By Lee Dise

Sixth of a seven-part series.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lee Dise is an accomplished trombonist and computer programmer, who also happens to know a great deal about things like philosophy, theology, history and related disciplines. He’s also a born-again Christian and in this multi-installment series appearing each day this week on HillFaith, Lee offers an insightful and provocative analysis of how we got from where we were to where we are today.

To recap what has been discussed so far, God was placed front and center in medieval philosophy, then progressively ignored by philosophers in Renaissance philosophy, and, by the end of the Enlightenment, considered optional.

Things didn’t go well for the Enlightenment in its final years.  The unity of philosophy from medieval times was that, within God, all knowledge was contained, and it followed that to learn more meant to get closer to God.  But, as faith in God waned, that left us only with man’s thoughts.

Confidence dissipated as philosophers struggled to replace God’s unity starting out from man’s autonomous mind.  Scientific discoveries were threatening to undermine Christian beliefs and ethics and even such humanistic ideas of man’s autonomy. Something was needed to connect the dots.  How can man’s mind possess autonomy in a mechanistic universe?

Arguably, the two greatest minds of the Enlightenment belonged to David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  Hume was more or less the father of modern empiricism, and Kant was more or less the Enlightenment’s exhaustive critic of reason and its limitations.  Both men demonstrate how far philosophy had wandered away from God.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia on Philosophy, Hume “was convinced that the only way to improve philosophy was to make the investigation of human nature central — and empirical.”  Hume simply rejected out of hand any appeals to God or authority.

Hume deeply admired Sir Isaac Newton and the manner in which Newton had described all of physics as based on only a few simple principles; he believed he might achieve the same sort of thing in philosophy.  To that end, Hume laid out sort of a skeptic’s view of the things that we can know.

And here they are:

• The only way one can know anything is through experience.
• One cannot know anything through experience, either.
• We have only a likelihood that the future will be like the past.  This is called the uniformity principle.  It is neither intuitive nor demonstrable, but something we must simply accept as true.

Hume was skeptical of any notions of causality.  He did not think we could reason our way to it.  We accept causality only because of association.  When you step out of bed, will your feet touch the floor?

In the past, the floor has always been there, but that is no guarantee it will be there tomorrow morning.  But by now, you have stepped out of your bed onto the floor a great number of times and trust it will be there, even if you cannot prove it intellectually.  This is habit.

What is missing from Hume’s philosophy?  Any confidence that truth exists. Approaching the truth seems like an application of Zeno’s paradox: You may be able to get closer and closer to truth, and it seems to work, but there are no guarantees.

His moral philosophy seems equally unsettling.  Hume is generally described as a “moral sentimentalist.”  Hume argues that reason cannot get us to moral truth, so some form of sentiment must be what does it.  We feel sympathy for our fellow man, and from that sympathy we make value judgments as to what is good or bad for him.

But Humes’ sympathy takes him where a reading of the Bible would not. Is humility good? Jesus thought so; Hume didn’t. But, quibble as we might over specific value judgments, what is inarguable is that Hume offers no reason to assume our sentiments are morally correct.

What if we don’t sympathize with our fellow man at all? And why should we? Some people enjoy cruelty; that’s just a fact.  That’s a sentiment, too. By what standard are some sentiments to be preferred over others? It seems we need some sort of transcendent authority to settle such issues; opinions carry little weight.

Where Hume’s inspiration was Newton, Kant’s was Copernicus.

Kant riffs on some of the same themes as Hume, but comes to different conclusions. In Kant’s view, reality consists of noumena — the things that exist in themselves — that present themselves to our perceptive world, filtered through our senses, as phenomena — the things as our minds perceive them to be.

If you’re on a movie set, you might see something that you perceive to be a boulder. However, in fact, it is really canvas, paint, and a wire lattice, assembled to look like a boulder.

Without being better informed, you have experienced the phenomenon of seeing a boulder, but what you actually experienced was the noumenon of a prop designed to appear that way.

We can never experience the noumenal, but only the phenomenal. We must presuppose there is an objective world outside of our perceptions, but how we perceive it may be different than what is really is.

This take on reality is called transcendental idealism.  It seems circular. We can only experience phenomena, not noumena, but if we ever could experience a noumenon, it then becomes a phenomenon. This brings uncertainty to a whole new level.

However, unlike Hume, Kant does think that our minds may correctly infer causality. Whereas Hume believed a-priori knowledge (knowledge without experience) was impossible, Kant thought that it was indeed possible because the “sensible world” is not utterly independent of the human mind.

It was not until Copernicus, once he allowed man to revolve around the sun rather than insisting the sun revolved around him, that he could make sense of astronomy. Kant decided that, if all we can do is perceive the phenomenal, then we should study the phenomenal — and we have plenty of experience in dealing with phenomenal things.  The human mind is seemingly built to make sense of our observations, and can reasonably apply past experience to phenomena of the present.

As a whole, the Enlightenment philosophers seem at their worst when talking about ethics. As for Kantian ethics, there aren’t any. Well, no, he doesn’t say it like that. Kant believed that reason is king; reason determines what is good, and bad is what happens when we act outside of reason.

Kant thought that, morally, motives are more important than consequences because only the motives are subject to reason. Therefore, you done nothing wrong when your attempts to do good things result in bad things.

Problem is, reason is a fickle mistress. She serves good or bad with the same congenial smile, and is just as likely to serve your desires as your conscience. After all, it took a fair amount of reasoning to engineer a “Final Solution” production line for the systematic slaughter of Jews and Gypsies.

But Kant was undeterred.  He argued that man’s mind is autonomous and decides what is good; God is no help to us anyway, for He is noumenal and we cannot know Him. So, man believes what he wants to believe and sets the course of his own moral agenda on his improvised principles.

What could go wrong?

Hume and Kant both sought to explain how we can know things. Yet, Hume’s empiricism led to skepticism, and Kant’s transcendental idealism led him to treat perception as reality and reason as ethics. Science is based on appearances and moral truth is based on the tapping white cane of man’s reason.

So much for enlightenment.

Next: Limits to Knowledge; No Limits to Depravity

Previously: 

Sunday – “Christian Belief and the Consequences of Ideas”

Monday – “Western Civilization as Cultural Synthesis.”

Tuesday – “From the Fragments of Empire, a New Beginning”

Wednesday – “Late Medieval Philosophy and the Basic Questions”

Thursday – “Renaissance, Reformation and Humanism“

Friday – “Man’s Reason on the Throne”

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