Hume and Kant on Free Will Essay

Abstr goThis paper is an attempt to show how Kants ideas c erst spellrning virtual(a) and occult b argon(a)dom of the will was a significant correction to the par e actu each(prenominal)y(prenominal)el theories of Hume. It starts erupt by clarifying Humes critique of moldinesser out will, especi in all(prenominal)y as it appears in An Enquiry C erstwhilerning clement Understanding. It draws the conclusion that Humes philosophy is espousing agnosticism, and that Kants effort is to overcome this skepticism and hiatusore trust in reason. The philosophy of Kant is surfacelined in separate to falsify the last point.It is generally concur that Kant supplied the definitive stamp to philosophy that ushered in the modern age. Hume, though tremendously influential in his sequence, and a favorite in the French salons of philosophy, trim d possess into disrepute in the Victorian era, and tho since has become a font of restored interest. Yet Hume is the philosopher cited by K ant as having stirred him from his dogmatic slumbers. He had espoused a philosophy of empirical skepticism, so thorough and devastating in its ground that it became im execut fitted for Kant to remain in his settled certainties of Newtonian apprehension. It was the spur that carried him on to compose the critical review of stark(a) Reason (1781), where reason is restored, and man is once more vindicated as a cerebral being.Just because he refuted and reacted Humes skepticism does non imply that the latter philosophy is nullified. We must(prenominal) keep this in sagaciousness, that Humes skepticism is completely valid as far as palpate experience is concerned, and Kant does not refute every part of this philosophy. What he does is posit a further dimension to human being ground, specifically, the synthetic a priori expertness of the headspring, the existence of which Hume did not suspect. Only later on this addition is the primacy of reason restored. So we cannot say that Kant has destroyed Humes philosophy, earlier he has added to it.Central to Humes skepticism is his critique of cause and military force, which is spelled out to its most profound depths in chapter VII of the An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). The preliminary task is to outline the feign principle. The premise to this is that all live onledge begins from sense experience. Among such we ar fitting to distinguish surrounded by primary and atomic number 16ary sensations. The primary sensations are extension, motion, inertia etc, which are hence the concepts that physics tackles. Color, taste, smell etc are said to be secondary sensations, smooth or derived from the primary ones.The copy principle says that the primary sensations, though not bring throughing complete information from the tangible purpose which is more poignantly set forth as the reject in itself nevertheless is a faithful copy of it. This is why primary sensations are distinct and forceful presences in our mind. collateral sensations are in tress copies of the original copy, and due to this derivative record they lose distinctness to us. We will examine the copy principle of Hume in a moment.For the succession being we accept it as such and conceptualize the consequences. For Humes purposes, it has allowed him to refer to objects and their motions with confidence, and not to be held back by the rigor of these concepts. For without the principle we dont know as yet that objects are objects, and motion is motion, and we would birth had to deal with a chaos of sense experience, and nada meaningful to refer to it once against (1993, p. 12).So now, with the copy principle of Hume as foundation, we play along to talk about objects in motion. Next, we observe interdependence between objects, carried out in musculus quadriceps femoris and date. We know that motion in one object is cause to motion in another.A billiard bunch in motion strikes another, and afterward impact the second acquires a velocity too, and the dexterity of our understanding tells us, without the least inkling of doubt, that the impact imparted by the counterbalance ball is the cause of the second ball gaining motion. This understanding is so refined that we can, with a little help from Newtons mechanics, predict the exact flying of the second ball by analyzing the trajectory of the first of all. We know it, scarce how do we know it? This is the crucial question for Hume. For if we do not fuck off the answer we are left with skepticism.After impact with the first ball the second could require taken any one of an illimitable number of trajectories. simply it takes only one, and thusly we expect it to take only that one. A physicist whitethorn come along and try to convince us that it could not involve taken any other trajectory because the laws of motion stipulates that, with the initial conditions given, the trail it takes is the only possible one. But this is not an answer to the observer of the billiard ball, because he doesnt care what the laws of physics are. If nature had noticeed another numeric law then(prenominal) another outcome would have been just as valid.The observer could then have framed his conundrum differently Of the infinite possible numeric laws why just that one? There is nix in the inner logic of the situation that dictates that the first ball should take exactly the prescribed trajectory in the second. Hume said this about the observational set-up, that we may try an experiment ten times, and may arrive at the exact resembling result ten times. But this does not canvas that the specific outcome is inevitable. not even if we confirmed the outcome a million times, because we would still only have a statistical probability and not a proof.Humes conclusion is that there is no rational link between cause and termination. Yet we expect effect to go along cause, immediately and irrevocably. If this is so then, apologizes Hume, it is a feeling transmitted to us by custom. What exactly he manner by custom is left unknown. He could not have meant anything other than observing over and over again, even though this fails to take into account new-fangled experience.He himself supplies a famous counterexample in the Enquiry. Some one who has experienced all the dark glasses of blue, except for a tiny strip of the spectrum, is expected to report a gap when looking at the full spectrum of blue. But the fact is that he does not observe a gap at all, and recognizes at once the full spectrum of blue, even though he is experiencing a concomitant tone of voice on blue for the first time. The recognition was instantaneous, and the eye did require accustoming beforehand. This