Audio: Diverse Religious Experience, by Dr. Bin Song.

(1936 words. )

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

As the course comes to its conclusion, let’s talk about comparison of religions. However, since the comparative study of religions from the inter-disciplinary angles of philosophy, religious studies, and theology is what my scholarly career has been dedicated to, it is hard to give a short video-lecture on such a rich topic.

In this regard, I will follow my writer-instinct that if nothing else you can talk about, or if there is too much you can talk about, be phenomenological. In other words, I’ll just describe my religious experiences.

Per the categories so nicely laid out in the assigned chapter of “how to think globally and affiliate locally” by Dr. Jeannine Diller, I am a differentialist pluralist regarding salvific religious experience, but an identist open inclusivist regarding the knowledge of ultimate reality. This means that I believe there are multiple types of religious experience, each of which fulfills distinctive paths to “salvation,” in whatever sense “salvation” can be understood by varying traditions. For instance, in the Christian tradition, prayer to God is a theistic religious experience leading to the salvation from sins. In the Buddhist tradition, meditation is an acosmic calming-down religious experience leading to nirvana, viz., salvation from human suffering. In the Ru (Confucian) tradition, performing ritualistic arts such as the one of Taiji Martial Art is a anthropo-cosmic religious experience leading to a continual harmonization of involved beings in evolving situations of life, viz., a salvation from chaos and imbalance in one’s individual and social life.

However, regarding the knowledge of the so-called ultimate reality, I am an identist. I believe ultimate reality is one, and different traditions have varying perceptions and conceptions of it. However, since my way of life is rooted in the ancient Ruism (Confucianism), I take Ruism as the base for me to learn about ultimate reality, the so-called Tian. Even so, I do not believe the long history of Ruist spirituality has exhausted all possibilities of the knowledge of such an ultimate reality, and hence, I am also eager to learn from other traditions so as to incorporate these outside insights into the Ru tradition. During the process, I hold on to no dogma nor incorrigible creed; instead, I am ready to change my pre-established conceptions whenever needed, and hence, grow my rooted Ruist way of life in an open-ended, yet continual and organic way. I call this type of interreligious studies as a rooted and open inclucivism.

Since I am experientially, salvifically pluralistic, but ontologically processual and inclusivist, I also see varying types of religious experiences lead to different modes of salvation, but these modes of salvation all engage humans with varying aspects of the same ultimate reality.

Good, let me give some brief accounts of three types of religious experience I have gone through: the theistic one, the acosmic one of pure awareness, and the anthropo-cosmic one.

Around the summer of 2004, I watched the movie Pulp Fiction, and was quite obsessed with one of its last scenes which is full of religious meanings. In that scene, one killer acted by Samuel L. Jackson miraculously avoided all bullets fired by his opponent from an incredibly close distance. Before this event, whenever the killer was about to kill someone, he would recite biblical verses, yet with no obvious understanding nor devotional feeling attached to these verses. However, after this miracle happened, the killer believed that this is a revelation, and he accordingly turned into a very pious Christian. In compassion, his killing partner, who is acted by John Travolta, experienced the same miracle, but because he has no habit of pointlessly reciting biblical verses, he didn’t see that as a miracle. In the movie, the partner was eventually killed, but the new Christian convert gave up his criminal vocation, and continued to live a pious life.

After watching the movie, I was so intrigued by its religious meaning to start regularly and intensively reading the Christian bible. During one night, when I played poker with my friends and was in a desperate situation, I shouted almost fanatically “God, please give me a black ace of spades” without really believing it could ever come true. However, I did draw a black ace of spades after I fanatically prayed my wishes. Honestly, because of the influence of the movie and my reading of the Christian bible during that time, I had a great feeling of awe in front of an almighty supreme being at that particular poker moment. I was stunned. Many years later, when I read Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) described his religious experience of God as a feeling of “mystery of terror and awe” towards the “absolute other,” I knew exactly what he is talking about.

Be theistic as such an experience may, my acosmic experience of pure awareness derives from my consistent practice of breathing meditation.

