Morality & Politics
Hume’s ‘False Philosophy’ and
the Reflections of Common Life
By Jonathan Allen Green
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, exalted Science as
humanity’s best chance for material improvement, and crowned Philosophy
as the final word on metaphysical, moral, and political questions. This
faith in reason rose conspicuously alongside the Hegelian notion of
inevitable historical progress, the idea that gradual human advancement
is written into the very structure of the cosmos.
This newfound historicism suggested that our ancestors—who had
generally deferred to religious authority over secular authority—had
been on the wrong side of history, and therefore deserved our censure.
Thus, above all, modern thought must be understood as a rejection of the
pre-enlightenment West. “Unlike any preceding culture,” notes
sociologist Anthony Giddens, the modern human “lives in the future,
rather than the past.”15
Although the modern period has ushered in countless material
improvements for which conservatives should be deeply grateful, the
predilections of the modern mind are also ripe soil for ideological
speculation. Indeed, ideological reasoning (“which,” you will recall,
“presume[s] the domain of the pre-reflective to be false unless shown
otherwise”) is the natural outgrowth of the modern mentality;16
it relies entirely on the assumption that abstract thought—liberated
from the constraints of place and history—can discern the total truth of
reality, a presupposition that would have seemed absurd before
Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum.
This position of epistemic authority is the throne from which Marx
announced that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggle.”17 It is the throne that Hitler climbed to propound his own racial and nationalist ideology, the myth of the imminent Drittes Reich.
And it is, in many important ways, the same throne from which Locke
theorized the natural rights of man to life, liberty, and property, and
from which the General Assembly of the United Nations subsequently
amended his list. Thus modern notions of history and reason are closely
bound up with the great instances of ideology in the twentieth century:
Soviet communism, German fascism, and Western liberalism.
While conservatives should of course condemn fascism and communism as
thoroughly false philosophies, the present essay aims, in part, at a
more introspective—and therefore, more controversial—critique of
ideology: namely, a critique of liberalism. In many purportedly
conservative circles, pointing out the ideological nature of liberalism
(and its economic counterpart, modern industrial capitalism) is close to
political heresy.
“But piety requires us to honor the truth above our friends,” and
the truth of the matter is that liberalism, in both its classical (i.e.,
libertarian) and more recent (i.e., Rawlsian) aberrations, is a deeply
ideological Weltanschauung, and therefore is susceptible to the errors of false philosophy outlined above.18
As Madame Roland’s infamous last words before the French guillotine
attest, liberty is a malleable construction that can be used to justify
both good and evil: “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”19
That liberalism is an ideology can be seen through an examination of
its methods. Locke began the liberal political tradition when he
rejected the historical reality of the Garden of Eden, and instead
posited isolated, individual experience—apart from any social, political
or religious relations—as the original position of man. Borrowing a
phrase from Thomas Hobbes, he called this arrangement the “State of
Nature.”
Although Locke’s pre-political humans were not always anarchic like
Hobbes’s, they were certainly discontent. They had legitimate claims to
their lives, their liberty, and their cultivated land, but these
“natural rights” were often violated by other men. So, in a moment of
rational cooperation, Locke’s pre-political individuals formed
governments which, in Thomas Jefferson’s well-know phrase, are intended
“to secure [their natural] rights, . . . deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed.”20 For as long as
these rights remained unmolested, human beings were “free.” Similarly,
the liberal individual was economically “free” for as long as his right
to the uncoerced, consensual exchange of material goods between
individuals and corporations remained intact.21 For modern
human beings, Locke went on to claim, living and working in the domain
of a sovereign government constitutes our implicit consent to the
government’s existence, and therefore binds us to submit to its
authority.22
In the years since Locke formulated his theory of individualism,
political philosophers have proceeded to embellish his list of natural
rights. (Modernity, remember, is animated by the idea of progress.)
Perhaps most famously, John Rawls demanded that, in order to guarantee a
“fair worth” to our Lockean rights, human beings must possess the
material means to realize our rights. As a result, the most
basic rights of life, liberty, and property really imply second-level
rights to more substantive goods: for example, social security, welfare
benefits, sufficient healthcare, and so on.23
While very few conservatives will accept Rawls’s amendments as
legitimate (and rightly so), many are eager to adopt Locke as a founding
figure in the Anglo-American conservative tradition. This is a serious
error. Locke’s isolated individual is a fabrication, a hypothetical
conjecture used to solve an academic riddle. In reality, neither natural
nor historical evidence supports Locke’s idea of the solitary
individual.
Human beings are not born into a State of Nature. We are
born into the arms of mothers, raised alongside siblings and relatives,
and grow to maturity in a time and place not of our choosing. As a
result, real freedom is a much deeper matter than simple consent; real
meaning cannot be found in lonely seclusion. And yet, the obligations
that we have to our families, our communities, and to God are coldly
excluded from liberal political theory.
