean ‘see my petty excuse for not actually citing a text I claim to have read and understood’? I’d rather not, it was a bit embarassing for you the first time…
I’ll take that as another admission that you neither know what you are on about nor remember what you’ve already claimed…
What do you mean by ‘liberalism’? Since you’ve no idea about slave morality, free will, nihilism, the bundle theory of the self, induction, reason as slave of the passions I’ve no reason to suspect that you know what ‘liberalism’ usually means…
This is all totally irrelevant, though it does remind me of a cheap version of the techniques used by someone who used to post here…
Vaguely pointing a stick at texts doesn’t count as citing them in support of your reading. You may have noticed this when you failed philosophy at college…
Duh, that they don’t require any representation, supplement, added extra, abstraction, addition or anything similar in order to be motivators of the will. Perhaps?
I have an idea, let’s just keep arguing back and forth till doomsday. It’s quite obvious discussion of this kind is utterly pointless. Everyone thinks they are right. And guess what? They are right!
Something to keep in mind, most people are only able or willing to expand their point of view no more then 5% at a time.
You may reply with something like, “well, what’s the point of discussing anything if you think everyone is right”. I would say, discussion should be a matter of invitation and not someone saying that THIS IS THE END.
Oh but I’m sure someone will just reply to me that I’m an idiot, and the idiocy will continue. Beautiful.
i knew you could not resists using your scalpel, as you are a slave to your ego and ongoing disingenuine pursuit of knowledge. since i have asked you not to use your scissors, and you have chosen to despite your statements your would refrain from said technique, i will simply be the editor, and reduce your rants to the usable bits. frankly, we all benefit from you saying less, and so, that the meaning may be… MORE.
hovering with a knife you said of hume! ahh, sweet irony.
technique you said? now i am given you visions and memories? do try to keep sane, and discuss the issue and not your irrelevant fantasies, eh? thanks.
[HINT] also, try not to quote anything prior to this very sentence for none of this matters to the discussion. [/HINT]
firstly, i am sad that i throw the dog a stick, only to find out that the dog is unwilling to chase the stick. make one wonder what is wrong this dog, that it chooses not to hunt? may i suggest you at least read the sections on the WILL and the MORAL SENTIMENTS? it would take very little of you to do so, and i am not all that fond of plagiarizing the amounts needed for the likes of yourself to gain understanding. i am also not trying to “win” anything, i am just trying to let you discover “the truth of it” on your own…
secondly, did you not just describe how the passions are innate? now then, what are these passions?
gee, that third one almost sounds like a certain philosopher we are discussing. funny, that.
it gets even more interesting, his praise of our “original existence of passions,” when you consider what his likely audience knew of the term original sin…