In one night early this year of 2021, around 1:00 am, I woke up with my eyes open but my eyelids closed. At the first few minutes, I could not understand where I was. Since my eyelids were closed, I could only see some shapeless dark or crimson colors before my eyes, like facing the quiet and vast universe. My breathing was completely suspended; I felt no need to either inhale or exhale whatsoever. And this suspense of breathing lasted for quite a while before I felt the need to inhale a little bit and exhale slightly and accordingly. I could not feel the existence of my body either; one leg seemed to bend, while another one seems to cross over it; but overall, there was no obvious feeling of my hand, arm or other parts of the body. And I felt a complete ease, comfort, transparency and an endurable sense of peaceful joy. It was as if nothing exists in the world except your super translucent eyesight! However, when I opened my eyelids and got to understand I was actually sleeping on the original bed and waking up, I immediately realized that the psychosomatic state where I was at those moments was exactly the same as when I entered into a deeper state triggered by my normal practice of breathing meditation. Such a deeper state is normally featured by slow, delicate, and even suspended breathing; and I regularly do this practice after my lunch and during an afternoon nap. During this sort of meditative nap, I barely fall asleep, but can feel that when the ideal states of breathing happen, my eyes can open while my eyelids closed. Accompanying this unusual movement of my eyes, I can also enjoy a feeling of ease, comfort, transparency and being endurably reenergized for quite a while. This is also normally how I re-boost myself for my afternoon work.

However, on that night, for the first time in my life, the practice of breathing meditation went on by itself while I was asleep; when the spontaneous practice reached its ideal state, it woke me up with my eyes open but eyelids closed! What happened afterwards was that while lying on bed, I changed my sides and postures for several times. Nevertheless, however I positioned myself on the bed, the deep, slow, and delicate breathing just continued by itself. It constantly reenergized me, and put my state of consciousness in such a more and more mindful state that eventually, I got up around 2:00 am and started to write a paper, reply to emails, and do my other daily routines as a scholar. I did another nap in the breakfast time, and after that, I didn’t feel any fatigue or stress during the day because of the seemingly undercut sleep.

I call this religious experience as an acosmic one of pure awareness because of the complete disappearance of the split between me as a subject and the world as an object. Because of it, when I read how Patanjali talks about the non-dual “pure awareness” as underlying all concrete patterns of consciousness in the Yoga Sutra, I know intimately what he is talking about.

Lastly, I will give an even briefer account of my anthropo-cosmic experience of Oneness because of my intensive study of Ruism at the Daofeng Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong in the spring of 2011. That institute dwells in a very beautiful mountain, and its building are a mixture of ancient Chinese and Lutheran Christian styles. I was arranged into a room in a scholarly dormitory which shares the same common area with other scholars. from the window of it, I can feel the flourishing trees, flowers and hear bird chirping and tourists walking by. In that room, I used three months to decipher one singular verse in Confucius’ Analects. When talking about the goal of one’s good life one can ever dream about, Confucius was recorded as particularly approving of the following view:

“In the last month of Spring, once the Spring garments have been completed, I should like to assemble a company of five or six young people and six or seven kids to go bathe in the Yi River and enjoy the breeze upon the Rain Dance Altar, and then return singing to our residence.
” (Analects 11:26)

As mentioned, this quote is embedded in a long conversation between Confucius and his students on what is the desirable type of good human life. The experience depicted by the verse itself is anthropo-cosmic since the exuberating joy felt by the companions of human fellowship, including the young and old, co-vibrates with the life-generating season of spring in the cosmos. In order to re-liven the depicted experience, I tried to integrate everything I can do in that beautiful mountain during the three months into one holistic experience: I meditated every day and almost everywhere. I read, I wrote, I talked with other scholars, and I also hiked together and played sports together with them. We even cooked together so as to have dinners of a banquet style. During the process, friends played guitar, we sang songs, and sometimes, we also organized serious conferences, and exchange intellectual ideas. I wrote lots of poems in the three months, and when things cooled down a bit, the three months also turned out to be the most productive ones in my career of scholarly writing.

I see a significant portion of the three months in that mountain as reviving the anthropo-cosmic religious experience approved by Confucius. This type of religious experience may not be that submissive, or ecstatic as the Christian and Hindu ones; however, its enduring, constantly energizing, and colorful nature definitely leaves an indelible mark on my life.