quickly disposes the theory of custom. Hume, however, continues to insist that our convictions regarding cause and effect can have no other source than custom.That the inference to custom is a vague one is made c lear when he comes to occupy giving will. The very act of consciousness, he says, testifies to the existence of free will. But coming to smooth on how it is possible that we are able to willingly set our limbs into motion, and to take up and external object thereby, it appears cipher less than miraculous. The mystery in nothing less than how one im visible body imparts momentum to anotherFor first Is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body by which a hypothetical spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? (Hume, 1993, p. 43)The consequent is that we cannot explain free will, just as surely as we cannot explain cause and effect. Custom was hesitantly introduced to explain cause and effect, and the same comes to the give birth of free will. As constant observers of nature we come to expect an effect to al meanss follow a cause, and the same summary ought to be apply to the orbit of human will. In all times and in all places humans have shown a constancy in their solar day to day affairs, which points to a constancy in human nature. The speculation concerning the scope of free will is overdone by the philosophers, maintains Hume.The exercise of free will, when looked at by means of the vista of human history, does not display divergence as often as it displays constancy. Hume broaches on the distinction between freedom and necessity to make this point clear. Inanimate objects convey to us most clearly the lumber of freedom. We may describe an inanimate object as indifferent to the rest of the material universe, and in that sense free. But this freedom also entails necessity. The object is subject to the necessary laws of causation, and indeed is bound entirely by them. This is the blood that marrys cause and effect to inanimate objects, and is a relationship that is composed of some(prenominal) freedom and nec essity.Hume transposes the same analysis to the relationship between human beings and free will. The will is indeed free, but being so implies that it conforms to human nature. He proposes the following definitionBy liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will this is, if we spot to remain at rest, we may if we choose to move, we also may. (1993, p. 63)The notion of free will advanced here bears a crucial difference to the commonplace one, and begs to be recite out. What Hume describes as free will is not a prime(prenominal) between course A and B. Rather the choice is between A and not A, the latter implying stagnation, not an utility(a) course. This is the entire extent of our free will. We choose either to move forward, or else to stand still. This is what Hume would describe as freedom to act. Free will, however, is in complete accordance with human nature, and therefrom follows the laws of necessity, just as everything else in detail reality. Free will urges us to act freely. With freedom to act we may respond to this urge, or we may desist.In the final analysis our understanding of free will hinges on custom, in the same way as does our understanding of cause and effect. The past is guide to the future in the probabilistic sense. Beyond probabilities we have no understanding of either, contends Hume. In order to enforce this skepticism he proceeds to dismantle the Cartesian theories that simulated to explain mind and matter interaction, especially the theory of occasionalism advanced by Father Nicholas Malebranche.In this theory God is made some(prenominal) motivator and executor of every act or incident that seems to be cause, while the circumstances which we call a cause are only occasion for God to act in such a manner. Hume complained that this not only made God a slave to his own creation, but it also eradicated free will, making everything full of God (1993, p. 47). By disposi ng summarily the Cartesian explanations of cause and effect Hume makes his skepticism complete.Kant overcomes this skepticism by revising the premise of Hume. The correction is made most forcefully in the opening to the CritiqueAlthough all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises entirely from experience. For it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own capacity of knowing (incited by impressions) supplies from itself (1999, p. 1)To be fair to Hume, he does consider this possibility, and ponders whether there is a blueprint in the mind where all causes and all effects can be referred back. (1993, p. 44). But he dismisses this idea when he realizes that a static blueprint can never account for the propelling reality. However, the faculty that Kant is suggesting is not static, rather dynamic and creative, and here lies the crucial difference. In the technical terms of Kant it is the synthetic a priori faculty of the mind. This is distinguished from the uninflected a priori faculty, such as logic. The rules of logic are extant in the mind (a priori), but form a consistent system (analytical), and therefore do not depend on sense experience.On the first instance it seems impossible that the mind can have a faculty that is synthetic a priori, where synthetic implies that it is creative. It entails that order is created out of the chaos of sense experience, and order that was not there before. But Kant also provides proof that the mind is capable of synthesis. Mathematical marriage offers are synthetic a priori, he contended. The proposition 3 + 5 = 8 may sound like self-consistent logic, but it is not really so. 8 is a completely new concept, and is not contained in either 3, 5 or +. If we know that 3 + 5 = 8, it is due to a synthetic a priori faculty in the mind.As Kant relates in the Prolegomena, when he realized that mathematical propositio ns are indeed synthetic a priori, it led him to ponder on what other such concepts the mind uses to facilitate understanding, and it appeared to him, in due course, that cause and effect was a concept of understanding that derives from the same faculty. He does not at all concern himself with material reality as a thing in itself, that which the materialist philosophers were after in order to provide a foundation to Newtonian science. Like Hume he maintains throughout that an absolute material reality is beyond knowledge, and to speculate on its existence was futile.We only pauperism to consider what we perceive and what we do. He also shows that Hume falters at exactly those points where he cannot dismiss material existence in itself. The copy principle is subservient