PHILOSOPHY - David Hume

The 18th century writer David Hume is one of the world's great philosophical voices because he discovered a key fact about human nature: that we are more influenced by our feelings than by reason. This is, on some level, possibly a great insult to our self-image, but Hume thought that if we could learn to deal well with this surprising fact, we could be both individually and collectively much calmer and happier than if we denied it. . Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, into a family long established but far from wealthy. He was the second child and from the beginning it was clear that one day he would need to find a job, but nothing seemed to suit him.

He tried law, the vocation of his father and his older brother, but soon decided that it was: "a laborious profession, requiring the drudgery of a lifetime." He was considered for academic posts at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, but did not get either job. So, he set out to become a public intellectual, someone who would make money selling books to the general public. It was quite difficult. His first book, A Treatise on Human Nature, for which he had high hopes, was poorly received. "Never was a literary attempt more unfortunate than my Treatise," he wrote. "He fell dead from the press, without achieving such distinction as to provoke even a murmur among the fans." But Hume continued at it, realizing that the fault lay largely in the way he had expressed his ideas.

And by tenaciously training himself to write in a more accessible and popular way, he finally found an audience. His later works: books of popular history and collections of elegant essays were the best sellers of the time. As he used to say, not without some pride: "The money the booksellers gave me far exceeded anything previously known in England; I would become not only independent but opulent." Humes'

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is based on a single, powerful observation: that the key thing we need to do well in life is feeling rather than rationality. It sounds like a strange conclusion. We normally assume that what we need to do is train our mind to be as rational as possible, to engage in evidence and logical reasoning and to be committed to keeping our feelings from getting in our way.

But Hume insisted that, whatever goal we pursue, reason is the slave of passion. We are more motivated by our feelings than by any of the comparatively weak results of analysis and logic. Few of our core convictions had been driven by rational investigations of the facts. We decide whether someone is admirable, what to do with our free time, what constitutes a successful career, or who to love based on feeling above everything else. Reason helps a little, but the decisive factors are linked to our emotional life, to our passions, as Hume calls them. Hume lived in a time known as the Age of Reason, when many claimed that the glory of human beings lies in their rationality, but for Hume a human is simply another type of animal.

Hume was deeply attentive to the curious way in which we very often reason from our convictions. We consider an idea to be pleasant or threatening and only for that reason we declare it true or false. Reason only arrives later to support the original attitude. However, what Hume did not believe was that all feelings are acceptable and equal. That is why he firmly believed in the education of passions. People have to learn to be more kind, more patient, more comfortable with themselves and less fearful of others. But to learn these things they need an educational system that addresses feelings instead of reason.

This is why Hume believed so deeply in the role and importance of public intellectuals. These were people who (unlike the university professors whom Hume greatly disliked) had to inspire a passion-based attachment to ideas, wisdom, and insight. Only if they succeeded would they have money to eat. That's why they had to write well, use colorful examples, and resort to wit and charm. Hume's idea is that if you want to change people's beliefs, reasoning with them like a normal

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professor will not be the most effective strategy. He points out that we have to try to adjust feelings through sympathy, reassurance, good example, encouragement and what he called "art." And only later, for a few determined souls, should we try to make a case based on facts and logic.

A key place where Hume made use of the idea of ​​the priority of feeling over reason was in relation to religion. Hume did not believe it was rational to believe in God. That is, he did not believe that there were compelling logical arguments for the existence of a deity. He himself seems to have floated between soft agnosticism (there may be a god, I'm not sure) and soft theism (there is a god, but I don't much care if there is). However, the idea of ​​a vengeful god, someone willing to punish people in the afterlife for not believing in him in this one, he considered a cruel superstition.

Hume's central point is that religious belief is not a product of reason. Therefore, arguing for or against on the basis of facts misses the point. Trying to persuade someone to believe or not to believe with well-honed arguments seemed particularly foolish to Hume. That is why he was a prominent defender of the concept of religious tolerance. We should not treat those who disagree with us on religion as rational people who have made an error in reasoning and therefore need to be corrected, but rather as passionate, emotion-driven creatures who should be left alone. in peace as long as they do it. the same with us.

Trying to have a rational discussion about religion was for Hume the height of folly and arrogance. Hume was what is technically known as a skeptic, someone committed to doubting many of the common sense ideas of the time. One of the things he doubted was the concept of what is technically called "personal identity." The idea we have that we can understand ourselves and have a more or less graspable and lasting identity that runs through life. Hume pointed out that there is no such thing as a "central self." "When I enter more intimately into what I call 'myself,'" he explained, "I always stumble upon some particular perception or another, of heat or cold, light or shadow, love or hate, pain or pleasure.

I can never catch myself." "self" at any time without a perception and can never observe anything other than perception. Hume concluded that we are not actually the clear and definable people that reason tells us that we are and what we appear to be when we look in the mirror. or we casually use that great and rather misleading word "I." However, despite being skeptical about temperament, Hume was very happy that we retained most of our common values. "Sensory beliefs because they are what help us to make our way in the world. Trying to be rational about everything is a special kind of crazy.

Hume was making a slight attack on Descartes. The French philosopher had died 60 years before Hume was born. But his intellectual influence was still very much alive: he had maintained that we should discard any fruit of the mind that was not perfectly rational. But Hume proposed that almost nothing we do is truly rational. And yet he ventured that most beliefs are justified simply because they work. They are useful to us. They help us move forward with what we want to do. A proof of a belief is not its demonstrable truth but its usefulness. Hume was offering a sometimes badly needed corrective to our fascination with prestigious but actually not very important logical puzzles.

As opposed to academic niceties, he was a skeptical philosopher who defended the common. meaning Defending the everyday and the wisdom of the ignorant and the ordinary. Hume showed great interest in the traditional philosophical topic of ethics: a puzzle about how humans can be good. He maintained that morality is not about having moral ideas, but about having been trained from an early age in the art of decency through emotions. Being good means acquiring good habits of feeling. Hume was a great advocate of qualities like wit, good manners, and sympathy because these are the things that make people pleasant to be with outside of any rational plan for being good.

He was greatly surprised by the fact that a person (and here again he was thinking of Descartes) could be ostensibly rational and yet not so pleasant. Because being able to follow complex arguments or deduce trends from data does not make you sensitive to the sufferings of others nor does it make you skilled at keeping your temper. These qualities are the work of our feelings. So if we want people to behave well, what we have to do is rethink education. We have to influence the development of feelings. We have to encourage benevolence, gentleness, pity and shame through the seduction of the passionate sides of our nature, without giving dry and logical sermons.

Hume's philosophy always emerged as an attempt to answer a personal question. what is a good life? He wanted to know how he could best influence his own character and that of those around him. And interestingly, for a philosopher, he didn't feel that the traditional practice of Philosophy could really help. Although he was a scholar, he was very much a man of the world. For some years he was adviser to the British ambassador in Paris, who welcomed his astute wisdom. He was much loved by those around him, known to the French as 'Le Bon David', a humane, kind and witty conversationalist, much in demand as a dinner companion. he he insisted he.

This is how Hume lived. Not in the intellectual isolation of a monastery or an ivory tower, but deeply integrated into the company of other humans, dining. He especially liked roast chicken, chatting about love and career, and playing backgammon. Hume died in Edinburgh in August 1776, at his house in St. Andrew's Square. His doctor wrote about his final hours to Adam Smith, Hume's best friend for many years. Hume is still something quite outstanding. A philosopher, aware of how much Philosophy can learn from common sense.