The Weekly You Demon, first in my head. The 12-year-old boy went to college. The skeptic was jovial and kind. When he published his history of England, he went backward, starting with recent events.
He was a staunch atheist. Well, I'm not sure he was staunch about anything, except maybe his food intake, which made him hugely fat. Now, in his defense, he may have had some sort of thyroid or the kind of condition I'm not sure, but given the fact that he was just the consumption hundreds, I'm not sure anyone knows for sure. But anyway, so he wasn't staunch about anything, but he was at least unapologetically an atheist.
This was at an age when such a thing took guts. When it cost a person job opportunities, it made him a symptom of an outcast. Such was David Hugh, a man so novel in his thinking and powerful in his prose that a free speech proponent, like Thomas Jefferson, suppresses his work, by making sure only in a bridge copy of Hugh's history made into the University of Virginia Library. Hugh blasted potholes in both lanes on the Bacon Descartes Modern Freeway, and keep in mind that's one of the themes of this existence strikes back project, is that my journey has two primary lanes, the Bacon Lane, Francis Bacon, and the Descartes Lane, René Descartes, Hume, pretty much demolished both of them.
So, on a Bacon Lane, Hume was unapologetically skeptical about science. Europeans discovered the first black swan shortly before Hume was born, thereby destroying 1,000 years of European empirical evidence that said black swan, that the black swan was just a myth. Now, Hume pointed out that was harder the first time empirical evidence or science was wrong, and it wouldn't be the last. He pointed out the problem of induction, and said no amount of evidence can produce certainty about anything, no matter what Francis Bacon may have thought, and the problem of induction has not been answered to this day.
All right, now let's look at the Descartes lanes a little more involved. First off, we have to look at movement. So, if you put big potholes in the Bacon Lane or the Modern Freeway, you tore up Descartes Lane entirely, and Daniel Kahn would have to repave it, though unsuccessfully, I'll deal with that in later essays. Now, you might recall that Cartesian dualism had an incredible problem.
It couldn't explain how mind and body interact, and indeed, given its premises concluded that they don't interact. My mind tells my left hand to go up and it goes up, but not in Descartes' world. Descartes' world consists solely of quote-unquote extension. Body's taken up space.
Movement doesn't exist, at least not as a product of human agency. Quote, pure extension is pure passivity, unquote, and that's a tangial zone, explaining how this stuff came together in the modern world. So, in Descartes' world or among the Cartesian, some power or energy other than the mind was causing movement. Descartes' disciples and followers struggled to explain it just like Descartes' did, but eventually a semi-mystical and deeply religious Cartesian, Marbranche, explained it.
God causes all movement. We must, in Marbranche, judge things by the ideas that represent them. He's a Cartesian, after all. But we have no physical idea of energy, power, and causation.
You can't pick up and see cause. He then proceeded through a lucid and logical explanation that isn't relevant here, but pre-involved, but not relevant. He proceeded to show that the only way to explain movement is to attribute it to God. Movement, including Marbranche, occurs when God wills it.
When we see the cue ball hit the eight ball and the eight ball roll into the pocket, that's God causing it. In philosophy, it's called occasionalism. Now this greatest of Descartes' disciples died in 1715, Hume, headed born in 1711. The toddler Hume took the baton from the dead Marbranche and ran with it.
Marbranche's conclusion about movement and causation became Hume's starting point. Hume observed that Marbranche was right. We can't see, quote unquote, cause. We can't see bodies, but we can't see quote unquote, power.
Matter takes up space, but quote unquote, energy doesn't. Now I put those three things, cause, power, energy, and quotes because Marbranche and Hume effectively did. Marbranche said the existence of such things is unknown to us, so they must be the agents of God. Hume said the existence of such things is unknown to us, so they're unknown to us, and that's that.
If we don't even know what caused power and energy are, how do we apply such operations to God? So here's a hypothetical conversation. Marbranche, Johnny is flinfloxing the ball. We don't know what flinfloxing is.
Therefore, it must be God who is doing the flinfloxing. Hume responds, that's stupid as shit. Hume obviously wins. Hume removed God from the Cartesian gender tower and it came crashing down.
Let's look at what we did with matter in our bodies. We just as Hume demolished any nobility of movement caused power energy. He also helped demolish the nobility of matter at all. Okay, now just a little bit of history here.
It's actually pretty relevant. So really this is good about Hume and some other things, but this part here is relevant to understanding Western philosophy in the modern world. John Locke disagreed with a card's assertion that the mind is the beginning of reality. The mind, Locke said, is merely a blank slate that upon birth starts to receive sense impressions from which it builds its understanding of reality.
Matter, therefore, is the material of the mind. That's why people refer to Locke as a materialist, as opposed to Descartes, who founded idealism. While then the Irishman, George Barkley, came along and he defended Descartes by pointing out that we don't perceive things. We only perceive things characteristics.
That green thing has four legs, a flat surface and a horizontal surface. Our mind combines those things to declare chair. We don't, in other words, perceive chair. We only perceive the things that comprise the chair and therefore the chair itself doesn't really exist.
And since all things are mere combinations of other components that we perceive in relation to such other things, nothing really exists. Everything is just our ideas. Our mind, soul, is the only reality. Barkley's logic was unassailable.
Years later, Samuel Johnson would be confronted with the logic by his biographer, Boswell. And Boswell said he can't refute it. And Johnson said refute it, thus laid he kicked a rock. Suddenly, obviously, the matter exists.
I just kicked it. Anyway, Barkley's logic, the logic was unassailable and Hume knew it. He said Barkley's arguments quote, admit of no answer and produce no conviction, unquote. Hume then did the same thing he did with movement.
He accepted Barkley's conclusion about the non-existence matter, just like he accepted the model of Rochester's conclusion about the unknowability of movement. But he pointed out that if matter doesn't exist because it is merely a concept of our mind, the mind doesn't exist because it's merely a concept of the mind. And the words of one contemporary wit who suggested that everyone just drop this increasingly ridiculous controversy, quote, no matter, never mind, unquote. All right, here's Hume's bottom line.
Why I like him. My journey is built on the need for certainty. Descartes sought the certainty of mathematics. Descartes sought the certainty produced by empirical studies.
Hume didn't need certainty. He certainly didn't need the certainty of faith. I mean, he wasn't Staunjathius. He didn't need the certainty of the new philosophy.
He was obviously just a laid-back guy. I mean, by all accounts, he was ugly a sin and it didn't seem to bother him. When his famous philosophical work that arguably became the most important work of modern philosophy came out, it went nowhere. No one noticed it didn't, said Hume even quote and cite a murmur among the zealots, unquote.
Because he's also in that philosophy work with you, a lot of explanations why God doesn't exist. And I'm not that acquainted with those, but my understanding base of what I have right there, they're not very profound. He doesn't address a lot of issues, but no matter. I was going to redo Hume's self-assessment of his personality.
I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions of command of temper, of an open social and cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of immity and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. The testimony of his friends, many of which made up the core of the Scottish enlightenment, supports the self-assessment. They said he was just a real laid-back decent guy.
He liked to hang out and drink beer and just talk to people. Now, Hume's important because he's proved that a person can reject modernity on its own grounds. He is like Pascal, an anti-modernity champion. But on my Pascal, he wasn't religious.
I mean, far from it. And that's important. The battle against modernity is a religious war, make no doubt about it, but it can't be fought on religions grounds. Hume might have been the first to show how the battle can be fought.
As always, thanks for listening.