So, the final problem may be: since religious experiences are thus abundant and diverse, how do we deal with them? In the Ruist metaphysics, the ultimate reality of Tian has its mystical and ineffable dimension, which connects me to the “absolute other” nature of the theistic experience. Also, the all-pervading cosmic vital-energy was thought of by Ruist masters such as Zhang Zai (1020-1077) as best manifested by the purified state of human heartmind, a trope immediately relatable to Patanjali’s term of “Pure Awareness.” However, what remains the most important for such an incorporation of non-Ruist religious experiences to its own is that I expect that such a process of incorporating and harmonizing will never end. Life continues, civilization endures, and the entire cosmos is evolving. So, with such a felt cosmic and human energy of constant creativity, I believe our comparative study and practice of religions would never end either.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

The four stages of the development of Daoism can be summarized as follows:

Firstly, it starts as a seriously dissenting voice among the so-called hundred schools of thought in the period of Spring and Autumn and Warring States (770-221 B.C.E), with “dissent” here mainly understood as being against, or simply different from the emphasis of Ruism (Confucianism) on education, ritualization, social activism and ethical governance.

The gist of the dissent of Daoism from Ruism in their classical period can be briefly described as follows:

In face of the rampant social turmoil and interstate wars created by the collapse of the late Zhou Dynasty, Confucius diagnosed the origin of the social disease as the “under-civilization,” or “under-humanization” of each human individual. Therefore, in order to recover the social order and regain the so-called “peace under the heavens” as elaborated by the text of Great Learning, Confucius’s ambition was to build an independent school to provide people with a more universal access to education, and furthermore, to cultivate students’ virtues and knowledge via a broad learning process of the fruits of ancient civilizations. Ultimately, Confucius intended his students to become a noble-minded, exemplary human, the so-called Junzi, and hence, get hired by governments to serve the society as ethical and competent civil leaders. For Confucius, this process of education and self-cultivation of a junzi is the ultimate path for the society to recover the delicate ritual system that once functioned well in early Zhou Dynasty, and hence, to realize the sustainable development of the civilization.

However, for the Daoist philosophers, such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, they have different understanding of the situation. They thought the cause of social turmoil is not the “under-civilization” of human individuals. It is actually the “over-civilization” of human individuals when their innocent, naturally flourishing human life gets complicated by the increase of human knowledge, the artificiality of human intelligence, the unrestrained social competition and the advancement of technology. In other words, for Daoist thinkers, education leads to the over-development of human intelligence, and if individuals rely upon this advanced development of human intelligence to compete for limited social resource, chaos will follow and government will fall apart. Therefore, rather than calling for more education and social engagement of the so-called noble-minded, exemplary individuals, Daoist thinkers advocate less education and less social engagement of human beings in general. Ultimately, a primitive natural state of society, where each individual enjoys their life alone with little use of technology and sociality, will be the ideal society human beings could ever have.

Of course, this is a rather very sketchy account of the contrast between Daoism and Ruism, and I intend the value of this account to be more heuristic than prescriptive. However, an important angle to understand the origin of Daoism, similar to the case of Buddhism versus Vedic and Upanishadic Hinduism, is indeed to grasp how different and similar it is in comparison to the Ru school which Confucius helped to transmit and strengthen. This is also the reason why it is appropriate to teach the Daoist tradition after Ruism in our course.

Secondly, everything we just talked of transpired in the pre-Qin period of ancient China. After Qin Dynasty reunified the Warring States and was shortly replaced by another unifying dynasty, Han Dynasty, Daoism, mainly in the form of the so-called Huang-Lao thought, played a very prominent role of statecraft and governance in early Han Dynasty, largely from 202-130s B.C.E. The major sociological reason for such a prominent role is that the Daoist political philosophy, as indicated by the above account, largely takes a “laissez-faire” approach which precludes the substantial interference and proactive coordination of governments with local people’s economic and social activities. This mentality fit very well with the need of early Han Dynasty to recover itself from the devastating wars and turmoil caused by the dynastic change between Qin and Han. In this period of its history, Daoist thought also incorporated a cluster of thoughts and practices that flourished here and there in the vast Han territory, and developed features such as the practice of sorcery, divination, shamanistic rituals, longevity, medicine, and the cosmological speculation over the all-pervasive correlation of everything in the universe via the theory of yin/yang and five phases.

