Hume’s criticism of the principle of causality: causality is not anything real, it cannot impose impressions of us; there is no legitimate idea on what has no impact on us.
Still, we have a sort of tendency to think in terms of cause and effect. For Hume, there are three orders of factors that continuously lead to this; repetition, custom and ”a memetic element”.
So we cannot find anybody who doesn’t have this custom of cause and effect; but Hume thinks that this is not enough of a proof to show that cause and effect exists.
Let’s take the hypothesis of a man, such as Adam, the first man, was created in the full vigour of understanding but without experience; he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the impact of the first.
If Adam enters a billiard club, he would never be able to infer that the movement of the second ball is caused by the first, because Adam lacks experience of that ball.
However, if he starts to spend time with other people, he will learn of that custom too.
He chooses Adam in order to subtlely refer to an ongoing figure of thought introduced by several prior authors, Locke, Leibnitz and Spinoza – the man without external experience but with full possession of the mind and its faculties (this figure goes back to a mental experiment by Ibn Sina, the floating man thought experiment).
It asks us to think of a man who is basically a mind only, there is no perception or input.
Schelling, teaching at Munich, wants to introduce his students to Kant. In his lecture, there is as much discussion of Hume as there is of Kant. Schelling addresses this problem of Adam directly. ”Well, let’s take Adam in the book of Genesis”
Adam is created as an adult with not past experience, but in very comfortable conditions. He just has to respect some rules which God gives him; such as not eating from one tree.Schelling says that if we read the biblical Adam, there is a very clear notion of cause and effect in him. Adam clearly understands that he is disrespecting the rule, and that there will be punishment.
Thus, Hume’s example actually demonstrates the opposite of what he wants to say; that a person with no prior experience actually has a notion of cause and effect.
His argument is that cause and effect is a sort of instinct of the human mind, the human mind automatically adopts the principle of cause and effect.
It is not a result of having sensible external experience.
In his argument, after having mentioned the case of Adam, Schelling adds another example where he introduces a referens to the text ”philosophos autodidactos”, which is about a lonely child on an island who develops all philosophical concepts himself, by Ibn Tufail. The boy develops talents in cooking, building, geometry and begins having knowledge of the causes. After becoming 30, he is therefore able to even teach the man who comes to him on the island.
(what is growth?)
This text was famous in arabic (inspired Maimonides), and was translated by ****, who found an old manuscript from the 14:th century, and which his son published after he died. This text was quoted by John Locke, and inspired Robinson Crusoe.
If you look at the text philosophically, it is an elaboration of Ibn Sina’s floating man thought experiment, and thus is also quite similar to Descartes and Anselm (who were likely also inspired by commentaries on, or of, Ibn Sina.
Adam thus has a clear notion of cause and effect. Schelling criticises Hume, by using something Hume uses to criticise Locke, and in turn finds Kant’s position.
Schelling introduces a third example; the psychology of the child. Looking even at a child, at its most basic form of experience; when a child hears a sound, and turns its head to the origin of that sound, that is likely because it is in some sense aware of the principle of cause and effect. It hears the effect, and is looking for the cause.
In Aristotle’s book Alpha, when a philosopher does the history of philosophy, he does it in a philosophical way, with his own positions. So the thoughts of another thinker serves a function to his own understanding of ”The Philosophy”. So Schelling constructs a sort of history that explains why Kant comes to understand what he does.
But Schelling also incorporates his own criticism of Kant in the lecture. Kant, Hegel and Fichte, and then his own philosophy.
The text is emphatically personally schellings, but he tries to see what is actually new in Kant compared to before.
Kant takes Hume’s criticism seriously, but does not want to give up the principle of knowledge, which needs the principle of cause and effect.
Hume says that we have a habit to make inference, but it’s not something that is really in our mind, because the mind is not stable.
Kant says however, that constant habits are something real, but real in the subject. So the principle of causality is a structure of the subject that is the condition for any experience to be the case.
So if one wears blue lenses, you see everything in different shades of blue, or in a blue-ish way. This is not because everything has a blue-ish shade, but is rather the way in which we see. It is the way through which we come to know. So the object of experience through which we can formulate scientific theory, is always a formulation of an input coming from outside.
In the text, they use supersensual, but it just means ”what is behind the sensibility”. Ie. What Kant calles the Noumen. The reality behind our experience. This input however is framed by the categories that are inherent in the subject, and this framing gives rise to the object of knowledge, which are the phenomena of experience.
These have an element of subjectivity in them, but as structures of the mind as such, of a transcendental mind.
So the knowledge of reality is possible, but we have to change of our notion of reality, the subject co-creates reality, the phenomena are co-produced in a way which is impossible to disentangle. You cannot disentangle Noumena and Phenomena – intuition without concept, our knowledge would be blind, but concept without intution, our knowledge would be empty. This emptyness is overcome by a synthesis.
For Kant, these too lines of thought come from Baumgarten (rationalism) and Hume (empiricism).
Rationalism gives us empty knowledge, and empiricism gives us a grasp of reality, but since it has not access to universal categories, one cannot develop a science because everything is singular.
