I’m putting together some notes for a long-term project I’m planning to share on my Substack (which you can go and look at and even subscribe to if you like! It’s a bit bare for now but I will begin posting soon). It’s going to be an attempt to explain in an interesting way, and in as clear terms as possible, what Hegel is doing in his Phenomenology of Spirit, which is a really interesting and influential book which is, unfortunately, pretty impossible to make sense of on first (or even second or third) reading, but which I do think everyone could benefit from reading.
One of the first few topics I want to discuss on the new blog is David Hume’s ideas about “perception,” and the use Hegel makes of these ideas. So I’ve been making notes on Hume’s work and I’m sharing some of these here.
In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume criticises rationalism, which is the philosophical belief that reason, rather than experience, is the best way to understand truths about the world. He shows how rationalism first of all raises doubts about the ordinary perception of the world, and then how rationalism starts to bring doubts against itself, until it ends in the absolute destruction wrought by the extreme form of scepticism he calls “Pyrrhonism.”
The problem of perception isn’t a problem until you start doing philosophy. Natural instinct tells us that what we perceive when we look around us are objects, or things, in the world. It’s such an obvious thing to say that it looks like I’m saying nothing when I say it: for example, I see a book beside me; when I say “I see a book” I am saying that “I” (the observer) sees a book (the object). It is sentences like this, over-explaining the absolutely obvious, that can make non-philosophers, perhaps forgivably, believe that philosophers are absolutely wasting their time.
In Hume’s words: “It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses” and so “we always suppose an external universe” (151*) And people get along fine in this natural belief and perhaps some never question this belief for the whole of their lives.
“But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception.” (152)
In other words, reason and philosophy come in and tell us: no, what you see when you say “I see a book” is only the “perception” of a book. Things look different to different people, and to the same person at different times, for example this book is a dark green but when I hold it to the window it looks lighter in the sunlight, so does the colour really belong to the object? And so on for all the qualities of an object. We don’t want to doubt that there’s an object there, but it seems impossible to deny that all we can ever see of the object is our perception of it, and never the object itself.
We want to believe in objects, and an external world, because to deny the world and everything in it would be to exist alone in the universe, with everything that seems to exist having reality in your own mind only. So reason asks: is there any way we can prove that there are external objects? And if you are a rationalist it will be essential that you find some rational proof. Because though it’s true that I want not to be alone in the universe, if I’m a rationalist I will refuse any belief that’s not grounded in reason.
“By what argument can it be proved, that the perceptions of the mind must be caused by external objects, entirely different from them, though resembling them …?” (152-153)
It’s a strange predicament to be in, and utterly baffling to a lot of non-philosophers. Why on earth have you put yourself in this hole? You insisted there was no external world despite the evidence of the senses, and now you want to prove there is some world behind the one we can see in order to prove that the very objects we can see exist at all!
Philosophy persists in its endeavour to find this world behind the world but ultimately finds that we can’t prove any such thing because every argument that can be made with reason can be defeated by another that reason brings against itself. In other words: scepticism arises from the use of reason. And there is no limit to scepticism. “Pyrrhonism” is a term Hume uses broadly to describe scepticism of the most extreme kind: an example that might come under this heading would be Zeno’s Achilles and the Tortoise thought-experiment that seems to prove that space, and therefore the material world, cannot really exist. Pyrrhonian scepticism is a problem for rationalism because it seems to show that, even if there is a world behind our confused world of the senses, it can’t be anything like the one that we perceive, since very basic notions, such as the concepts of time and space, are concepts for things that cannot possibly exist.
“This is a topic, therefore, in which the profounder and more philosophical sceptics will always triumph, when they endeavour to introduce an universal doubt into all subjects of human knowledge and enquiry.” (153)
Reason always turns back on itself: it looks for reasons for its reasons, and checks its own working. So every reason for the existence of something causes reason to search for possible objections, and there is always one to be found. In other words, whatever rationalism can offer, scepticism, the ungrateful child of reason, can easily mock to scorn.
Ultimately, the cycle is broken with laughter. We give up on this extreme use of reason. In Hume’s words:
“And though a Pyrrhonian may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point of action and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect, or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches. When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement …” (160)
Since the rigorous proofs of rationalism are always unsuccessful (since stronger objections can always be found), any “proofs” offered for anything must appeal to something other than pure reason. Hume suggests common sense. Proofs for Hume are a sort of proof “beyond reasonable doubt,” to use a legalistic phrase, appealing to the judgement and instincts of the one assessing the situation.
This is why Hume will use phrases like “it seems evident” in his reasoning. Ultimately we can’t get further than a preponderance of evidence about anything we learn through experience. Famously, Hume brings arguments that call into question the existence of minds, the world, space, and time, and yet at the end of the day he still believes in them.
If you are a rationalist then you need undisputed reasons for believing anything. But Hume is not a rationalist and so his belief is based on something else. As an empiricist his beliefs are based on experience. Well experience is not enough either, on its own. The whole debate between rationalists and empiricists is about what we do with the data we get from experience. Do we throw it out or make some use of it? Hume, as an empiricist, suggests that we appeal to common sense to interpret and judge what we experience in a sensible way, in a way that accords with everyday activity, with “action, and employment” (159), which demands that such things as self, world, time, and space exist.
(*Page references are to David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals published by Oxford University Press, 1975. In case you have a different edition, all the references are to parts I and II of section XII of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.)
Lee Watkins 