to a material object in itself. The object does not deliver copies to our mind rather the mind provides the concepts of space in which we are able to conjure up material objects from sensory data. Both space and time are minute concepts of the mind, contends Kant, and like cause and effect are the tools by which we come to understand depending on(p) reality (Prolegomena, 2005, p. 26).As soon as it is made out that we are the responsible architects of our own reality, and are not passive bystanders to an absolute material reality beyond our control, we suddenly bump ourselves as incorrupt beings. Therefore the subsequent direction of Kants philosophy, after the metaphysics of understanding has been established, is towards a metaphysics of incorrupts.And so emerges the crucial distinction that Kant makes between applicatory and transcendental freedom. To say that we have realistic freedom implies we are able to understand the world, and by doing so we direct the will accordingly. We will do so of course for practical purposes survival, utility, convenience, happiness etc. this would seem to pass through the entire orbit of freedom. But Kant went on to demonstrate, in his Groundwork for t he Metaphysics of morals (1785), that such freedom is not actually freedom at all, and indeed is a binding. Thus far Kant is in concord with Hume.Now, the metaphysics of understanding, as spelt out in the Critique, is not the entire picture. The synthetic a priori faculty of the mind fashions understanding out of sensory experience. But such understanding does not lead to truth. As pure concepts of understanding space and time are both necessarily infinite. But because they emanate from the finite mind they are also finite. So in their very make-up space and time lead to contradictions. The same end must necessarily assure anything that takes place within space and time. So that matter is both unendingly divisible and also made up of concrete building blocks.As another example, we have free will, but at the same time everything is caused, so we dont have free will. Such examples are put forward by Kant as pairs of antinomies. agree to our understanding both consequences are vali d, and yet they mutually contradict each other. All practical reasoning necessarily leads to pairs of antinomies.This must be so, because we reason by means of subject and predicate, where the subject is the cause of the predicate. But this subject is in turn predicate to another subject, and so on in an infinite chain of causation. If there was an ultimate subject at the beginning of this chain, we could have claimed to have discovered the final cause, and thereby have at hand a pronouncement of truth. But in contingent reality there is no such final cause. So whenever we try to make pronouncements of truth we must face contradiction.We cannot say that practical reason is false for this reason. Life is control by contingencies, and practical reason is to explain the contingent, or to facilitate such understanding. Absolute truth lies beyond all contingencies, and this is ruled by pure reason, explains Kant. It is not within the grasp of the human mind, yet it is the underpinning of the mind, and is the source of all innate faculties.The same analysis applies to practical freedom, which is but the corollary to practical reason. With practical freedom we choose our course according to practical reason, i.e. we are actuate by self-serving motives happiness, honor, respectability, and so on. But in doing so we bind ourselves to those endless chains of contingencies, so that we are not really free. We imitate material acquisition in order to be happy, and yet it incessantly eludes us. The definition of freedom is to escape all contingencies, and yet by the industry of practical reason we are mired more and more into contingent reality. Therefore we are not free.This is indeed a contradiction, one which Hume does not pay heed to. The very act of consciousness tells us that we are free, that out will is free. If practical reason does not embody this freedom, then surely pure reason must do so. By the same token, we are in possession of a transcendental freedo m, which is a way of life that overcomes all contingencies, and is dictated by pure reason. Kant describes this path as the moral one. We recognize and follow this path from a sense of affair.To clarify what it is, duty is done for its own sake. There is no material motive any(prenominal) attached to it. Not for any particular good, it is done for the universal good. It is a categorical imperative, meaning that the very make-up of our being, or pure reason, dictates that we follow it. As an aid to identifying ones duty Kant devised the following verbiage for the categorical imperative I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my apothegm should become a universal law (Moral fairness, 2005, p. 74).Kant is described as overcoming Humes skepticism. But it is questionable whether the latter is a skeptic at all. According to a contemporary, Humes philosophical paradoxes are delivered with a confidence that belies skepticism Never has there been a Pyrrhoni an more dogmatic (qtd. in Mossner, 1936, p. 129). A more recent reassessment of Hume is carried out by the German Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who opines, Humes doctrine is not to be understood as an end, but as a new beginning (1951, p. 59).The nature of this new beginning is well up articulated by Hume himself. Indulge your passion for science, nature tells us, according to Hume, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society (Hume, 1993, p. 3). If we listen carefully, the moral note that Hume is sounding is hardly different from that of the categorical imperative of Kant. Not for the persons sake, but for humanitys sake. Not for the particular good but for the universal good. This is the essence of Humes projected science of man, as it is also the heart of Kants metaphysics of morals.ReferencesCassirer, E. (1951). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and crowd P. Pettegrove. Boston Beacon Press.H ume, D. (1993). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. E. Steinberg (Ed.) Boston Hackett Publishing.Kant, I. (1999). Critique of Pure Reason. W. S. Pluhar (Trans.), E. Watkins (Ed.) Boston Hackett Publishing.Kant, I. (2005). Kants Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Whitefish, MT Kessinger Publishing.Kant, I. (2005). The Moral Law Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. New York Routledge.Mossner, E. C. (1936). Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason A Study in the History Of Thought. New York Macmillan.