Hume Reminds Me: Take Me as I Am

Last updated on: October 23, 2016 at 7:02 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Hume Reminds Me: Take Me as I Am 2016-10-22T11:17:11-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Wake me up, David Hume!

When it comes to hard thinkers, it is all too easy to read them as judges. Does this guy line up with what I think? If so, then I can strip mine his writing for pithy quotes that make me seem smart! If not, then I can take him down and a critical essay is always easier to write. There is an entire style of Christian apologetics that takes on the job of standing in judgement of the greats.

Do they have a Biblical worldview? Often, this is another way of saying: “Can this be read while I stay in a dogmatic slumber?”

We should have a Christian worldview, because I think Christianity is good, true, and beautiful. However, we cannot know other ideas, or even our own ideas, by first judging them. I am convinced that to read a book well one must begin by listening as if every word is true. A second reading will allow more critical thought and then a third reading can start the process of probing, dialog, and criticism.

A god might be able to understand without first embracing, but a man cannot. Of course, there is danger, great deadly danger, in embracing ideas that turn out to be false, ugly, and wicked. What to do?

We can be thankful that training can help us learn to love an idea as a hypothesis, tentatively, without simultaneously adopting it in our daily living. We consider, we take the argument on its own terms, but we need not act.

There is a difference between intellectual love and actual love. Intellectual love considers, admires brilliance, takes a great thinker on his or her terms, but stands a bit apart. The real lover is totally committed. The skill of intellectual detachment can be abused (obviously), but it is important, because it creates a compartment where we can examine ideas on their own terms and consider if we have been wrong, even totally wrong, all along.

David Hume and how we treat him is a test for all of us: skeptics, atheists, theists, and everyone else who loves big ideas argued boldly.

David Hume is a joy to read, but (as one student said to me) tricksy. When he writes about religion, does he mean everything he says? Is he a deist messing with traditional religion? Is he a closeted atheist or agnostic? What of his defense of faith?

If Plato is hard to pin down, because he is cryptic, Hume is hard to pin down because he is clear, but abundantly! In any given passage he seems to stake a claim, but he says so much over his whole body of work, with so much nuance (yet any given passage is a model of lucidity!), that taken as a whole, he can be hard to understand.

Is Hume a skeptic? Does he think science can be grounded in reason? What of ethics?

In reading people writing about Hume, I see two dangers: seeing the Hume we wish to see or seeing a devil to be damned. Hume is too deep, too careful, and, yes, too tricksy (old rouge!) to be labeled easily. There are few (if any!) things I could say about Hume (as a non-expert) that would not be disputed based on text from the author.

Yet Hume is not empty, contradictory, or a sophist. If anything surely is true of him, he is an intellectual mood and not a list of ideas. He is a mood of a mind awake . . . someone who wants to wake us up from comfortable assumptions too easily adopted. The Enlightenment loved science and would lionize anyone, like that old fraud Benjamin Franklin, who could mix some science with moral platitudes and easy living. David Hume liked easy living, but he did not like scientism. If you thought you could go from what is (which science can find), to what ought to be, then David Hume wanted you to wake up. More than one “new” atheist needs this reminder.

Yet religious types (like I am!) should not be too comfortable, because Hume blows up the comfortable sleep of those of us who believe in miracles. He points out (more or less) that we should never accept that miracles happen, because the extraordinary claims of miracles require such extraordinary evidence that we are never going to get it. If we saw a “miracle,” then it is more likely fraud, then a miracle.

My experience has been that theists like the Hume who is “woke” on scientism and atheists like the Hume who is “woke” on miracles. God help us (!), we have to love the Hume that is. He is on nobody’s side and that is good.

If I had to guess about Hume, then I would say he is a a philosopher like Nietzsche who is hard on all his contemporaries, because everyone does not see how much they take for granted. This is marvelous . . . and makes me wish to be like Hume: a mind awake.

——————–

This post is base on a discussion at The Saint Constantine School. Thanks especially to Ms. Clark for not letting me get stuck on my favorite ideas. Come join us in discussion!

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