24
Liberalism, laments Wendell Berry, leads to fragmentation, setting
“us ‘free’ from responsibility and therefore from the possibility of
meaning.”25 As Locke’s theory has permeated the collective
mentality of the modern West, this has led to societies of unprecedented
moral diffidence. “Most modern freedom is at root fear,” wrote
Chesterton. “It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it
is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”26
The social atomization and moral timidity engendered by liberalism
are especially problematic given the recent appearance of postmodernism.
As its name implies, postmodernism is a general denunciation of the
grand designs of the twentieth century. It rejects the universal—indeed,
denies the existence of the universal—in favor of the particular.
Postmodernism denounces all traditional sources of metaphysical
authority as impotent, and thereby renders the construction of
normativity an intimately personal task. The moral theory of emotivism,
which holds that moral and ethical judgments are simply the expression
of individual desires, is quintessentially postmodern in this respect.
“I claim that there are all kinds of truth,” shouts Flannery O’Conner’s
fictional postmodernist, “your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all
of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”27
Nietzsche enthusiastically heralded the death of God; the postmodernists likewise hail the death of Nature.28
In doing so, by denying human beings access to natural and supernatural
moral reasons, postmodernism places the “whole burden of meaning”
directly onto the individual’s will.29 Unhappily, this new
burden comes at a time when our society’s collective capacity for
altruistic moral and political action has atrophied under liberalism. So
rather than presenting an alternative to the excesses of liberal
modernity, postmodernism only exacerbates its effects. Postmodernism, it
turns out, is an (ironically) extreme form of modern liberalism.
Just as it eschews other ideologies, any authentic conservatism must
also eschew liberalism (and its postmodern permutation) as a symptom of
modernity, rather than its cure. In the final analysis, liberalism is
inseparable from the caustic ideological speculation that pervades our
time: the very same speculation that conservatism exists to combat.
If, as I have argued, Lockean liberalism is a shoddy foundation on
which to construct a twenty-first century conservatism, towards what
alternative should conservatives look? Here Livingston’s essay can help
us once again. To this point, I have represented Hume’s conservatism in
negative terms—that is, apophatically: in opposition to ideology. But
this approach has perhaps overshadowed the more cataphatic implications
of his dialectic. True, the enlightened philosopher realizes that, to
quote Livingston, modern “principles of philosophic reason are
incompatible with human nature.”30 But it seems appropriate to ask as well: what positive “principles of philosophic reason” do comport with human nature?
According to Hume, true philosophy ultimately consists in the “reflections of common life, methodized and corrected.”31 A rejection of ideology, therefore, involves a corollary acceptance of Aristotle’s sensus communis, those conspicuous truths that are often obscured by ideology. In a word, these are T. S. Eliot’s “permanent things”32—an abiding faith in God, solidarity with one’s given place, an appreciation of productive order, Burke’s “moral imagination.”33
These are the principles that should guide our political action, and
this is why a “healthy political society reposes in the enjoyment of
inherited traditions and practices”—because tradition is the vehicle
through which the permanent things are transmitted from one generation
to the next.34 The tragedy of ideology is that it deprecates this permanence; the romance of conservatism is that it defends it.35
It is no disparagement of Hume to concede that, despite the
intellectual richness of his critique of false philosophy, a fuller
explication of the sensus communis must extend beyond the
parameters of his own writing and specifically his epistemology. Hume’s
dialectic makes clear that any search for universals must root itself in
the tangibility of the pre-reflective, lived human experience; that is
to say, his critique conceptually endorses the simultaneous unity and
tension of universality and particularity that is an abiding aspect of
direct experience. It follows that for Hume, “true philosophy” should be
predicated not only on intuition or perception, but also on a form of
reason uncorrupted by ideology: call it “metarationality.”
Curiously, however, Hume's thought is often tepid to defend such
restrained, properly constituted reason; as a result, in the centuries
following Hume, many conservatives have falsely conflated reason and
ideology, and dismissed both as dangerous.36 Such distortion
is damaging and moreover unnecessary. In locating the transcending
“grace / that keeps this world” amidst the ever-changingness of life,
the true philosopher must not clumsily distort the tangible and the
concrete.37 Nevertheless, his defense of the permanent things
should not phyrically attempt to cast off reason, via intuition or some
such device. As humans, we are inevitably rational; the choice afforded
us is what sort of reason we will employ.38
For the philosopher’s task, a study of history is especially
important. In the confusion and disarray of our own time, history can
act as a surrogate form of common sense, illuminating the essentials of
human moral, political, and religious experience. Our predecessors can
remind us of what it means to be human. “We need intimate knowledge of
the past,” wrote C. S. Lewis,
because we cannot study the future, and yet need something
to set against the present. . . . A man who has lived in
many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his
native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in
some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from
the press and microphone of his own age.39
Cultivating historical consciousness does not, of course, mean
dogmatically resurrecting the debates and the controversies of the past;
this is neither desirable nor helpful. Eliot makes much the same point
in the Four Quartets:
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.40
An unthinking nostalgia for days-gone-by will not help our current
situation, and neither will blissful optimism: progress is not
inevitable, and our future will be exactly as humane or as base as we
make it through our actions. Amidst the current throes of ideology, the
challenge and the promise of conservatism rest in resuscitating our
languishing political and cultural traditions, in restoring philosophy
to its proper station, in extending the old truths into our own time, in
making dry bones speak once more.
