Hume — Value & Knowledge

[Left-hand column From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1772 by David Hume]

The Enlightenment in France is the period leading up to the French Revolution. It was a movement of unparalleled intellectual ferment and creativity whose figures include Rousseau, d’Holbach, Diderot, Voltaire, Condillac, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Helvetius and others. Many different philosophical tendencies and currents were to be found among the ranks of these intellectual rebels. Although some were Deists (including Rousseau and Voltaire), the overwhelming trend amongst them was materialist, with a strong adherence to the promotion of science and above all the determination to elaborate a scientific view of society and to understand the social form and content of knowledge. In addition to the major influence of the Rationalism of earlier French philosophers, there was a considerable interest in the Empiricist philosophy of the British where Feudalism had so successfully been done away with and an Industrial Revolution was under way. Among the “sensationalists” included d’Holbach, Helvetius, Condillac, Condorcet, d’Alembert, Voltaire. Montesquieu remained a Rationalist, but with Rousseau pioneered the conception of knowledge as a social product.

Diderot is the purest expression of the conviction that science is inherently revolutionary. His whole life is taken up with collecting and disseminating knowledge and dodging the police and censors who continue to try to suppress the dissemination of knowledge. Diderot also typifies the conviction that there is no limit to human knowledge, and the capacity of human beings to “conquer” Nature — a kind of revolutionary dogmatism. Diderot however did not adhere to the “sensationalist” view of the identity between conception and object, but anticipated a materialist theory of the psyche to understand how people are able to reflect nature in theoretical conceptions. Diderot dealt with the Dogmatic spirit of the Enlightenment by adopting the dialogue as his form of exposition: the various dogmatic currents arising from the Enlightenment are given voice, but Diderot does not attempt to systematise them, but rather tends towards the development of an open-ended philosophy in the which the various currents contest one another and are not finally resolved.

The Enlightenment is enormously rich in tendencies and shades of opinion, but the great historic intellectual product of this movement is the discovery that knowledge is a social product, and not just knowledge, but also personality, mortality, health, justice, etc., etc. What were hitherto abstract or natural entities, became for the thinkers of the Enlightenment, social products. And this is the essential content of the controversy between Scepticism and Dogmatism: Is value given by Nature or is it a social product?

It is this same period which gives birth to the great tradition of British political economy, when Adam Smith elaborates the labour theory of value in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

And no wonder. Formerly it appeared that value was purely and simply product, material. The struggle of the British bourgeoisie to accumulate value by increasing the productivity of labour drew attention to the fact that value was alienated labour, not just appropriated matter. Rousseau’s discovery of the social origin of knowledge coincides with Adam Smith’s discovery of the social origin of value, which in turn coincides with the real application of science to the creation of value in the industrial revolution.

§

Kant

Kant lived in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, an absolutist monarch who raised Prussia to the status of a European power in which the arts and sciences flourished, but where political life was virtually totally absent. A contemporary of Goethe, the great composer, scientist and philosopher, Kant was in his earlier years also absorbed with scientific problems and developed important ideas of the evolution of the Solar System, Galaxies, and the retardation of the rotation of the Earth by the tides.

During this period he tended towards empiricism and was influenced by the Scepticism of David Hume. While his contemporaries in France were preparing a Great Revolution, in Germany the was no prospect of political activity, although the Arts and Sciences were flourishing. It is said that the German Idealists worked out in philosophy what was being played out in politics in France and economics in England.

In his Critical philosophy, Kant attempts to establish a system of concepts and categories in order to resolve the struggle between the multifarious tendencies, particularly scepticism and dogmatism.

“The first step in regard to the subjects of pure reason, and which marks the infancy of that faculty, is dogmatic. The second, which we have just mentioned, is sceptical, and it gives evidence that our judgement has been improved by experience. But a third step, such as can be taken only by fully matured judgment, based on assured principles of proved universality, is now necessary, namely to subject to examination, not the facts of reason, but reason itself, in the whole extent of its powers, and as regards its aptitude for pure a priori modes of knowledge. This is not the censorship but the criticism of reason, whereby not its present bounds but its determinate and necessary limits, not its ignorance, in regard to all possible questions of a certain kind, are demonstrated from principles, and not merely arrived at by way of conjecture. Thus scepticism is a resting place for reason, in which it may reflect on its dogmatic wanderings and gain some knowledge of the region in which it happens to be, that it may pursue its way with greater certainty; but it cannot be its permanent dwelling-place. It must take up its abode only in the region of complete certitude, whether this relates to the cognition of objects themselves, or to the limits which bound all our cognition..”

[ Critique of Pure Reason, 1787, II, II]

He proposes that there are certain principles given a priori and that on the basis of these we can have a knowledge of all possible objects of perception. Knowledge must, however, be confined to propositions about what is given in experience. Any attempt to introduce into thinking objects which are “beyond sensation”, metaphysical entities such as “value”, must lead to antinomies and error. Kant is thus able to reconcile empiricism and rationalism on the basis of these a priori notions which, with the passage of time, have become much less convincing. All subsequent attempts to build a theory of knowledge which depends on such a priori “knowledge” have ended in failure (such as Russell & Whitehead’s Logicism). The Essence of Kant’s theory of knowledge is the rejection of scepticism simultaneously with the rejection of an empirical basis for universal knowledge. He failed to reconcile these opposites, but in at least one sense he correctly posed the problem.

Likewise, in Ethics, Kant asserted both the categorical imperative and the self-value of each individual, but here also he failed to resolve the essential implicit contradiction in such an Ethic.

In the last decade of the 18th Century, ushered in by the American War of Independence (1776 — 83) and the French Revolution (1789), Georgian Britain has entered the period of proliferation of coal and steel mills (1780 onwards) while the conditions of the working class have reached an all-time low with the hulks overflowing; France is attempting to implement The Social Contract, but robbery, fraud and corruption predominate. The Kingdom of Reason is taking shape as Hell on Earth. Conditions did not even begin to improve until the first of the British Factory Acts in 1833.

For the first time now, the bourgeoisie is squarely confronted with the fact that there are limits to exploitation, that unbridled exploitation of labour leads to the destruction of humanity. Classical German Philosophy anticipated the course of bourgeois society. Its idealistic form reflected a content which pointed the future of social developments in Britain and France and the rest of Europe.

§

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23