Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.

The Conclusion of Hume’s Book

The first exposure I had to a lot of details of the artistic and philosophical history of Europe came from Francis Schaeffer’s book entitled How Should We Then Live? Schaeffer definitely had a particular way of interpreting art spiritually, and he probably committed some errors of fact in his historical details. But when I was about eighteen years old, he got me thinking about history and art and philosophy and cultural criticism at a level I had never worked at before. And he was exactly right about at least one observation. He said that the colleges ignore the last part of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, the part labeled “Conclusion of This Book.” A few years after I read Schaeffer’s book for the first time, I took a philosophy class as part of my Ph.D. program, and we covered Hume and his Treatise of Human Nature, and, sure enough, we did not discuss the “Conclusion.”

Hume spends most of the treatise applying empiricist skepticism to the world and showing that we don’t rationally know that things exist and can’t logically know that cause and effect exist. All we know, he says, is that we experience phenomena, and that the phenomena come in patterns. This part of the book leaves us without any basis for science, love, or faith; life seems meaningless. As my professor duly pointed out, Kant says that reading Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber,” and that he set about finding a system that would “save” God and science. But in the “Conclusion,” Hume says:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds [i.e. the uncertainty that God, people, morals, and causality exist], nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.

Maybe God and science didn’t need saving. I suspected Hume just tossed these lines out in order to try to stave off public criticism of his nihilism, but, retaining my own brand of skepticism, I entertained the thought that he wrote the words sincerely. After all, they are in the “Conclusion to This Book,” and “conclusion” doesn’t only mean the end: it might mean that this position marked the final resting place of his thoughts on the subject.

This year, I read Hume’s other most known works: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The former covered much of the Humean territory familiar to me, but I was amazed to see that the author started right at the beginning explaining that he had no desire to pull the rug out from under religion and science. He makes his point abundantly clear: we should trust our senses, believe in God, and pursue science, but the basis of these human activities is not in the understanding. We can’t prove that cause and effect exist the way we can prove the Pythagorean theorem, but we still believe in them rightly because we have been made with another mechanism of knowledge, which he calls “custom.” A few minutes ago, when I read the passage I quoted earlier, words stood out that I had never noticed before. I had remembered “reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds” and “I play a game of backgammon” and “they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous.” But I did not remember the words “nature herself suffices to that purpose.” Hume only rejects reason here, not our beliefs. He just wants to show that these beliefs come to us by a path that has nothing to do with arguments and syllogisms.

So now I’m thinking about Kant again. Was he really concerned, as I’ve thought, that Hume made belief in God and science impossible? Or did he see that Hume still believed? In other words, was he disturbed only that Hume placed belief on a foundation other than that of reason?

A Bird’s-Eye View

I must confess that I’m having trouble deciding where to start this post. My motivation is a sense that I’ve gained a bird’s-eye view of the history of philosophy. But how does one begin to describe a bird’s-eye view? Which point on the horizon does one choose as the beginning? Maybe the random center over which the bird’s eye currently soars is the best beginning. The other day, I read a reference in Locke to Hobbes. Now a link between two seventeenth-century philosophers doesn’t exactly constitute a panorama. But that link made me think of the references to Locke that I read a few months ago in Thomas Reid’s writing. And then I thought of both philosophers referring to Aristotle and the medieval Aristotelians, and something like a great vista started to open up before my imagination. My thoughts next flew to Husserl, another philosopher whose work I read earlier in 2014, and his response to Hume, who lived at the time and in the same country as Reid, who disagreed with Locke, who followed up on some epistemological issues set by Descartes, who did much to overturn the reign of the medieval schoolmen, who revived Aristotle, whose concept of ideas opposed that of Plato, who learned from Socrates. Now that’s a panorama.

I wrote a few days ago about my sense of accomplishment on unpacking the Great Books set. Yes, every empty box brings a sense of accomplishment these days. But I meant specifically a satisfaction in having read and understood all of these great thinkers’ works. I set out twenty years ago to give myself a liberal education in classic literature, history, philosophy, and science, and I’ve succeeded beyond all expectations.

The sense of achievement becomes even stronger when I find that as I read one author, I’m critiquing his ideas according to what I’ve read in another. Reid’s arguments resolved a problem that had nagged me since the 1980s when I first read John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This time through the key passages in Locke, I find myself wanting to stop him at the very beginning and say, “Your thought of a table is not a thought about an idea in your head. You’ve added a needless step in your model. The thought and the idea are the same, and they are about the table.”

And then I start wrestling with a new problem: if I want to stop Locke at his very first premise, why do I keep reading? I don’t read philosophy just to know what a given philosopher said; I want to know the Truth about Things. I don’t just want to learn about the philosopher; I want to learn from the philosopher. So if the philosopher’s first premise is wrong, I could be tempted to say that the rest of the book doesn’t have any truth for me to learn and set it aside. But Locke doesn’t try to follow a tight logical argument, as his contemporary Spinoza did. It seems to me that Locke has a lot of true and useful ideas to share that don’t depend on that first premise. So I keep reading, and as I do, I learn.