Thirdly, however, under the reign of the Emperor Wu (156-87 B. C.E), the central government of Han Dynasty intended more ideological unity of its political system. In front of the Emperor Wu, there were mainly three options for him to achieve this: firstly, Legalism, which emphasizes strengthening the central authority of an empire through a strict law system of reward and punishment. This school of thought was once adopted by the prior Qin dynasty. It helped Qin to win over enemies on the battlefield and thus reunify the territory, but it failed Qin in the later peaceful time since Qin’s harsh punishments upon its subjects engendered uncontrollable resentments and rebellions. Qin accordingly became one of the most short-lived dynasties in ancient Chinese history. In light of Qin’s failure, Legalism seemed not quite a choice for Emperor Wu.

The second choice was Daoism, which, as stated, was favored by the Han emperors prior to Wu for quite a length of time. However, the “laissez-faire” approach of statecraft might be good for a time of recovery from devastating wars, but not equally fit for the sustainable development of a country, since the growth of local economic and political powers needs coordination, and the unity of the central government needs to be supported by a strong ideology.

So, eventually, propelled by Ru scholars’ persuading efforts such as Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.E), the Emperor Wu chose Ruism, one lineage of thought that cherishes the values of ancient civilization, emphasizes unity within diversity, and favors a soft approach via education, family-nurturing, and ritualized public life to regain the desired unity. In other words, in the eyes of the Emperor Wu, the Ru tradition incorporates the good sides, avoids the bad sides from other schools of thought, and more importantly, can serve the diverse needs of social classes while still being able to unify the entire country as a whole. This decisive policy-move by the Emperor Wu was named by later Historians as “taking down a hundred schools of thought, while venerating the Ru statecraft alone.”

Then, we got to the fourth stage of the development of the Daoist religion in ancient China. The impact of the edict of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty to elevate the status of Ruism turned out to be extremely profound and long-lasting for the entire history of imperial China until early 20th century. Ruism became a state ideology, and its vast knowledge about ethics, statecraft and ancient civilizations constitutes the major criteria by which varying dynasties and imperial courts select governmental-officials among young and ambitious literati via the system of civil-examination. In other words, Ruism became the intellectual and spiritual foundation of the social elite of ancient China. This drove Daoism and its devoted affiliates and sympathizers, who were once very powerful in the court of early Han Dynasty, to find alternative social spaces to survive and evolve. In this regard, the establishment of the theocratic regime Tian Shi Dao (The Way of Heavenly Master) by Zhang Daoling (34-156 C.E) in the remote southwestern areas and in a time of rampant peasant rebellions in late Han Dynasty was a milestone event. This was the first time Daoism got established as an organized religion, and such a Daoist religion also started to construct its pantheon of deities, compile its canon, build its monastery, officialize its rules of rituals and ceremonies, and hence get intertwined with families and communities of its surrounding local areas.

However, despite that Tian Shi Dao being the first organized Daoist religion in ancient China, there were various Daoist religions created in the later history, which had no organizational relationship with Tian Shi Dao. On the other hand, although the Daoist thought lost its favor in the imperial court under the reign of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty, it never completely disappeared from politics. Rather, certain reigns of emperors in some dynasties actually were quite fond of the Daoist religion, and saw themselves as a loyal devotee of those Daoist deities. For the everyday life of local commoners and folks, we also witnessed a ceaseless process of intermingling and mutual-generating of practices and thoughts among the Daoist, Buddhist, Western, folk religions and the dominant Ruist social ethics. For instance, you’ll find strong traces of the Buddhist breathing technique in the Daoist method of “inner-alchemy”; you’ll find Daoist groups sometimes quite fervently advocated the Ru ethic of filiality to parents, loyalty to rulers and humaneness to all beings; you can even find the Catholic idea of “purgatory” to be overtly taught in some of the Daoist canon. In other words, in the fourth stage of the development of Daoist religion, it constantly meanders, metamorphizes, and proliferates into a loosely recognizable body of the so-called Daoist religion which includes a vast array of deviance, devolution, and diversity.

Because of this, I believe you must feel somewhat confused if you decide to learn Daoism starting from the most recent form of a Daoist religious order in the contemporary world (just as the assigned video indicates), since it would lie at one very end of a history which has evolved for almost three thousand years, and thus, was itself predominantly featured by diversity rather than unity.

