Hi, faust.
I have always try to read what you write. It is always entretaining and sometimes revealing. For example I had not considered the difference between Causation and causation as applicable to Hume. To me he was after the rationalists or those that wanted, like Descartes, to establish a ground for certainty. He destroys the self, Descartes “I” and even the grounds for any further ontological certainty in matter of reality outside a philosopher’s armchair. He reduces all efforts to modes of faith. He has no reason for this that or the other. But let’s get to specifics.
— The Golden Rule is not fundamental to Christianity, for example. The Ten Commandments (and all those other ones) are. They are simply dicated from heaven. Reciprocity is not part of the Big Ten. You just do it, whether you see something in it for you or not.
O- I disagree. If that was so then why the lamentations to Heavens when King and country are humbled? Why rites galore if God is irrational and simply says: “Thou shall do this or else I’ll kill you”? The very first commandment establishes the tit for tat character of the covenant. How does it go?
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery”
That action set the scales uneven. The hebrews have a debt to pay to God for their freedom. Of course, reciprocity is already an ancient formula that the hebrews simply inherit. The TC do not say “do onto others as you wish…”, but imply the doctrine throughout. God does recommend to them that they shall not work even the slave on the Sabbath, so that they too shall rest on the Lord’s day, and invites them to reminse, if as to dispel any opposition to the Lord’s charity thatthey too had been once slaves in Egypt. Is it really that hard to see here the seeds that would later bear fruit in Jesus mouth? The key issue in both is sympathy. Do not do unto others…is a saying that rest on the identification with the slave, because we too were slaves. If we were allowed to rest and we liked it, shouldn’t we do the same for our slaves? And if we were made to work without rest and we disliked it, shouldn’t we avoid doing that to our slave? So what? Why should we do better or as good to our slaves? Because you have to do onto others as you wish others would do onto you. If you had wished for rest as a slave in Egypt, then you must grant that rest to your slave now.
— Yeah, Hume allowed for psychological causation. That is a central point of my thesis. I’m not sure how you missed that.
I wrote, in my OP:
Quote:
Hume established that epistemology and ontology belongs to metaphysics; that causation is not phenomenal or logical, but is psychological
O- Here is my point though: if causation then is psychological, it is subjective and not objective. Predictably, one will be unable to find a logical necessity from one cause to a effect without the recourse to a tautology. Fine: Out with objectivity. what Hume presented then was observations of his own self (Russell’s argument against the psychology of his day) and it’s particular variety of experience. if that is the case, then how can I jump onto his band-wagon? How can I accept what he tells is the nature or the facts as they are, when in fact he makes a case against this possibility? It is like the liar’s paradox. So if indeed then everything is limited by my subjective, that same declaration falls within the limit and declares what at most stands as an opinion. As it appears to Hume, and as applicable to his mind alone, causation is the product of psychological causes like habit. Hume’s idea of causation is the product of habit- that is all that can be known at this point. As far as to what causation in general really is, we still don’t know. As much as Hume really tells us, all we have is really a biography.
— What Hume was really after was not to disprove causes and effects, but to disprove causation, or rather Causation - in a word - God. He was not really so concerned with the predictive powers of causation, but of the infinite regress - because there is only one way to stop the infinite regress - The Prime Mover. He wasn’t after causation, he was after God.
O- I agree for that is pretty evident in his “Dialogues…” but again that was not my point. i am saying that Hume is a reaction and as reactionaries tend to be, he is as radical in his negation as others were in affirmation and that there needs to be, in my opinion, a bit of moderation, that is all. Not because the Truth lies in the middle but because extremes are ripe with weaknessess.
— Yeah, omar - just about everything can be seen as a Universal, because everything - every name, actually is a universal - small “u”. But universals were invented before set theory was, and many philosophers (and all metaphysics) haven’t quite caught up with that. The metaphysical leap is merely to reify these universals.
O- Right, which is what Plato did. I don’t agree with Plato, but again Plato is an extreme and anti-platonism another. What I am suggesting is not that morality is free of convention, but that conventions are not free from nature. So that it is not a choice between nature versus nurture. As research is showing you don’t get one in absence of the other but you get what you get from both and perhaps it is time that philosophy caught up with that as well. Perhaps it is time to seek a truce between the Gods and the Giants.
— Perspectivists are particularists. Which is not to say that perspectivism is particularism. Only if you understand the difference between those two statements can you understand perspectivism.
O- Riiight.
— There are causes and effects - shit, we see them all day long. What Hume really showed was that there is not Causation. That it doesn’t “exist”. Once you reify Causation, make it into an entity, then the First Cause can also be an entity. Hume showed that Causation, well, causation, is not an entity, metaphysical or otherwise. That’s the Big Secret about Hume.
O- See this is why I love reading your posts because you do bring to light philosophical speculations not explicit in the text. Indeed, it makes perfect sense and I cannot believe I had not seen that before. In a way he anticipates Feuerbach. If causation is psychological, Causation would be a projection and if that Causation is enlivened and divinized the projection carries over and God then is a projection.
— Most philosophers seem still not to have figured this out. Hume took the metaphysics out of causes and effects. In fact, I’m not altogether sure he even knew it, but he was mightily aware of his motive - of that there is no doubt.
O- I think he killed God and did not know it and carried on as if God still lived. This is what I was hinting at before. Without that metaphysical quality of causation, everything including his own book is left as subjective opinion. As Kant came about the premises had been set for Kant’s conclusion: We are prisioners of our own subjetive perspective. We are limited to the perspective of Giants (yet this opinion is that of a God, which is my objection to Hume). Worse of all is that now days we have lost even that bit of faith Hume had left us in thinking that reality made direct impressions. Now we are finding that reality prints incomplete portraits that are corrupted by several things, including our emotional disposition towards something and towards the moment at hand. So not only are we prisioners of our minds, staring at the world from between our cell bars, but the cell bars are not fixed and indifferent but actively adjusting what little we do get from that reality outside our cell. So we are reported by a biased journalist: Who is to know what is true? yet if I buy my own shit-argument, where the hell did I get the news about this whole scheme from? What reliable source do I have if all the sources are tainted? And there lies the rub. At the foundation of the most rational system lies an irrational corn (Weber, I think). So too, at the foundation of my doubt and all doubt must lie a certainty on which to arrive at doubt itself. Sort of like a Unmoved Mover. If do doubt all things then even my own doubt would seem doubful to me, as indeed I do. I find that the more strenght in a doubt the stronger it’s opposite and unconsciouss, certainty. if we accept the notions of the argument we are left life the Donkey between the hay and starve to death. As Diderot pushed his friend to admit, this is hardly likely. Here we must ask whether it is natural. Whether it is util. In fact metaphysical ideas should be considered as adaptive, but in a limited measure and like everything else in our body, prone to abuse and exaggeration. We cannot conduct the bussiness of existance without a bit of metaphysics, and even the study of metaphysics, and scepticism of it, require a bit of metaphysical formulations.
— Yeah, universals are inevitable. Reifying them isn’t.
O- I think that depending on the psychological type of a person, reification might be inevitable for them.