DISCUSSION: Hume & Kant

Smaller class tonight as 5-6 people decided not to attend due to the picket line.  We met in the Liberal Studies department library which was a nice setting for a more intimate discussion.  We didn't get to Moliere tonight, just Hume and Kant (Scottish and German/French Enlightenment).

From 14th c. to 18th c./19th c.
Renaissance
Reformation
Enlightenment
Romanticism

Many things came into play during Enlightenment that we take for granted - things that were new

• Equality
• Securalism
• Science - the French Encyclopaedia (Diderot & D'Alembert)
• Nationalism
• Democracy (Representative Democracy); removal of societal stratification (citizen/citoyenne during French Revolution)
• Individualism (Rousseau)

Moliere's Alceste leads to Rousseau and Robespierre (the Incorruptible) - who was beheaded during Revolution, Robespierre active during the Reign of Terror (the first few years after French Revolution).

Machiavelli and Hume are both very contextual - what you do (or should do) depends on what is happening, Relativism.  In this situation I would do this, in that situation I would do that.  Hume would argue that there are a few areas that decisions/actions are not based on context.

Descartes and Kant are not contextual, they believe there are a few clear ideas, and these are operational regardless of context.  Categorical Imperative (Kant)

Montaigne leads to Rousseau who was very aware of the self.

Sophocles prepares the way for Machiavelli and Hume (as did Mencius)

Lucretius and Aurelius prepare the way for Montaigne and Rousseau, as do Antigone and Plato.

What to do in situations?

18th c. very big for stoicism.

Romanticism - linked to Enlightenment (Wollstonecraft is considered a Romantic, also Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge - Lake District, movement emerges during French Revolution)

Romantics; Rousseau is a pre-Romantic).

Romanticism eventually is superseded by Industrialism

By 1820s, after French Revolution and after Napoleon, Romanticism emerges later in continental Europe, some German Romantics as well (Goethe).

Romanticism is very location-based - linked to place unlike Enlightenment which believes Reason is universal, not different in different places.

Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith, Hume, Sir Walter Scott) & French Enlightenment (includes German Enlightenment)

Hume very attached to France.

18th c. was a period of unresolved tension between reason and passion.  Attempt to reconcile the two which we are still dealing with today.  Science and supremacy of industry have been the defining issues of the 20th century and into the 21st century.  We are still trying to reconcile the two.

Universities are no longer interested in critical thinking but in technical skills and technical thinking (i.e.: deductive, problem-solving) - this certainly holds true for my 6 years of post-secondary education at 2 universities.

Hume and Kant - believe in God (or a god) but want to secularize philosophy.

In France at the time there were still 2 courts, 1 civil and 1 religious.  Heretics could still be executed (even burned at stake up to the 16th c.).

Hume rejects the primacy of reason and asserts the dominance of experience.

Kant supports reason's universality

Hume wrote that knowledge and values are dependent on context - during famine or war (life or death conditions), more license allowed for self-interested behaviours.

Kant believes reason is in us before experience.

Kant also believed in "Enlightened Despotism" (Frederick the Great)

Both thinkers lived pre-democracy.

Both Kant and Descartes said that order and duty were still important - they didn't want unrest or massive change to destroy society so in public life one had to obey the institutions but in private one could have our own ideas.  Sapere Aude.

Lorraine mentioned Javert in Les Miserables who betrays his duty by allowing Valjean to live and then can't live with that decision.  

pg 88 Hume speaks about self-love.

We had a discussion about self-interest - most present seemed to feel that not all our actions are out of self-interest, many of them are for the good of society.  I feel that all morals even those societally-based (for the good of society) are at heart, self-interest.  It's in our interest for society to work, to keep me safe and so if I make a decision or take an action for the good of society then I'm am actually acting in self-interest.  I don't think this is the same as Hobbesian self-interest (as I imperfectly understand it to be) where we may act against the interest of society for our own 'narrow' self-interests.  I have a hard time thinking anything is not biologically based at its very essence and so while we may think we are acting for the good of others, I think there is still a self-interest basis at the very heart of almost all actions though the self-interest may be the interest in having a healthy functioning viable society.  The self-interest may also be survival of the gene pool or of the species (even at the expense of oneself).

Hume believed in the "General benevolence of human nature"

Hume felt that everyone could attain 'his' level of human nature with enough time - friends with Adam Smith who felt that the economy had to bring everyone's standard of living up.

Rousseau found nobility in the peasant class - celebrates folk wisdom of the poor, came from a rural background.

Hume feels that morals are innate, and qualities such as amiableness etc are universal among people so therefore they are innate to human nature since we 'all' value them.  It's also universal not to value other qualities such as selfishness, dishonesty.

pg 43 "we must renounce the theory, which accounts for every moral sentiment by the principle of self-love."  Hume goes back to experience all the time saying "It is sufficient that this is experienced to be a principle in human nature."

Calvinism spread across Scotland and, because they didn't have a church hierarchy, everyone had to read the bible so the population was very literate and advanced, good universities, country was ready for enlightenment.  Hume felt education was crucial.  This was how people could/would change.

Rousseau felt education very NB to everyone, to the people.

Educate comes from greek word for "bringing out of you" not inserting knowledge into people - this idea was more Germanic, where they developed large lecture halls and didactic lecturing.

Hume was quite narrow-minded in his idea of humanity and enlightenment - he saw a world with everyone like him and his friends but (pg 74) the "gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in our calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself."

Stephen recommended a few related texts:
1. Annette Baier, "Hume, the Women's Moral Theorist?" in Eva Kittay & Diana Meyers, eds, Women and Moral Theory (Rowan & Littlefield) Baier has subsequently turned this into a book.

2. Xiusheng Liu, "Mencius, Hume, And Sensibility Theory", Philosophy East & West, vol. 52, #1 January 2002, pp. 75-97

3. Ciaran Cronin, "Kant's Politics of Enlightenment". Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol 41:1, 2003, pp. 51-80.