Notes
1. 1 Timothy 6:16.
2. Deuteronomy 6:4.
3. Donald Livingston, “David Hume and the Conservative Tradition,” The Intercollegiate Review 44:2 (Fall 2009): 30-41.
4. Livingston, 30. See also Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001; 1953), esp. Ch. 1.
5. David Hume, Essays Moral, Literary, and Political, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis,
IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), 60; qtd. in Livingston, 34.
6. Livingston, 31-32.
7. See Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case
against Scientism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1983), esp. 20.
8. C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock”; in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hopper (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994; 1970), 240-244.
9. Russell Kirk, Eliot and his Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008; 1971), 39.
10. Ibid.
11. Livingston, 30.
12. Ibid., 40.
13. This is the best short definition of postmodernism I know of. See Jean-
François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1984; 1979), xxiv.
14. Nicomachean Ethics I.1102a19-20.
15. Anthony Giddens, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 94.
16. Livingston, 32.
17. Karl Marx, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1872), I.I, 83, translation mine;
in Philosophische und ökonomische Schriften (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam Verlag,
2008), 82-96.
18. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.1096a16.
19. Quoted. in Jacques Maritain, Truth and Human Fellowship (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), 4.
20. Declaration of Independence (1776), ¶ 2.
21. Corporations are, of course, individuals created by legal fiction.
22. Locke’s theory of individualism, rights, and the social contract is enumerated
in his Two Treatises of Government (1689).
23. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2005.
24. One of the most encouraging signs that our Founding Fathers were not wholly
liberal thinkers is their reference to the divine nature of rights in the Declaration
of Independence. Contra Locke, the Founding Fathers understood that whatever
rights we have are granted to us by Providence; they are certainly not a construction,
the consequence of one man’s abstract theory. Even still, the rather clear Lockean
antecedents of the Declaration’s second paragraph suggest a liberal influence
that should be challenging for conservatives. Although I am generally convinced by
Russell Kirk’s interpretation of the Founding (“a revolution to preserve what is”),
for now, I propose to set all this aside.
25. From “Rugged Individualism,” in Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance: and
other Essays (Berkeley, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), 9-12.
26. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1994; 1912), 143.
27. From Wiseblood, in Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Literary
Classics of the United States, 1988), 95.
28. This clever line of demarcation between modernity and postmodernity is taken
from Peter Lawler, “Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism,”
The Intercollegiate Review 38:1 (Fall 2002): 16-25.
29. The “burden of meaning” is an idea taken from George Grant’s Time as History
lectures. George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1995; 1969), 24.
30. Livingston, 31.
31. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the
Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 162;
quoted in Livingston, 32.
32. “Conservatism is too often a conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a
relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.” From T. S.
Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition
of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 102.
33. See Russell Kirk, “The Moral Imagination,” Literature and Belief 1 (1981): 37-49.
34. Livingston, 30.
35. It bears noting that any real defense of permanence necessarily
requires
ingenuity, creativity, and thus liberty. As I have argued above,
conservatives must
insist, against Locke, that crude, abstract notions of ‘freedom’ are
ultimately too thin to sustain political community; equally, however,
they must defend the richer
understanding of historical liberty described by Burke, who sought to
reconcile the
concept of freedom with its objective antecedent, and to understand
Locke’s individual
as a desirable product of civilization, and not its efficient cause.
That liberal
ideology is false does not imply that liberty is unreal or nonessential.
36. At moments, Hume seems insufficiently aware that alongside the abstract
reason he deconstructs is a purer form of reason—the very reason which capacitates
his devastating critique of “false philosophy.” As such, his corpus is often of
little help in countering antirational conservatism. For an examination of Hume’s
empiricism from a conservative point of view, see Donald Livingston, Philosophical
Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), esp. Ch. 1.
37. Wendell Berry, “A Warning to My Readers,” 5, 6; in The Selected Poems of
Wendell Berry (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1998), 117.
38. For epistemological ideas that might supplement Hume’s undeveloped
notion of “true philosophy,” see the work of Benedetto Croce, especially Logic as
the Science of the Pure Concept (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917). For a more recent
explication of genuinely philosophical and simultaneously historical reason, see
Claes G. Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality,
2nd expanded edition (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
For a summary of the relevant ideas, see Joseph Baldacchino, “Ethics and the Common Good: Abstract vs. Experiential,” Humanitas 15:2 (2002), esp. 38-59.
39. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War Time,” in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hopper
(San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 58-59.
40. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943, 37.
Jonathan Allen Green is pursuing a degree in American Studies and German
at Northwestern University. This article appears in Humanitas
23:1&2 (2010). An earlier version of the article was awarded first
prize in an essay contest cosponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute and the Leadership Institute.