Nevertheless, all trees, no matter how much ramified and widespread they seem, have their roots. By the same token, no matter how diverse Daoist orders can be from each other, they almost all read Laozi and Zhuangzi, the earliest Daoist texts in the initial stage of Daoist religion. Therefore, for our introductory course on Eastern Religion, we’ll spend some considerable time to read these two texts as well. I hope via this approach of being introduced to Daoism, we can be equipped with basic intellectual tools to understand the later, more colorful development of Daoist religions.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!

In this unit, let’s continue to talk about David Hume, not about his empiricist epistemology, but his so-called moral sentimentalism.

As discussed in last unit, Hume can be considered as a rare dissenting voice among modern thinkers, since he thinks it is “custom and habit” which plays the most dominant role in human knowledge about the objective natural world. His general attitude towards natural science, because of his emphasis upon custom and habit, remains modest since according to his theory, all human reasoning about cause and effect is based upon what we today call “induction,” and this implies that all scientific conclusions about causality are by no means certain and fixed once for all. Instead, they always succumb to testing, falsification and perfection, which is quite in line what we have discussed about Karl Popper’s thought on the distinction between science and pseudo-science, although Popper’s understanding of scientific methodology is somewhat different from Hume. In an era when the reputation of natural science was skyrocketing because of its unprecedented power of accurate prediction and technological transformation, we have to admire Hume’s modesty and reservation about how limited human knowledge can be.

However, in comparison with Hume’s ethics, I think the salient nature of Hume’s thought in epistemology will even pale. This is because Hume’s evaluation on the role of reason in morality is not even “modest;” it is actually a downright denial. In other words, Hume thinks in evaluating a character trait of human beings or their action as good or bad, virtuous or vice, morally right or wrong, “reason” does not play any role whatsoever. Therefore, contrary to the normal moral teaching (which we may hear too much during our daily conversations with each other) that urges human beings to listen to their reason rather than passion, Hume claims that reason, no matter how accurate and “true” it may sound, cannot play any role in motivating humans’ actions, and thus, it is actually passions, emotions, feelings, and in a word, sentiments which ultimately constitute the human judgement on moral virtues and vices.

Hume’s argument for this seemingly very counter-intuitive view is relatively easy to understand. He says “reason,” just as what he has mused in his epistemology, can only achieve two things: it is either about the relationship of “ideas” following the law of non-contradiction, or about cause and effect in matters of fact. The reasoning about the relationship between ideas can never motivate humans to act in their moral affairs because as explained in his epistemology, “ideas” are vague copies of “impressions”; they lack the vivacity and intensity of impressions such as the raw sentiments of pleasure and pain, and therefore, a mere contemplation of the ideas can never directly indicate the values of outside objects to human life, and hence, motivate human beings to react to these values. This is the reason why the presentation of data, statistics or mathematical reasoning in general rarely, if not never, motivates us to act morally towards a certain direction.

If reasoning is about cause and effect in matters of fact, considered by itself, this sort of reasoning is just to represent what happens objectively outside of human mind. Since it comprises of representations, this sort of reasoning would be like putting a screen between human mind and the outside world. In other words, since a mere representation of the outside world does not cause any direct perception of the good or bad of outside objects, reasoning in matters of fact cannot motivate our moral actions either.

Instead, Hume thinks that in order for any process of reasoning to have those possessive power to eventually grasp the attention of humans, and thus, motivate humans to react to circumstances, it needs to be conjoined with another fundamental component of human consciousness, that is the sentiment of pleasure or pain, as well as the triggered passions such as pride and shame, love and hatred. Understood in this way, the role played by reasoning in morality is merely twofold: firstly, if the awareness towards certain objects does cause the feeling of pleasure or pain, reason can help to check whether such objects exist or not, since one function of reason would be to represent the objects in the outside world. Secondly, the reasoning of cause and effect on matters of fact can help humans to find the means to fulfill their desires which are ultimately caused by the sentiment of pleasure or pain in the first hand. In other words, by all counts, it is the sentiment of pleasure or pain which helps humans to judge whether any outside object, such as a character trait of humans or any action, is morally good or bad, virtuous or vicious. Reason, using Hume’s own words, is just “the slave of passions,” and it can by no means be contrary to passions, since reason alone cannot motivate humans to act. What the normal moral teaching of listening to one’s reason rather than passions really conveys, according to Hume, is actually to use one passion to counteract another. This is because only passions can motivate humans’ moral judgment and behaviors, whereas reason merely comes afterwards to serve the actions out of passions as an instrument.

