The quest for common sense

The quest for common sense

Kant had wanted his philosophy to be rational; he almost instinctively reacted against any form of speculation. At the same time, however, he could not give up metaphysics entirely. He had read David Hume and claimed to have been awakened by him from his own ‘dogmatic slumber’, as he put it in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), but he was deeply frightened by Hume’s scepticism. Given the fact that both philosophers regarded Newton as the essential example of what philosophy had yet to achieve, it is surprising how much their reaction to what they perceived in Newton differed. Hume, so it seems, had understood the methodological implications of Newton much more intrinsically than Kant. Where Kant was looking for rationality, Hume tried to justify empiricism, embracing from the very beginning of his work the idea of experimentalism, based on ‘experience and observation’. If we simply compare the language used by Hume to set forth his ideas, we can understand Kant’s effort to go further than Hume. Where Hume in his Treatise realized the danger of scepticism, and finally decided that human nature would not fall into scepticism’s pyrronic traps, Kant wanted to exclude the possibility of scepticism a priori. This difference is indeed a fundamental one and consequential for the widening gulf between Continental and British thought in the nineteenth century. The great antagonist of radical scepticism, to quote from Hume, is ‘ordinary life’ itself. Never would Kant have been able to be so self- confident about the robust structures of the ordinary and neither were his followers. If, however, as Hume points out, scepticism cannot be refuted by logic, but can easily be shown to be irrelevant in real life, it is plausible enough to accept that knowledge is both possible and useful, without recurring to transcendental principles. You do not have to prove the possibility of viable knowledge, if you cannot seriously doubt its existence. So what remains to be done is to examine how knowledge comes about as the elementary ingredient of what we call experience. Much more than Kant, Hume was a man of letters, but he did not avoid the intricate questions that the ugly spectre of scepticism raised. He is an empiricist, as the ultimate test for philosophy is everyday life. But this does not mean that we can simply take our perception of life, as we see it, for granted. So quite naturally Hume goes about to lay the foundations for a theory of knowledge, using the categories of ‘memory’ and ‘perception’ as his cornerstones, to what eventually would turn out to be the whole content of human experience. He complements his first principles by adding two more categories that make up the nature of perception, namely ‘ideas’ and ‘impressions’. The difference between the two is one of intensity, as Hume claims that even the remotest, the weakest impression is more present to the mind than the most immediate idea. Hume realizes that degrees of intensity in themselves are not sufficient to establish the difference he wants and needs between ideas and perception, and so he goes back to establishing experience as the realm where knowledge becomes evident.

By stressing the many aspects of scepticism, Hume has often and mistakenly been characterized as a latent sceptic himself, but his early opponents (Reid, Beattie) simply missed the point of Hume’s seemingly obsessive preoccupation with the varieties of scepticism. He wanted to eliminate it as a problem preventing a grounding of knowledge in common sense and he needed it at the same time for the very same purpose. As we have mentioned above, Hume was as much a philosopher as he was a writer; in fact, his

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first philosophical attempt, his now famous Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) written to a large extent in France was highly essayistic in style, drawing on sources like Pierre Bayle and failed to make the necessary impression in Britain. As Hume put it ‘Never Literary Attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise. It fell dead-born from the Press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ Hume was only partly right. His Treatise was read, reviewed and criticized. His critics had taken Hume’s emphasis on his own scepticism too seriously, and to a certain extent Hume was correct in his judgement that the misfortune of his Treatise was due to the manner in which it had been written, which however was exactly the reason for concentrating on certain questions of matter. Hume had basically made a great effort to avoid the mistakes he ascribed to philosophers in general:

When a philosopher has once laid hold of a favourite principle, which perhaps accounts for many natural effects, he extends the same principle over the whole creation, and reduces to it every phaenomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning.

(The Sceptic) Nevertheless his critics, Thomas Reid above all, managed to isolate one particular strand

in Hume’s philosophy, the fact, as they surmised, that he had carried the errors of Berkeley and Locke to their legitimate and mistaken consequences. The truth however is that Hume did not avoid scepticism, but was certain that human nature itself would prevent mankind from falling into the traps of Pyrronism.

If anything Hume used scepticism to fortify his version of empiricism or fallibilism. Although frequently given to highly metaphorical examples, he made it quite clear in his Treatise, as well as in his later writings, that objects of experience exist and have a constancy, even if only by the work of our imagination and not necessarily by logic. If we want to give credit to Hume’s achievement, we must acknowledge his capacity for compromise, putting together, for example, the roles of imagination and experience in order to achieve an empirical world. It is exactly the ability to work out liveable forms of compromise that makes Hume so attractive today. Philosophy in his hands became a matter of real life, without negating its inherent contradictions. We may, therefore consider him the first radical empiricist. It is simply fascinating to observe Hume first explaining that there is no necessary connection between cause and effect in the world we inhabit, only to watch him raising the problem of induction, in order to introduce the category of reason as an overriding principle. In his lifetime Hume earned a considerable reputation, but nobody would have seen him as the great British philosopher. He faced a formidable opposition in the spokesmen of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, who made their points mainly by emphasizing Hume’s scepticism. In Reid’s opinion, for example, it could only lead to the point where no distinctions were possible. Even if Hume did not immediately establish a school of disciples, his critics had to concede that large parts of his system were coherent and that an empirical approach towards an understanding of human nature was definitely the right one to chose. Without Hume neither the work of Jeremy Bentham nor that of John Stuart Mill would be conceivable and the great history of British utilitarianism would probably never have been written.