Thus, Kant presents himself as the one that overcomes both of the two mutually exclusive traditions, and minimises the weaknesses of them.
This point is interesting, because in a lecture on the history of philosophy, Schelling presents Kant as a revolution in philosophy, and presents it as being motivated by previous discussion in philosophy and the necessity to overcome their limits.
Thus, the philosophy of Kant is systematic, but makes an incredibly strong claim in the history of philosophy, that all prior schools of philosophy were either rationalistic or empirical. And these have to be rejected by Kant’s third way.
Schelling’s criticism focuses on Kant’s first critique, the critique of Pure Judgement. What Schelling says needs to be qualified by the later Kant however, because Kant himself still developed his own philosophy towards the end, to refine his own viewpoint.
These ”X”, how can you talk of something that is really entirely unknown, so in a way, it is not really unknown, because if it was really unknown, it would be outside the horison of my knowledge, and it is not. So there is a lack of justification of the position of the unknown ”X”. If we cannot apply our concept to the noumenon, then the noumenon has no reason to be even posited, because it cannot even be thought.
Principle of economy: don’t posit principles if it lacks reason or effect. (Ockham’s razor).
The very fact that he develops his analysis of phenomenon, in a way that presupposes the thing in itself, acknowledges the thing-in-itself as knowable, as a hypothesis that you somehow have access to. Thus the structures of the subject are also a thing in itself.
”Even though if I think from the perspective of phenomena, I can never confound subject and object.”
The critcism of metaphysics in Kant, is successful as being historically connotated, as being a critique to Baumgarten, but is not a really finished critique of metaphysics as such.
If you look at the second critique, the realm of moral duty, brings us in contact with the real world however.
The lecture does not really say much about Kant in reality, but Schelling wants to qualify what the notion of experience is, and the role of presupposition that makes experience possible.
If Kant had read someone like Aristotle or Plotinus, he would not have considered himself to be finding an end-point of metaphysics.
Hume’s notion of the subject fails to ground itself according to Kant. Insofar you speak of subject, you need the kind of structure that Kant posits. Each subject has however a kind of empirical self, which Kant spends a lot of time in the Anthropology, which is what creates the kind of differences in custom.
Conviction is not scientific, but is a description of what a certain group or people has as some kind of reoccuring again. The empirical subject changes at any whim.
All the people in a community share in the transcendental subject, but also share in a kind of cultural subject, a specific brand of the empirical subject.
The transcendental subject is not just the subject that all human’s share in, but also the subject that all rational beings share. So if there are conscious aliens, they share in it too.
Conviction cannot be transcribed into the categories, but that this concept doesn’t translate over doesn’t mean that it is a necessary concept in another science.
Kant is very unsatisfied with this, because he does not want to leave the realm of conviction like Hume. This is most evident in Kant’s Anthropology.
Hume’s concept of testimony and his feeling of pride; which he is not the first to analyse, Mandeville and Adam Smith.
History is something entertaining, so it is particularly apt for women.
Women are more instinctive than men, and thus what is more sudden or without epistemic ground, ie. History for Hume, because it has no real knowledge on anything because history cannot really happen in Hume’s system.
However, it can give a kind of fun knowledge, but not anything that is actually useful. What is instinctual and immediate is accessible to and more appreciated by women.
Pride explains a lot of things, a conviction, which is a custom and a habit, that doesn’t really exist in reality. It only moves one subjectively, and doesn’t really move me in reality. Which relates back to Hume’s problem of the self. Hume makes general remarks on human nature, and the very concept he develops of the human self, prevents the possibility of developing any sound theory at all.
If the self is an association of random things, there is no deeper kernal to it, no nature of a human at all.
One could make an analysis for the conditions of the possibility of pride, and one could realise that this is a kind of contradiction to his previous claims.
However, Hume would grant this, and say that this is only something that is a critique on a psychological level but not something that explains reality.
Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
Hegel would consider it necessary that we need to look at the whole picture, ”the truth is the whole” (die Wahrheit sin die Ganze).
Another problem with Hegel is that you have to start from the beginning (der An-fang), and also getting yourself a whole from that. Now how can one construct a beginning? His philosophy is an attempt to overcome this issue.
This is a text he wrote in one shot, after having finished the phenomenology of Spirit, his first major philosophical work.
When Hegel passes away in 1831, he was busy with the second edition of the phenomenology of spirit.
Does the word phenomenology relate to something similar to Husserl?
(Valence, a professor who was here and made the psycho-analytical society, was one of the first to introduce Heidegger to the teaching in Leuven, and he made a work titled Husserlian phenomenology and Hegelian phenomenology where he says that the surface they are the opposite, but in reality they are the same.)
Hegel writes at the very beginning of the 19:th century, Germany. He always wanted to write in an accessible way, so he uses the meanings of the word as the common speakers tend to take them when they speak. So a lot of words in Hegel are taken from a theological glossary, and so his writing is very similar to that of how people really spoke after the translation of the bible.
And so phenomenology is the study of what appears. The study of how things manifest.
