Kant, Hume, and Tradition

Kant’s "Critique of Judgment" contains an implicit criticism of the conservative notion of tradition as embodied in the thought of people like Edmund Burke. This is most likely not a coincidence, as just before this section he has criticized Burke's essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful. The criticism comes in the form of reflecting on how the thought of previous individuals influences those in the present day. Kant maintains that the example of thinkers in the past, classical authors, is helpful and valuable, but, contra what Burke would talk about, he doesn't see the way this influence works as just being the transmission of values which the next generation has to recognize.

This also goes back to Hume's conservatism, which Burke drew on. Hume's thought in philosophy was one of the prime targets, if not the prime target, of Kant's critiques, and his political philosophy largely stemmed from it. One of Hume's basic ideas was that constant connection of two things, such as one billiard ball hitting another billiard ball, does not mean that, for example, you can say that one billiard ball has 'caused' the other billiard ball to go in this other direction. The word 'cause' here is the key. Hume isn't denying the physical reality of what's happening. Instead, he's criticizing teleological ideas, stemming from Aristotle but interpreted by Christian thinkers, that see causes linked to god's will in everything. This was the standard model of understanding how the world worked up until the 18th century, and the Enlightenment only modified this by suggesting that these causes were seeded, so to speak, by God in the beginning of time, a God who then no longer intervened in the world, letting it run on its own. In this way, you had the idea of intentional causes, but without the God who established them being a factor. This became a problem for this way of thinking.

So Hume, who was an atheist, wanted to dispense with causes altogether, in order to make the world more logically consistent. Things just happened. However, in putting this forward, he also put forward an extreme empiricism. This is the idea that we know about the world, ourselves, everything, through sense data and through our mind's processing of sense data. This is opposed to rationalism, which says that we can figure things out in our minds independent of sense data. Empiricism, here, also means that the only statements which can be regarded as true are those which are based on empirical proof, based on the observation of phenomenon, rather than a statement being true because we've figured something out in our minds which corresponds to reality independent of sense data.

Now, in terms of Hume taking this to an extreme, if you deny all rational knowledge, and purely go by empirical proofs, you could get things like the idea that we know that the sun comes up everyday only because we've seen it happen time and time again. Rational thinking about the earth orbiting around the sun, the rotation of the earth, and other things of that sort would go against the strict empirical proof, in that in the days before we actually had technology which could directly see this we had to only rely on rational thought combined with empirical proof, not on empirical proof alone.

This is the problem with Hume's position. Sure, constant connection of phenomenon, like one billiard ball hitting the other, does not imply a teleological cause, but that doesn't mean that we can't, through our powers of reason, deduce other things about the act. Constant connection not implying causation, and the rejection of the idea of causation in general, has become a cornerstone of the scientific method, I should say, but this is combined with rational thought about why exactly things happen which does not draw on thinking involving the jargon of causes.

So, it looked like Hume, in destroying the idea of teleological causes, left people in a lurch through also destroying the power of reason, or of anything not empirical, to make sense of reality itself. This feeds directly into Hume's politics. So if we can't know anything rationally, but only empirically, what can we know? Hume, in this, has a kind of proto-utilitarian bent. First, we know what we know because experience has proven it to be true, such as that the sun rises every day, even though we can't explain why exactly it does so. Secondly, we know what we know because this empirical knowledge enables us to navigate the world in effective ways: we're able to accomplish things in the world based on this empirical knowledge, and in so doing, this knowledge is proven to be valid.