I’ve been in this place before. I can’t buy Marx’s first premise, either: the value of a commodity does not reside wholly or even primarily in the value of the labor that went into its production. Someone has to admire and want the item’s beauty or usefulness. But Marx gets around his first mistake, and so did I when I read Capital. And I’m glad I did. For that matter, Spinoza slips up pretty early on, but I still like a lot of his conclusions.

I’m only a little bird flying over a great land. But the skies are clear, and the view is magnificent.

Reid’s Ideas About Ideas

I’m the last person I know of who took slides. I stopped only about ten years ago. I’ve suffered a lot of good-natured ridicule over my habit, especially when I used to show slides of my kids or of trips. But I just couldn’t see how anyone could prefer dull inks on a 4"x6" card over the bright colored beams of light shining on a screen 150 times as large. And the resolution was astonishing! As large as I ever made the projection of one of my slides, I never detected any graininess.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a slide I took in the museum atop the Acropolis in Athens, a picture of a bas relief of a boy leading a cow. I stared and stared at that sculpture for a long time, unable to shake the nagging question: Is it really there? Weird question, I know. Maybe not so weird, though, right after a semester of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy at the University of Iowa. Empirical philosophers like Locke and Hume said that although everything we know comes through our senses, our senses are cheats (Who could have guessed that I’d allude to A Christmas Carol two posts in a row? Okay, it’s not really all that unlikely.) As I was saying, your senses are cheats. You could be dreaming. You could be hallucinating. Even if you’re in your right, wakeful mind and the thing is truly there, you don’t actually know what it looks like. You think you know what a circular table looks like, for instance, but you always only see one side of it at a time. And the top almost never actually appears as a circle, unless you’re looking at it from straight above. You may think of it as a circle, but try drawing a true circle on a piece of paper with some legs under it, and you’ll find that what you drew doesn’t look like anything in reality. You don’t know what color the table is, either, since it looks black in one kind of lighting and gray in another. You don’t even know what size the table is, since it appears smaller when you’re farther away. You don’t actually see a table, the empiricists concluded. You see a constantly changing series of images in your mind. What you see are only “ideas.” Whether or how those ideas correspond to a table, you can’t know.

Twenty-seven years later, I’m wondering why that professor couldn’t have had us read some Thomas Reid in that class. Reid was the chief figure in Scottish Common Sense philosophy and wrote mainly in response to Hume, who argued that besides not knowing if the table exists, I couldn’t even know if the “I” that I imagine seeing the (imaginary) table exists. Reid’s solution to the problem posed by Hume boils down, in my mind at least, to two very effective arguments.

First, Reid says, You empiricists claim that when I think I see a table, I actually only see an idea in my mind. In other words, that image of an ellipse with four legs in my mind is the true object of an action of my mind called “seeing,” an act that has nothing to do with my eyes. But every day common sense tells us that the image itself is the action of my mind and that the object of that action is a table existing in reality outside my mind. You argue as if the burden is on me to prove the existence of the table outside myself. But I say that your theory posits new things for which you have no evidence. So the burden of proof is actually on you empiricists to show us the image in the mind as an existing object. Where and how does this happen in the brain? And what is this action called “seeing” that is separate from the image of the table? My senses give me continuing evidence of the existence of the table, but you give me no evidence of the existence of an extra act of the mind that “sees” an image in my mind.

This argument took all the wind out the empiricists’ sails for me. Like the table seen from a great distance, their nagging skepticism suddenly seemed very small. But I still wanted some positive indication that the table (and the bas relief) existed, and this Reid gave me a few chapters later. All the talk about the changing perspective of the table as we move around, he points out, far from telling us to doubt our senses and the existence of the table, shows us exactly the opposite. Of course we can never see the whole of the table at once. But the principles of geometry predict what aspect we will see, what apparent size it will take on, and what angles and shapes will appear to us in representation of the circular table. And since our changing perspective follows those geometrical predictions exactly every time we move, we have overwhelming, consistent evidence that the images all result from the sight of an actual table with one given shape and determinable dimensions.

If you’ve never read Descartes or Locke or Hume, you may be experiencing a bout of a different kind of  skepticism right now: you may have trouble believing that such thoughts had ever troubled me or that I could ever have doubted the existence of a particular sculpture in the Acropolis museum. But I have read those philosophers, and their arguments stuck with me. I had some ripostes in mind: some I had read in other places and some I had concocted on my own. But Thomas Reid’s response has surpassed them all. I wish he were here so I could shake his hand and thank him. And I wish my philosophy professor were here so I could shake his hand and tell him to include Reid in his class.