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What indeed would Bentham’s work be without its emphasis on the felicific calculus, an idea clearly derived from Hume’s theory of passions?

However, when Reid attacked Hume on his concept of ideas, he probably brought a whole new set of questions into focus the consequences of which he had no way of anticipating. To criticize Hume’s theory of ideas necessarily brought up the question of what an alternative to Hume might look like. Reid had not only failed to convince such relatively minor figures like Thomas Brown (1778–1820), a student and later the successor of DUGALD STEWART. He had also managed to discredit the project of empiricism, to which Brown did by and large and despite some misgivings want to adhere to. So there seemed to be a gap that needed to be filled, and the first one to realize this in a radical way was Thomas Hill Green (1836–82). Green, certainly aided by a general change of the intellectual climate of his time—Carlyle must be named here as the essential figure—simply declared the empiricist project to have gone bankrupt as a consequence of its own premises. Hume, according to Green, had done an equally thorough and honest job at dismantling empiricism. He made his position clear in an introduction to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. Using the arguments of Hume he tried to demonstrate that the empiricists could not account for the existence of human knowledge, without ignoring a glaring contradiction in their own argument. If the work of the mind was to accumulate sense data, and if the mind itself consisted of minute sense data, how could it ever go beyond itself? Green also went on to show that empiricism, constructing a world from perceived sense data, might end up with a nice construct, but what about its relation to the real world. Once again the old claim was made that empiricism must inevitably lead to phyrronic scepticism. Hume in the eyes of Green was

a great thinker, but now the torch had to be passed on to someone else. The most suitable candidate seemed to be—Immanuel Kant. From here on the next steps in Green’s argument begin to sound somewhat familiar. Kant’s transcendental ego is an ontological entity, in fact it must be one, because Kant had preceded Hegel. Not that Green had much use for Hegel himself, but Kant in his hands became thoroughly Platonized. While Green took on the whole of empiricism in great detail, to the point of occasionally seeming pedantic, F.H.BRADLEY embraced speculative Idealism in a totally different manner. F.H.Bradley (1846–1924) is one of the most intriguing figures of the relatively brief period of British Idealism. Unlike Green, whose refutation of empiricism kept him bound to the subject-object relationship, and his softened Hegelianism made him hypostasize the relation as such, Bradley wholeheartedly embraced the idea of the Absolute. It was not an imitation of Hegel’s Absolute, but like Hegel Bradley believed in an unfolding reality where each individual error would be overcome at a next step of improved knowledge. Bradley, in other words, sidestepped the dualism of Green and insisted upon the unity of given experience, calling it ‘a unified whole within which diverse aspects can be distinguished’. Bradley shared Green’s view that developed experience, or conscious experience, was relational, or in his term ‘mediated’, but he did not belittle the existence, or the importance of, immediate experience. In a way, the beginning of Bradley’s most fascinating work Appearance and Reality (1893) resembles in large parts Hegel’s introduction and first chapter of the Phenomenology, especially as Bradley seems to be one of the few philosophers who understood what Hegel had meant by such terms as Vermittlung and Aufhebung. He could speak of mediation, without inheriting all the problems Green encountered when talking about relations. But it is not the formal

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distinction between Green and Bradley that makes the reading of Appearance and Reality such a breathtaking adventure. It is rather the bold approach that Bradley embraces when facing the problems of his predecessors. Where Hegel sometimes plods along, Bradley, as if inspired by an Ancient Greek optimism, presents his insights, sometimes aphoristically, in sweeping intellectual movements. Thus an object of cognition is ‘real’ if it is not related to anything else, and that is exactly the way by which we are bound to understand it. Reality is absolute, even if our understanding of the real is not always up to such perfection. Nowhere in his writings does Bradley attempt to describe the Absolute. This makes sense, of course, because the Absolute as designed by Bradley is beyond description. If readers of Bradley have sensed a mystical streak in him, they must not be totally mistaken, but the real crux lies elsewhere. We can always explain that which in philosophy deals with notions of the Absolute as something close to mysticism, and leave it at that. But Bradley’s legacy shows us that the effort of understanding, and therefore the work of philosophy, cannot be satisfied in such a facile manner. Had Wittgenstein not known that the opposite was true, he would never have finished his Tractatus with the notorious statement ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

Bradley, by pitting with a Spinozistic fervour the Absolute as a necessity against our limited ways of knowledge, opened together with Continental philosophers the road towards the question, ‘How can we speak clearly about things?’ After all, both G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell had, in their early years, been admiring readers of F.H.Bradley. The sources for the linguistic and analytic turns in philosophy had many origins, and next to Frege, Carnap and Herbart, a figure like F.H.Bradley should not be forgotten.