Hume's 'false philosophy' and the reflections of common life.

• Author: Green, Jonathan Allen
• Position: David Hume - Critical essay

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. --Hamlet, I.V Theologians often distinguish between two ways of describing God: apophatic description, and cataphatic description. The former posits negative statements about what God is not; the latter, affirmative statements about what God is. When St. Paul writes to St. Timothy that God "dwell[s] in light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, or can see," he indicates that God must be understood apophatically, in the via negativa. (1) In contrast, when a Rabbi calls the Jewish people to prayer, he begins with an elegant cataphaticism: "Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one." (2)

In the ongoing battle for the soul of conservatism, Professor Donald Livingston's recent article in The Intercollegiate Review, "David Hume and the Conservative Tradition," presents a primarily apophatic reading of the Anglo-American conservative political tradition. (3) Echoing Russell Kirk's classic formulation, Livingston defines conservatism as "a critique of ideology in politics." (4) The ensuing discussion of David Hume confirms that, for Livingston, conservatism can only be properly understood in terms of its philosophic antithesis--ideology--or what Hume calls "false philosophy." Hume's methodology of enlightenment is dialectical in form. According to Hume (via Livingston), the typically modern philosopher pretends to reason from "abstract speculative principle[s]" unmoored from vulgar, pre-philosophical assumptions. (5) But as Hume shows, these pre-philosophical assumptions are logically necessary for practical moral and political debate; argumentum in vacuo cannot generate its own starting premises. Descartes' critical project, Kant's reine Vernunft, Bentham's utilitarianism--these are nothing but false temptresses, nihilisms shielded under a guise of objectivity. Only those few courageous souls willing to doubt the purported self-sufficiency and supremacy of their own petrified, ideological schemata can hope to attain the prize of Hume's "true philosophy": authentic, philosophic conservatism.

Realizing that abstruse rationalism effectually "leads to total skepticism," the true philosopher humbles himself and consents to "the autonomy of custom"; that is, he presumes "the pre-reflective ... to be true unless shown otherwise." (6) This new disposition brings modesty and sapientia, the "metaphysical wisdom" that differentiates humans from animals and automata. (7) Rather than pompously assuming ultimate authority over nature, the newly enlightened philosopher contents himself to play an important, but limited role in nature. Although, as C. S. Lewis noted, the presumptions of modernity often place "God in the dock," Hume's true philosopher will submit happily to the authority of God and the constraints inherent in his humanness. (8) He learns, in Russell Kirk's phrase, "that consciousness and rationality did not commence with [himself] or [his] contemporaries." (9) No longer crushed under the weight of false philosophy, his "moral imagination" is brought back to life. (10)

Livingston ultimately concludes that our present political discontents are rooted in philosophical confusion. Since Descartes, false philosophy not only has infected our way of thinking but has bled over into the realm of practical politics as well. In the current political climate, ideologies of the left--socialism, communism, and neo-liberalism--battle ideologies of the right--fascism, libertarianism, and neo-conservatism--like grotesque, Hesiodic Titans on the hillsides of Thessaly. Because these hostile ideologies rest on opposing (and unexamined) "abstract principles," contemporary political discourse is usually shrill and fruitless. (11) But true conservatism, as understood by Burke and Hume, offers a way through this quagmire. Put simply, we must renounce the ideological urge in both philosophy and politics. The former must be attended to first; only by confronting political ideology through "a critical philosophical engagement," Livingston argues, can we restore a responsible political order and combat the pernicious effects of ideology in the public square. (12) Although this task is novel (and therefore daunting), it is necessary if we are to salvage that which is good and true in the American political tradition.

Accordingly, this essay aims at a brief critique of ideology as it is currently manifested in American society and politics, using Hume's dialectic of enlightenment as a theoretical framework. In the following pages I argue that conservatism, if it is to avoid the pitfalls of ideology, must reject both the totalizing impulse of modernity--particularly liberal modernity--and the general "incredulity toward meta-narrative" characteristic of postmodern thought. (13) Instead, a robust, traditional conservatism must root itself in a theological and historical understanding of the human being. As Aristotle knew, the true "student of politics ... must study the nature of the soul." (14)

Shortly after Descartes ushered in the early-modern era, the masses began to trust philosophers over priests. This led to a new faith in autonomous reason, which, practically speaking...