Get the book. We're spending the whole week on it, and you will be a better person for the experience, whether or not the text touches your faith or lack thereof. Read to the end of the 9th part for Wednesday. And as you read, consider the following:
Laughter is the key to Hume's Dialoques Concerning Natural Religion. Indeed, I would suggest that if the Dialogues have not made one laugh, and if one has not experienced the sheer delight of Hume's rhetorical excesses and gaiety, then one hasn't really understood this work at all. From this perspective, the usual questions are irrelevant -- Is Hume Cleanthes or Philo? Is Philo a mitigated sceptic or a Pyrrhonian? Such debates are sterile and miss the point, for however consistent or inconsistent the characters may be, the actual drama of the text has an intention and a direction all of its own, destroying the religious hypothesis not so much by 'serious' calculated argument as by ridicule and excess. (Richard Wright, "Hume's Dialogues and the Comedy of Religion" Hume Studies 14:2 [Nov. 1988]. Web. http://www.humesociety.org/hs/issues/v14n2/contents-v14n2.html.)Do you agree? Do you disagree? To what extent, either way? Discuss! And cite some text to support your views.
Deadline: Wednesday (3/2), start of class.
6 comments:
There are some parts that make pretty big logical leaps. Take this quote from near the end of Part VII for instance (I'm using a different edition of the text so I will use Part numbers instead of pages), "The world, say I [Philo], resembles an animal, therefore it is an animal, therefore it arose from generation... The world says Cleanthes, resembles a machine, therefore it is a machine, therefore it arose from design."
This is a pretty ridiculous argument (which Philo freely admits). Consider the argument applied in another context - a child resembles their parents, therefore, they are their parents, therefore they arose from their grandparents. So Hume could very well be ridiculing the consistent use of the argument from design (a.k.a. teleological argument or watch-maker argument) as a 'proof' of the existence of god over the past 2000 years.
In the last paragraph of Part VII is one of my favourite quotes in the dialogue where Cleanthes decides that Philo is wrong, but he doesn't know how yet. He says:
I must confess Philo, that of all men living, the task which you have undertaken, of raising doubts and objections, suits you best, and seems, in a manner, natural and unavoidable to you. So great is your fertility of invention, that I am not ashamed to acknowledge myself unable, in a sudden, to solve regularly such out-of-the-way dficulties as you incessantl start upon me: Though I clearly see, in general, their fallacy and error.
The irony is that this is a very old argument, even for Hume. Luckily for Hume (and for contemporary proponents of teleological arguments) things don't really become obsolete in philosophy. So it is difficult for me to conceive that Cleanthes, the conscientious scholar, would be unfamiliar with the standard objections and their refutations which must have been discussed over the preceding two thousand years of philosophy and theology.
I can sense the bit of humor in this text. The conversations between each character sparks this because one may feel that the other has said something completely out of the box or contradicting toward the whole set of the world. For example, the section where it states, "But please notice how extremely cautious good thinkers are in transferring a discovered result to a similar case. These thinkers are not perfectly confident in applying their past observation to some other particular phenomenon, unless the old and new cases are exactly similar,"(13). Here, I get the sense that Philo his being witty to comment on the way that they other characters have evaluated their logic and reasoning with lacking some influential aspects. DO I believe that Hume is Philo? Yes, Philo is the character that seems to push the issue with different subjects regarding the main topic. He helps the other characters further their thoughts by bringing new perceptions in to light.
I feel that a humorous connotation can be found in
Humes' writing. I also believe that some of the viewpoints are very serious and important aspects of the Enlightenment era.
Considering the religious aspect, I feel the blind belief in God and his all mighty powers is of critical importance to the most important arguments among people during the time period we discuss so much. I believe it was Demea that was in an outrage that someone would be so bold as to even have a doubting thought that God was not the creator of all and had unlimited power. This theme is not comical and has caused a major spillage of blood over the world's long history.
I think you can definitely see the humor in Hume's writing. The back and forth between Cleanthes and Philo is very clever and I enjoy how Demea only contributes every once in a while in short bursts to kind of just agree with both of them. I think it's interesting that two hundred years later, the reader can still hear the sarcasm in some of Philo and Cleanthes' statements. I also think that Philo best represents Hume's views because he seems to have the most logical objections to Cleanthes' arguments and I think he comes off the best. Although, all of them do have their faults and I like that Hume doesn't make it clear who's ultimately right. I agree with Wright that the book is not just about the debate, but about the interactions between the characters.
While there may be some humor present in the writing, I think people tend to see humor where there is a lack of strong rationality. Most people undermine the impact that the religion paradigm had on the writing of philosophers. For example, if you look at Aristotle, he wrote excessively on how slavery is justified and seemed to stray from reality with his arguments. Some interpretations of this text are, because it is so off-base with reality, that it is a comedy. I think that in the same sense, religion in this context offers a strong frame for Hume's writing and while he is far from being a theologian he was probably more serious about many of his arguments than people would first think.
I agree with the initial quote that one who understood the text would be hard-pressed to not find it whimsical in some way. As Shaun noted, many of the arguments are exaggerated to the point of comedy. But beyond this, the way in which the characters interact is also comical. Philo is represented discussing in a "vehement manner, somewhat between jest and earnest" in part 2 and elsewhere the characters are shown being more animated than they would necessarily be. This could be a poke at the way in which philosophers place too much importance on their arguments.
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