Geist is a word that is very difficult to translate into English, because it is a term that is charged with a lot of connotations in German, that does not translate. Geist is all over the place in Hegel (whilst Heideggers Dasein is very specific), but the title can be vaguely translated as ”How the spirit, or the mind, manifests itself”.
The very idea that the truth emerges only when you are able to look at the whole, this applies a fortiori to a phenomenology and thus also to the preface.
In the case of Hegel, try to go on even if something is left unclear and just get to the end, because a lot of things become clear when you get a view of the whole. Just like his philosophy implies.
A lot of texts from Hegel are known via notes taken by students, and this creates a lot of big dilemmas. In the sense, that the most reliable are those that copied literally everything he said, without understanding it. Hegel was extremely obscure in teaching, and was quite bad at talking. He had a very strong Swabish accent, Tübingen, and was near incomprehensible in speech.
So, Hegel is an author that requires some patience in order to understand.
Hegel had been translated as saying that everything that is rational, and that everything that is real is rational in his Elements of the philosophy of Right; better translation: what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.
Was vernunftig ist, das ist virklich, und was virklich is, das ist vernunftig.
The brothers Grimm, were too learned professors from Göttingen, who wrote a vocabulary of the German language in several volumes, the Grimms Wörterbuch. It’s a fantastic research that gives a glimpse of the standard German for Hegel.
Virklich means real, but in the sense of what is produced, it is becoming. It is about something that works. That produces effects, that has an impact. Not everything that is has an impact and produces an effect.
Vernunftig does not just mean rational in a kind of abstract meaning, but is about what can be grasped and be traced back to a necessary principle of itself. What is intrinsically, and necessarily, coherent with its principle.
What is constitually with a necessary internal logic that connects it to its principal, that is virklich, it has effects. It doesn’t remain random or accidental. And what produces effects and has an impact with an internal necessity, is also a sign that it has an inner logic.
The meaning that Hegel uses is does a lot more common-sensical. What has an inner logic that connect it to its own principle (genuine principle), will always have an effect that follows from it. What is vernunftig is something you grasp in its own structure, and can be brought to its principle.
Principle is what is for Aristotle, the cause, what answers the question of why something is what it is. A thing is what it is because it has a certain structure, so the principle is its cause.
What is grasped, is never without effect on reality.
Anything that has an effect on reality, cannot lack an inner logic.
So it remains a rationalistic account of the world, but is more sophisticated than saying that everything that is thought is real.
If these inner logics is missing, something can be real, but is instead accidental. So, for Hegel, today you could have something real but that lacks effects. This would be an idea that has already been overcome by the historical process. Or something like a tautology which has no effects, but is clearly real.
In another work, Logic (Hegel’s name for metaphysics), he creates a triad from which everything else derives, which are: 1. Being. 2. Nothing. 3. Becoming.
How can one move from Being, to non-being, to becoming?
Think about Aristotle, we look at everything to the extent that it is (Intention & Extension: how applicable a concept is to be predicated). Because Being is predicated on everything that is, thus the intention becomes minimal, that at the end, it tells us nothing. Therefore Being converts into Nothing (nothing of intention). And how can you pass from the contradiction between Being and Nothing. This is through the process of Becoming, no longer an empty Being, but a Being that becomes full through the elements of Meaning.
Even these abstract notions at the beginning of Hegels work, can be clearly explained in metaphors. Try to indulge into the metaphor of the fruit.
If you look at an apple tree in the spring, you say that there are flowers in it, then some weeks later, the flower’s fades away and a bud later appears. Now what you have at the beginning, we have Thesis, the starting point, which is then denied by something else that is different from it, the bud, or the Antithesis – the passage from thesis to negation is the process of alienation, something that is different from itself in which it no longer recognises itself – but the bud is further negated, and we see the Synthesis in the fruit. Can we say that the truth of the apple tree is the Apple? Hegel thinks many people say this: the apple is however only the overcoming and maintaining what is left of the former self. This in turn leads to Aufhebung, Sublation.
The truth is only the whole process, which seems the most clear in the fruit, but only if we can recognise the flower and the bud in the fruit. Thus, one actually knows the truth of the tree already in the flower. However, the flower is certainly only an early step, and we cannot isolate it from its future.
This metaphor clearly illustrates Hegel’s movement in terms of doing philosophy. Hegel always tries to conceive this process as a living process, which are steps of the whole.
Thus you can judge the tree from the fruit, only if you understand the fruit as the whole process of the tree.
The concept is something static, the Truth is always something ”virklich”, and we thus have to grasp a process through the concept, as the concept is only a moment in the process.
There is a clear criticism towards the end what Hegel calls positivistic knowledge in the sciences. Critiquing certain earlier philosopher in order to grasp the whole, which they did not, by not paying attention to the distinctions that are part of the whole. If one does not pay attention to the necessary mediation between one stage to another, one cannot grasp the Whole: then philosophy becomes like a night in which all cows are black.
Hegel wants to vindicate the legitimacy for philosopy to be called science, because no other sciences look at the whole. The only Wissenschaft, is philosophy, whilst the others are but sciencia.
Pay attention the mediation between starting point and conclusion.