Careful Who You Root For

I have a passing interest in philosophy and, within that field, perhaps my greatest hero is David Hume. This is amazingly difficult for me, for reasons I’ll go into in a moment. However, why did this man manage to influence my thinking so strongly? His ability to cut through popular dogmatic teachings and expose what seem to be unavoidable truths appealed to me as a young man. At the height of the Age of Enlightenment, when men of science and learning are striding around answering questions that until now had been the purview of religion, Hume points out that, due to the issue of inductive reasoning, science can’t actually answer questions as it deals only with what we can recall and what’s happening now. We can guess what will happen next, but we can never be sure. But then, just as philosophers and theologists are cheering, Hume tells them they’re a bunch of time wasters as too. I’m slightly paraphrasing, but the is-ought problem is an absolute nutmeg for people who try to use reason to define morality.

He didn’t just go around kicking sand in other thinkers eyes though. He also made some pretty serious claims of his own, too. His view that ethics are based on emotions rather than principles was absolutely revolutionary but, now that neuroscience and psychology have finally caught up with a 17th century thinker it is now believed that, though we might like to see ourselves as thinking creatures who feel, in reality we’re feeling creatures who think.

However, I have to temper my admiration for Hume. Simply put, the man was a racist. Anyone who dismisses his racism as being a ‘product of his times’ is wrong. He was challenged at that time on his views by plenty of his contemporaries. For example the philosopher James Beattie pointed out how ludicrous Humes assertions were that black people had never created any kind of civilisation. A modern academic, Dr Felix Waldmann has said of Hume that it is “absurd” to suggest that he did not appreciate what he was doing was wrong. Yet Waldmann himself has edited ‘Further Letter of David Hume’ and is currently working on two more of Hume’s works. What can we take from that?

Recently Edinburgh University renamed its David Hume Tower because the philosopher’s “comments on matters of race… rightly cause distress”. Many people were awash with grief, talking about 'cancel culture'. However, they're taking his name off a building, not the syllabus. It's the same argument with statues coming down. We don't teach history using massive bronze name plates. I know this because I'm talking about Hume as someone I've been inspired by and yet I've never once seen the tower named after him or spared a second glance at his statue on the Royal Mile. It's almost as though learning about his work and memorialising him are two different things.

I wanted to write about Hume today because the man inspired me and shaped my thinking. I deeply admire many things about him. But I also recognise that in certain aspects he was deeply flawed and wrong. Not because of the society he lived in - as I’ve shown he was happy to challenge established norms - or because of ignorance or stupidity. Hume was wrong because he was a racist. Despite this I do believe there is much we can learn from him, but it’s also important that we learn about him.