To go back to the Acropolis, my response to my doubts about that sculpture didn’t make much sense, now that I think about it. I tried to capture an elusive material being by recording some light waves on film. Then I developed the film and shined a projector light through the slide, casting the colors on a screen, which reflected the colored light into my eyes. And now I have the slide digitized. So when I look at the picture these days, I’m seeing the representation on a computer screen of a series of magnetic polarities set by scanning the light shining through a slide developed from film exposed to the light reflecting off of a bas relief sculpture of a boy. So I’m several steps removed from that sculpture. But at least I now believe the sculpture exists.

At least it did in 1987 when I last saw it with my own eyes.

Coming to a Conclusion

In How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer claims that philosophy classes covering Hume's Treatise of Human Nature almost always ignore the last part, which Hume calls the Conclusion to the book. That thought stuck with me, and twelve or so years after reading Schaeffer's review of western philosophy and art, I took a philosophy class covering Hume (and others), and sure enough, we read most of the book except for the Conclusion. And yet, "conclusion" doesn't just mean "last bit": it can also mean "the final idea that all my thinking leads to." Why should a philosophy class leave out a philosopher's final thought?

Hume starts with the empiricist's premise: that all we know comes through the senses. His predecessors taught that, given that premise, we had reason to doubt everything we know since our senses can't be trusted. All that I really know about objects or other people is but the image in my mind, they say, and I have no way to know if that image corresponds to reality. Hume, pursuing this path, went even farther and said that I can't even know if I exist, since I only know of myself through sensory experience. What I think I know -- no, that formulation of the sentence doesn't work, because it assumes I exist. Let's try this: The apparent thoughts that suggest the existence of myself only exist in the mind -- although I don't know if it's my mind or our mind or The Mind or what.

Now in David Copperfield, Dickens might appear at first to be saying something like what Hume says. We find that people interact more with vivid memories or vivid images of the future than they do with the present. (The exception is shown by David and Dora, who, at the moment of their engagement, think only of the present. But then they are described as being "mad" with love, so they can't be taken as models of human thinking!) David's beloved nurse, Peggotty, has a sewing kit with a picture of St. Paul's on the lid, but she is disappointed with the "real" St. Paul's when she sees it because it doesn't live up to the superior image she has in her mind. In a hundred-and-one examples like these, Dickens presents characters whose mental images of objects are more real to them than reality.

The unusual use of names in the book could be seen as an example that applies not to objects but to people. Many a character in this novel has a special name for another character that only he uses. For instance, Aunt Betsey -- and only Aunt Betsey -- calls David "Trot." Steerforth calls him "Daisy," Dora calls him "Doady," and Ham calls him "Mas'r Davy Bor." Betsey definitely calls him Trot because, for her, the name stands for the ideal child, and she usually sees David as this ideal child (or at least a very close substitute for the ideal child -- a girl -- that David didn't turn out to be); she does not generally see him as a real, flawed boy. Steerforth explains that he calls David "Daisy" because he sees him as fresh and innocent, whether David actually is fresh as a daisy or not. So with all these pet names representing all these mental images, is there such a person as David Copperfield in the world of the novel? Or is that name only a convenient symbol for the collection of all the images that all the other characters have in their minds?

In Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, Lawrence Frank, my colleague at the University of Oklahoma, says that the answer to the last question is "yes." Dickens, he says, shows us in his novels that there is no self, no human soul, and that people are only imaginations. An object with a human name has a string of experiences, but there's nothing to suggest that the object that, for instance, is now looking at this computer screen is the same object that ate that turkey sandwich last November. I never expected a Dickens fan to espouse such a philosophy, let alone ascribe it to the Great Author, so I had to read Frank's first chapter several times before I could understand that this was, in fact, his meaning. If he's right, I wondered, who was this "Charles Dickens" who supposedly said all these things? Who was "Larry Frank" who wrote the book and got tenure for it? Who was this "I" that read it and got confused by it?

Well, at the very least, I can respond that the Dickens that lives in my head never said any such thing. (And you can rest assured that the Ken Stephenson that lives in your head doesn't think Dickens said it.) To say that human beings are mysteries is a long way from saying there are no humans to be mystified. And to accept that reality challenges the limitations of the human mind doesn't mean there is no reality, just as our difficulty grabbing on to the greased pig doesn't mean there is no pig. But let's say that a person's very personhood does reside only in the mind. Well, then, a Mind of greater power than ours, the Mind that imagined us and created us, knows who we are better than we know ourselves and preserves the integrity of our souls. And God, too, will one day give to each of his children a white stone engraved with a special name that only He will use.

Hume didn't ultimately buy it, either. Here's an excerpt from his Conclusion (I'm glad Francis Schaeffer told me to keep my eye out for it):

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

I, too, find that after playing a game (or after reading a few pages of Dickens) all pessimistic philosophies appear cold, strained, and ridiculous.

Hume's oft-suppressed Conclusion, by the way, is not included in the purportedly complete copy online at this site from the University of Idaho. [Note from 2016: the link from the U of Idaho philosophy professor seems to have been taken down.] It is included, though, on the Project Gutenberg copy.