Reading Response: Kant v. Hume

            It seems I cannot safely return to the endeavor of reading Kant without, on each subsequent encounter, finding his argument all the more preposterous. That any can make their way through his claims without frequently begging for some justification to be offered other than his unexamined assumptions that such things follow from his prior statements leaves me at a loss for understanding of a larger public—present and historical—who have taken up his ideas as gospel. It is not that his base claims fail to stand on their own, for he openly acknowledges that “we have not here asserted the truth of this proposition, much less professed to have within our power to prove it”. Rather, he proceeds from each assertion, in turn, to make leaps that fail to disclose any logic other than his wish that there should be an ought that transcends human experience. One wishes for a Socrates to engage Mr. Kant in dialogue, short circuiting his game of Tarot of Reason before the entire edifice might have been constructed from such flimsy stock. Instead, the text becomes increasingly convoluted, as one is caught in the intricate assemblage of a clockwork wagon (to use Hume's image) wholly unsuited to the task of carrying its load. Having struggled through, all I can venture to say is that I am torn between a compassion for his and his disciples' sincere desire for an unsentimental “simplicity” (again, per Hume), and a deep confusion as to how anyone can match up such fanciful Reason with an embodied experience of being.

            My sentiments, instead, fall with Hume, who makes a much more, dare I say, reasonable case for interplay of sentiment and “public utility”, based not in an appeal to pure practical reason, but in our natural inclinations to judge actions in a context of their effects upon “human affairs”, situated as they are. Admittedly, Hume, like Kant, makes assertions that land unexamined (e.g., “infidelity...is...more pernicious in women”, “nature has implanted...superior affection to [one's] own country”). However, when taken in context of his catalog of varying “boundaries of moral good and evil” (Part II) these stand as yet further examples of the manner in which even Hume's own sentiment is caught up in the circumstances of his time and place. (He has made no claim here to these or any other maxims as being or being based in “universal law”.) This said, it should be noted that Hume's repeated protestations that no cause beyond sentiment might be then or in the future identified does fail to anticipate (as well they would) contemporary group fitness theory, which casts sentiment as embodying an ecological rationality comparable to Kant's Reason only in the abstract, operating as it does as “a disinterested [yet not illogical] benevolence in [non-human and human] species” alike, without appeal to any universal “rational being”.