A Contradiction in Hume’s Aesthetics?

By Hume’s lights, any inquiry into aesthetics operates under the pretense that that any rule or standard associated with taste is ascertained solely by experience and not by demonstration or reasoning a priori. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume asserts this thesis rather than proves it (see Paragraphs 9 and 10). Perhaps for some, Hume’s suggestion may strike them as intuitively correct and without need of conceptual rigor or proof. However, a closer look reveals that Hume’s aesthetics is subservient to epistemological commitments developed and expounded independently of “Of the Standard of Taste,” and it is to these commitments that one ought to direct one’s attention in order to determine whether the premise of Hume’s aesthetics holds up under philosophical scrutiny.

Early in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume draws what is minimally a conceptual distinction between two types of knowledge. On the hand are what he calls “relationships of ideas,” which include mathematics and any other sort of thinking whereby propositions are intuitively or demonstrably discovered. On the other hand are the broad and seemingly boundless “matters of fact,” which are conclusions and assertions whose arrival necessitates moving beyond the operation of thought, as well as beyond experience: “All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be based on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can beyond the evidence of our memory and sense” (ECHU 22).

Hume’s criticism of the customary affirmation of the a priori rule of causality is well known and needs only fleeting mention here. For Hume, the relation of cause and effect arises out of experience and habitual expectation rather than out of any a priori reasoning. He rejects the notion that the mind can ever discover the effect in a given cause. And so, he reasons, the mind must “invent or imagine” each scenario of a particular and peculiar effect proceeding by necessity from a cause. Now, Hume does not deny that causality is something real; rather, he holds that the mind cannot discover this principle intuitively or demonstrably and extend it to any future event.

New York Times highlights growing interest in philosophy

The New York Times published an article last Sunday on the increasing interest in philosophy at colleges and universities around the United States. I always advise my college students to pick up a second major in philosophy in addition to what they are already studying, as I have found no other discipline comparable in terms of aiding in the development of critical thinking, linguistic skills and practical application of concepts.

I was pleased to see that my own university, Texas A&M, got a nod in the article. Click here to read it.

José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 5)

By way of concluding this all too brief sketch of Ortega’s idea of life, perhaps it is worth taking account of “that anxiety both dolorous and delicious contained in every moment” of the present age.[1] If the essential and naked being—or not yet being—of humanity has been laid bare, are all people conscious of the fragility of life? In the context of a heightened vital altitude, are we all going to now choose to take up the task of life in inventing projects of being? Unfortunately, such optimism will inevitably lead to disappointment, for the present age is only now being ushered in. Just as the modern epoch began with the revolutionary insights of an minority, so too will our present age begin with a select minority long before vital awareness trickles down to all. In each generation, a “constant interval” separates the minority from masses.[2]

Ortega submits that before one can feel oneself disoriented and lost, one must make the initial effect to feel oneself, to meet oneself. But not all are willing to even take this initial treacherous step. The first answers we tend to seek whenever a crisis arises are those that are ready-made within our social environments. We often seek solutions from people without withdrawing from our environment momentarily in order to find our actual reality. But a “people” is not charged to invent itself, to decide its own being. A “people” does not think or choose for itself, it does not have responsibility for itself. Thus, the social “I” is inauthentic. Yet if I constantly rely upon the repetition of thoughts communicated by the “people,” I join myself to the amorphous and inauthentic masses; “I supplant my individual ‘I’ with the social ‘I’; I cease to live my genuine life and make this conform to a mold that is common, anonymous, ownerless. From being individual, I move to become communal; in the realm of thought, I practice vital commonality.”[3] To become inauthentic, to become mass is to live life on a derivative level, to make no demands of oneself for improving one’s circumstance, to avail of the effort to invent one’s being. Rather than being aware of the shipwreck, the masses perceive themselves as mere “buoys that float on the waves.”[4] In rather harsh terms, Ortega describes this life of inauthenticity: “Human necessity is the awesome imperative of authenticity. Whoever freely chooses not to abide by it falsifies his life, he unlives it, becomes a suicide.”[5] The masses ignore their ontological disorientation, substituting in its a place a fictitious and second-hand situation of orientation.

José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 4)

While I possess a great deal of freedom with respect to deciding my future possibilities, in life, I am condemned to choose. On that matter, I have no say. Before Heidegger’s “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of Dasein came Ortega’s description of the human condition as a “biological projectile launched…with pre-determined force and direction.”[1] I find that I have been “flung” into my life without any prior consent on my part,[2] and here I discover that my live is not coextensive with “I.” I am always within a particular surrounding, an environment, a circumstance. Life reveals to me that “I” am never without my environment—yo soy yo y mi circumstancia. “I” am only a single ingredient within the scope of life. “I live, and, in living, I am in the surrounding circumstance, which is not I. The reality of my being, my ‘I,’ is, then, secondary to the integral reality which is my life; I find the former—the reality of my ‘I’—in the latter, the living reality. I and circumstance both form part of my life.”[3] Before me always lie possibilities, and among these possibilities I possess a great range of freedom. However, my freedom is not limitless. Indeed, my liberty of choice transverses only the ground within the borderlands of my environment. I can never escape from my environment; it remains a constant within my life along with my “I.” In his groundbreaking La Rebelión de las Masas, Ortega succinctly captures this reality: “Our circumstances—these possibilities—form the portion of life given us, imposed on us. This constitutes what we call the world. Life does not choose its own world, it finds itself, to start with, in a world determined and unchangeable: the world of the present.”[4] To borrow Husserlian terminology, “I” and my circumstancia are moments to one another, dependent upon one another as they comprise the whole, which is my life. My awareness and conceptualization of my “I” comes only after having already been living the relationship with my circumstancia or environment.