Now, it's not just one person who is doing this, who is making all of these empirical judgments and applying them to the world, finding out by trial and error what works, but all of society. Not only that, but society has been collectively doing this for a very long time. This, for Hume, has lead to the build up of a kind of cultural knowledge about empirical reality and about what works, which has been passed on from generation to generation, and which could be called tradition. Now, here's the thing: because it's hard for individuals themselves to form an empirical worldview which deals with everything, through their own experience, and because they benefit quite a deal from what not only other people in society but other people throughout history have figured out, this means that we have to trust the opinions of others for quite a lot of our information. So far so good, but in Hume's universe the ultimate nature of reality, of all of the things in the world, is unknowable, and so this means that there's a stark choice that people face: either accept all of tradition as being valid, deferring to it, or face an unknowable universe. The role of the individual in reasoning things out, in making their own ideas, in figuring things out beyond their own meagre empirical contributions to the accumulated cultural whole, is very small.

The way which this may be a problem is illustrated when we take this concept out of the realms of things like science and into the realms of morality and more pure politics. For Hume, traditional knowledge of how to act, what you should do, what you shouldn't do, how society is constructed, is an absolute authority, which individuals should absolutely defer to, and not question. If they dispute it at all, it should be with gradual, minor, changes. Again, in this, there's a choice between tradition, containing at least an imperfect truth, and complete nothingness---an irrational world which is uncontrollable through any other means. Empirical truth here, which in the scientific method is supposed to be freeing and liberating, becomes in Hume's world something which destroys freedom, with empiricism being set up as the new god to which all should worship.

Kant objects to this. To bring it back to Kant's implicit critique, in looking at traditional sources of authority, Kant wants to restore the importance of thinking for yourself, while not rejecting the usefulness of the thought of people who have come before. To do so, he points out that every classical author dealt with the issues of their time in a full way, by using their reason, and their mind in general, and applying it to life. Therefore, part of the value of traditional authorities is not simply the content of their writings in a basic sense, but also because in reading them, and seeing their method, you yourself are taught how to think. Take Aristotle, who Kant doesn't use as an example but who could very well be used as one. He uses the example of classical mathematicians in this, saying that you read them, or should read them, because in reading them you follow their reasoning and learn their methods of mathematics. Similarly, reading old philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, there's a difference between accepting their conclusions in a literal sense and appreciating the reasoning which has taken them to those conclusions. Reading these writings thousands of years later, in a very different cultural context, we might not agree with their literal conclusions, but we can take the method of analysis that they used to get to them and apply it to our world in order to make sense of it.

There's a saying in some of the philosophy of the Anglo-American conservative movement that tradition has to be renewed in each generation. This is part of what Kant's talking about, but in a much more explicit and detailed way. The way out of Hume's dilemma is that we ourselves can do what the sources of tradition do in a way which goes to the root causes of things like human behavior, ethics, morals. Knowing why we do something, and then applying this knowledge to behavior, renews ethics, renews behavior, and passing on the method of this knowledge helps to ensure that other people will go through the process of renewing it in the future as well.

Kant sees empiricism such as Hume's as really just floating on the surface of reality. In reality, we don't actually just defer to things that we've been taught in a mechanical way. We make actual choices in our lives, and our choices indeed have a high rational content, although they're not purely rational. We think about principles, we deliberate about what to do, when we set out to build something or accomplish some big task we think about it and plan it out--we apply our minds to the outside world in a hundred different ways in our daily lives, instead of just blindly applying principles that have been passed down to us. We actively navigate the world, and in this sense recreate it not only every generation, but every day, but not totally. Kant is sensitive to the limitations of personal ability, and implicitly the cooperative nature of knowledge, but the cooperative nature of knowledge here is more due to the division of labor, to some people specializing in one thing rather than another. Fundamentally, the mental capacity to do all of the work in society is present in everyone. Some people may be more talented in one thing or another, but fundamentally they all share the same basic mental framework.

There's a basic distinction, then, between the flow of facts and the principles behind the facts, between the accumulation of facts and the ideas which lead to the production of facts. It's these ideas and principles which form the true core of tradition, teaching people how to think instead of just telling them what to think, teaching them why you should believe something instead of just telling them to believe it. Facts should ultimately be supported by method, in other words, instead of just being free floating things which have an inherent authority in them. Absolute authority, in the sense of something being able to command complete, unthinking, obedience, does not exist.