What is particularly interesting about Hume’s thought on the significance of sentiments in morality is that he thought while moral judgement is based upon the sentiment of pleasure or pain, it is not purely out of self-interest that humans evaluate certain deeds as virtuous or vicious. For instance, we can estimate certain character traits of our enemies, such as diligence, loyalty, or wisdom, as virtuous even if these virtues are contrary to our self-interest. Therefore, in order to have “sentiments” play the central role in moral judgment, Hume also thinks our moral consideration needs to be conducted from “a general point of view,” rather than from a merely selfish perspective. In other words, if we think certain character traits as being able to bring pleasure and joy to a certain human fellow or others, then, they can be judged as virtuous. This also brings us to another very important aspect of Hume’s ethical thought: sympathy. According to Hume, It is out of sympathy with the sentiments of human fellows that we ultimately deliver our moral judgment about virtue and vice regarding any potential moral event in human society.

When almost every named philosopher eulogized the triumphant role of reason in the modern era of Enlightenment, Hume’s skeptical voice towards reason using such a rigorous argument is really freshing, if not utterly convincing. It points out the limited role of reason in moral affairs, and most importantly, in order to live a good human life, individuals should pay more attention to cultivating their virtues, which are intimately interconnected with their moral sentiments, than acquiring advanced calculative power of human intelligence. Unfortunately, I do not think even today, human fellows have carefully listened to Hume’s advice. For instance, the educational system, from pre-K to higher education, is still dominated by a mentality of what I may call “intelligence first, and character second.” In other words, the cultivation of sentiments, emotions and feelings has not yet occupied a central role in the curriculum of modern educational institution. In this respect, I think philosophers and educators today really need to revive Hume’s thought for the sake of the general well-being of human fellows in modern society.

However, although Hume’s thought is indeed extremely valuable for reminding us of the significance of sentiments and passions for the good human life, his view that reason does not play any significant role in morality is also a little bit overstated, since he gives such a narrow definition of “reasoning” to make it exclusively address the relationship of lifeless ideas and represent objectively matters of fact. Defined as such, reason indeed has very little power to motivate moral thought and action. However, reasoning can also be about “values,” rather than just about ideas and facts. Per Hume’s analysis, the value of things ultimately derives from the sentiments they cause to human beings. However, just as indicated by his analysis of the role of “sympathy” in triggering our moral sentiments, “pleasure” has its different kinds, intensity and endurability. Accordingly, values of things to human life based upon such different pleasures can also be varying. In this sense, we can compare the values of things, character traits, actions, or even lifestyles and worldviews so as to “reason” about them in order to guide our moral reaction to things in the world. In other words, when things in the outside world affect us, our perceptions of them are normally entangled with our value judgments of them, and these value-laden judgments in turn can trigger a certain kind of emotions, which eventually motivate us to act. Actually, this identified sequence of stimuli – value-laden perceptions – emotions – behaviors is a major tool for today’s therapists to envision the significance of philosophy for mental health, since a philosophical understanding of certain aspects of human life can directly shape our perceptions of the outside world, which in turn will rectify certain kinds of self-defeating emotions such as stress, anxiety or depression due to our misperceptions of the value of things in the world.

Of course, my critique towards Hume is not a major one in comparison to his enormous contribution to the discussion about what really matters in morality among modern thinkers. In a certain sense, this critique can also be made compatible with Hume’s thought since moral sentiments are indeed a major source for our judgment of values of things in the world. In a word, if we include “values” as a major target of human reasoning, we can still claim “reason” plays a significant role in morality, and we indeed need to rely upon the cultivation of a specific kind of sentiments, which can be aided by our moral reasoning, to live a fulfilled good human life.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song in the course of “History of Modern Philosophy” at Washington College.