José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 3)

“The new great Idea in which man is beginning to abide is the Idea of life.”[1] Ortega tells us that this new idea had its first adumbrations in the philosophical output of Nietzsche and Dilthey, who Ortega acknowledge as his guides, as well as in the literature of Goethe.[2] These great thinkers marked the beginning of the fin de siècle of modernity; Ortega is the herald of the consequent age. The imperative of this age is to permit the human reality to disclose itself as it really is in its most basic and vital spontaneity. Remarkably, Ortega’s most extended treatment of human life in its multifarious dimensions occurs in a work published posthumously under the rather unimposing title, Unas Lecciones de Metafísical.[3] In this marvelous little work, Ortega unveils human reality, in its “primary situation,” as nothing more than “living.”[4] Prior to any conceptualization and rationalization of human reality is life itself. As trivial and obvious as this description sounds, it has been forgotten over the course of Western philosophy and science, most especially in the modern age, and must be recovered and made the nucleus around which all philosophical investigations into human reality crystallize. We must unabashedly gaze at life in its nakedness, unclothed by modernity’s conceptual bonds. What this implies, Ortega asserts, is that we must dispense with the concept of being as it was developed and handed down from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle.[5] What we are in need of is a “non-Eleatic” concept of being, a Heraclitean description of the vicissitudes of being’s going and flowing.[6]

José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 2)

The modern age appeared under what Ortega calls a generación, which is a general term in his philosophy that denotes a peculiar social reality marked by a decisive sort of sensibility. The generación of modernity was determined by the ascendency of physico-mathematical reason, first among its intellectual minority and later among the vast multitude of Europeans, and lives now according to what can loosely be described as “our convictions.”[1] What Ortega wants to declare is that the sensibility of his own generation is markedly distinct from that of modernity, and in so doing he brings to light what had already been dimly present: the European of his age is in a fundamental state of crisis, of disorientation. Ortega, in his typically personal, narrative style, describes the onset of the crisis:

The man who has not lost faith in the past is not frightened by the future, because he is sure that in the past he will find the tactic, the method, the course, by which he can sustain himself in the problematic tomorrow. The future is the horizon of problems, the past is the terra firma of methods, of the roads which we believe we have under our feet. Consider, dear friend, the terrible situation of the man to whom the past, the stable, suddenly becomes problematical, suddenly becomes an abyss. Previously, danger appeared to lie only before him, in the hazardous future; now he finds it also behind his back and under his feet.[2]

What had for nearly 300 years buttressed human confidence in the under-laboring of modern philosophy and the grandiose constructions of science was now being subjected, ironically, to the very doubt that initially fired the machinery of the Cartesian system. Yet, this new doubt lacks the optimism of its modern forbear; it is not intended to serve as a means to undergird a pre-established system of science. Rather, the doubt of Ortega’s age slipped surreptitiously through the backdoor of the modern edifice, initially in the form of a nagging whisper before crescendoing to a resounding clamor. “We are beginning to suspect that history, human life, cannot and ‘ought’ not to be ruled by principle, like mathematical textbooks”[3]—the European at the turn of the twentieth century is forced to confront this unsettling reality.

José Ortega y Gasset on the Idea of Life (Part 1)

José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and politician, is one of the more exhilarating theorists to read. Commenting on themes philosophical, political, aesthetic and cultural, Ortega was perhaps the first modern Spanish thinker whose ideas made up a true export. Uniquely original, masterfully didactic and unusually perspicuous, Ortega is a genuinely enjoyable read. However, he has been eclipsed in existentialism by the likes of Sartre, Heidegger and Marcel, so few, even among the philosophy crowds, are aware of his thought. This is unfortunate, for his ideas under-gird a large part of twentieth century philosophy. Perhaps no other idea of his is as compelling, insightful and inspiring as his idea of life, which is the foundation of every tenet of his philosophy.

“One of the things life has taught me is that nothing is a matter of indifference if one has a moderately clear view of reality.”[1] These words, taken from a verbose but certainly not prolix self-introduction, never reached their intended German audience in the lifetime of their author, yet they perhaps capture in exemplary fashion his entire philosophical purview better than any other phrase he ever penned. José Ortega y Gasset insisted that life must be lived intentionally, not in the cognitive sense born out of the phenomenological tradition to which he remained loosely tied, but in its mundane sense of common parlance. For Ortega, one either chooses one’s destiny with deliberation, intention and execution or one resolves to consent and to concede to living at the derivative plane. There is no tertium quid or, in this case, no tertia vita. Indifference is not an option for life. I choose to realize my destiny or I choose to supplant my destiny with the cheap construct.

In this series of posts, I will touch on one of the main themes of Ortega’s thought, namely the idea of life. In the first section, I describe Ortega’s diagnosis of his present age in which he detects a fundamental need to return to the question of life. In the second, I treat in summary fashion Ortega’s idea of life. Finally, in the third, concluding section, I touch upon Ortega’s charge that the person of the present age must face the full reality of human life and respond to its imperative of realization. While my intent is primarily expository, my hope is to portray Ortega’s idea of life as what, in my opinion, it is within the history of philosophy: the departure point of twentieth century existentialist thought.