When you remove the TDS hate that is leading the lives of so many on the left, it makes perfect sense.
I think somewhere in his writings, Hume mentions the Norman (French) invasion of England, which occurred in 1066, some 700 years before he was born.
He suggests that by pure rational thinking a person would say “That means that even today the English government is illegitimate. We therefore are free to stop observing laws and should throw out the foregn interventionists.”
His idea: That is a rational approach and it is both dumb and unworkable.
Instead, (and he believes all of his readers will immediately recognize the truth of this) people correctly see there is no utility in that rational approach. “Obviously,” he thought, “the English people should not do this and no one in their right mind would advocate doing this, even though it is ‘rational.’”
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Do you doubt that we all do it on both sides of the political aisle?
If by “it” you mean something like
“Make dumb irrational choices based on emotion and our dislike of the opposing party,” then I have no doubt. Both parties do it.
(I also believe TDS takes it too unprecedented levels, but that will probably wear off once JD Vance is president.)
You aren’t understanding Hume. There is no “more rational” or “less rational”. It’s all emotion, all the time, equally between everyone.
This is all going above your head.
I was referring to you as OP rather than Hume.
I am arguing the same point as Hume. There isn’t even an “What amounts of emotional are people being?” question to ask. 100% emotion, 100% of the time.
You already answered my question. Both sides of the political aisle are equally guilty.
And I am saying you may think you are, but you are not.
Hume used terms like “rational” and “utility” in very specific ways with very specific meanings.
He did not say “throw away all logic, ration, science, and reason and just do whatever appeals to oyur emotions,” which you seem to be implying.
And that is by virtue of logical necessity instead of it being a contingent truth that could possibly be different.
Well, I can’t advocate for something that could ever possibly approached in any other way.
'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. 'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.
The perfect thread for this.
Basically the OP breaks down to….
“We lost and we don’t like it so everything is stupid”.
It shows exactly the emotion and mental level of your average leftist.
Trump’s been in office 7 months and the leftist tantrums continue with no end in sight.
What he was saying, and we can see this from his other writings
is that
- a strictly rationalist apparach to poltical questions is often impractical (lacks utility) and that
- oftentimes utility must overrule the strictly rationalist approach.
this is far differnt from saying "rational politics do not exsits and passions hould reul over everything.
A striclty rationalist approach would (his example) mean
- the “Normans” decendent who still ive in the UK today should leave,and go back to France – where they came from. They were wrong to steal land from the Saxons.
And would also mean (not his examples)
-
Most Europeans should go back to Greece and Turky – where they came from. They were wrong to steal land from the hunter-gatherers who lived there first.
-
Many of the “native americans” should go back to Siberia – where they came from. They were wrong to steal land from the earlier waves of native Americans, whos ancetors were then displaced East of the Mississippi.
-
etc.
That is emphatically not Hume’s POV. Is–ought problem - Wikipedia
But what did Hume know of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which already settled these matters long before?
“Western” “philosophy” and “science” was already passé in the world but only stimulated local interest with local instructional scaffolds of intellectualisms
Hume’s primary contribution was in epistemilogy.
- How do we (really) know stuff?
- Why is it that sometime we ‘know’ stuff that isn’t true?
- What types of thinking should be used to answer what types of questions?
- etc..
Epistimology does not rely on reading anything else from anyone else.
(Although it would be silly to engage in such thought if any of those questions have been permanently and definitively answered.)
yes
It demonstrates how pockets of “accepted knowledge” disconnect from previous “answers” and how people tend to repeat confusion from life to life, falling back like inchworms due to various impediments and attachments.
It does demonstrate the fault of “vanity” which Hume had an inkling about.