After reading Rene Descartes’s Meditations, we will learn another very different philosopher, who is representative for the so-called school of British empiricism, in order that you can get a more holistic picture of the development of modern philosophy. This philosopher is David Hume, and the “temperament” of his thought is modest, amicable, and always remains skeptical towards the over-speculation of philosophy in case that the philosophical speculation may fly too far away in one’s solitary thought from the everyday reality and the common sense of human fellows. For students who have learned western Ancient philosophy, you will find the difference between David Hume and Rene Descartes is similar to the one between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle’s philosophy is quite empirically oriented. He thought human knowledge derives from observation and experience, and to live a good human life, humans need to follow the good customs of society and cultivate good habits so as to become virtuous. All these themes would be repeated by Hume’s empiricist philosophy to a certain extent. Whereas, Plato’s mind was always preoccupied with the world of the so-called “ideas” or “ideals,” just like Rene Descartes, whose Meditations intends to build the entire system of human knowledge from the most basic, allegedly innate ideas within human mind, such as soul, body and God.

In more concrete terms, the difference between Hume and Descartes can be envisioned in the following aspects:

Firstly, rather than treating “metaphysics” as lying in the root of the tree of philosophy and thus ascribing a fundamental role to it, Hume indicates in his writing a great suspicion towards the discipline of “metaphysics” in general. He thinks scholars’ discussions on metaphysical issues (such as the existence of God, the ultimate power and secret of nature, the essential and immortal nature of soul, the interaction between a thinking mind and an extended body, and other extravagantly abstract topics prevalent in modern philosophy) barely produced any certain result, and the debate on these issues seemed to be endless, if not desperately fruitless. In comparison with the very solid development of natural science in the era of Isaac Newton, who was both a compatriot and a slightly elder contemporary of Hume, Hume thinks that the discipline of metaphysics, as indicated by its poor performance in the early modern era, is deeply flawed. In order to rectify these flaws, Hume thinks that the primary task for philosophers is to imitate what Newton has achieved in natural science, and hence, to investigate the more fundamental topic of “human nature,” particularly the operations of human mind, before diverting our energy into those endless metaphysical debates. Hume’s suggestion is that through investigating the operations of human mind, we will get to know how human ideas are formed from their empirical origins, and how human mind associates these ideas so as to produce knowledge on different subjects. If we can pin down the origins of all the extravagantly abstract ideas in metaphysics, then, the language we use to discuss metaphysics will be more clear and we will therefore be able to grasp the limit of human knowledge lest our metaphysical thinking would have become a sheer speculation doomed into on-going, yet fruitless controversies and debates. (About Hume’s view on metaphysics, please refer to the assigned reading “Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” Section 1).

Secondly, a pattern of western philosophy is that idealistic thinkers normally quite cherish the distinctive value of mathematics. For them, such as Plato and Descartes, the empirical world cannot be where mathematical ideas derive, since all empirical knowledge lacks the universality and certainty of what mathematical reasoning can live up to. However, humans cannot arbitrarily manipulate mathematical ideas either, since mathematical objects have their stable traits and inviolate laws which human mind must obey. For Descartes, the two aforementioned reasons, viz., the non-empirical and the objective natures of mathematical knowledge, lead to his conclusion that fundamental mathematical ideas, such as size, magnitude, number, and in one word, “extension” of body, are innate. They are the blueprint of divine creation, which God imprints into human mind so as to inform humans of the essence of bodies which are also created by the same almighty God.

However, for Hume, just like for Aristotle, mathematical ideas do not occupy such a distinctive position in the world of ideas of human mind. Hume distinguishes all human perceptions into two groups according to their degrees of vivacity and strength: impressions and ideas. “Impressions” are those raw, vivid perceptions of the world which humans acquire from outer sense (such as vision, hearing, smell, etc.) and inner sense (such as our feeling of hunger, thirsty, pleasure, pain, etc.). However, when these raw impressions are stored into memory, revived in imagination or abstracted in intelligence, they will lose certain degrees of vivacity and turn into “ideas.” For Hume, all ideas, including mathematical ideas, derive from impressions, and thus, have an empirical origin. It seems that human mind can work on mathematical ideas alone in separation from the empirical world; however, according to Hume, this is because once abstracted from their empirical origins, the connection of mathematical ideas can be investigated according to the logical law of non-contradiction. Even if it seems we can acquire much knowledge of mathematical objects in reliance upon the work of human mind alone, the knowledge is just about the relation of “ideas,” and whether the knowledge can be applied to the everyday empirical world would still depend upon experience and observations. In other words, for Hume, the ideas of math derive from empirically given impressions, their relationship can be investigated by human mind alone, but whether mathematical ideas can be applied in the empirical world would still depend empirically. In a nutshell, there is no innate idea in the Cartesian sense, and all human knowledge derive ultimately from observation and experience, which is definitely a very different stance from Rene Descartes.

Thirdly, and most importantly, since experience and observation, rather than reason, plays the ultimately prominent role in the development of human knowledge, compared with Descartes, Hume also furnishes a much higher evaluation of the role of “customs and habits” in epistemology. As indicated by last unit’s reading, the hyperbolic method of doubt which Descartes uses in his Meditation I targeted customs and habits of human cognition that he inherited from his medieval scholastic background. For Descartes, nothing is more urgent to overthrow all those old ideas and beliefs in order to obtain an entirely new, and absolutely secured foundation of human knowledge. However, with a purpose of highlighting the irreplaceable roles of custom and habit in human knowledge, Hume asked an extremely consequential question for the further development of modern philosophy and for our general understanding of scientific knowledge. And the question is: on what basis shall we infer that an effect will be produced from a cause given our past observation of the constant conjunction of the two events identified respectively as a cause and an effect? For instance, we observed constantly in the past the rising of the sun can lead to the rising temperature of a stone; however, if we conclude “the rising of the sun causes the rising temperature of a stone” as a piece of knowledge, it will imply that in the future, the rising of the sun would always cause the rising temperature of the stone. But Hume’s question is that: how can we infer a future state of the worldly phenomenon based upon our past perception?

Hume does not think “reason,” in the form of demonstration which deduces one consequence from its premise according to the logical law of non-contradiction, can play any role in the aforementioned inference. This is because if the rising sun does not cause the rising temperature of the same stone in any future event, this does not bring any self-contradiction to our ideas. In other words, a different effect from a given cause is entirely possible, and thus, it is not self-contradictory to connect “a rising sun” to “the non-rising temperature of the stone.” In other words, the so-called causal reasoning is actually about matters of fact, which is different from the one about the relationship of ideas, and hence, it must be operated upon a completely different mechanism from the latter.

After surveying all possible answers to the above question, Hume concludes that it is nothing other than “custom and habit” that incline us to infer a stable repetition of future events from our past observation of the same events so as to develop our knowledge of causality and matters of fact. In Hume’s words, “After the constant conjunction of two objects – heat and flame, for instance, or weight and solidity – sheer habit makes us expect the one when we experience the other.” (pp.20, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.)

So, according to Hume, there is no secrete power or ultimate cause of nature which guarantees that nature will always proceed according to a fixed, unchangeable set of laws. Instead, Human knowledge of nature, viz., matters of fact in Hume’s words, solely and entirely derives from our observation and experience of the natural world, and thus, it is customs and habits, rather than any pre-established metaphysical reasoning, that help humans to know and adapt themselves to the constantly changing world with its discoverable, falsifiable and perfectible laws of causality. In other words, Hume’s “skepticism” employs customs and habits to remain suspicious towards metaphysical reasoning, while Descartes employs metaphysical reasoning to remain suspicious towards customs and habits. Shall we find a difference between Hume and Descartes more striking than this? I bet it would be very hard.

Nevertheless, despite that Hume’s philosophy can be read in a contrasting manner from Descartes in the above multiple aspects, Hume is surely still a “modern” thinker. His admiration towards Isaac Newton speaks to a common commitment among modern philosophers to the utilization of scientific method, the one of reducing complex issues into simple ones similar to what Descartes has articulated in the Discourse of Method, in the investigation of human mind. Also, Hume’s extraordinary work upon the study of the operations of mind represents another distinctive trait of modern philosophy which we analyzed before: its unusually intensive focus upon the subjective world of human mind. In fact, Hume is thought of as a pioneer of the modern discipline of psychology, and his study on the law of the association of ideas and the related moral philosophy which focuses upon sympathy continually generates great impact upon the study of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy even today.

Based upon the illustrated differences and similarity between Hume and Descartes, I would like to characterize Hume as a rebellious sibling of Descartes in the same family of modern thinkers.