Chesterton and Hume

[PHSshamrock]

Do Chesterton’s ethics of elf land sound a bit… Humean to you?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Do Chesterton’s ethics of elf land sound a bit… Humean to you?

Try to flesh out your question. Answers might then be forthcoming.

 

[GKChesternut]

Try to flesh out your question. Answers might then be forthcoming.

I think PHSshamrock means “Does the Ethics of Elfland sound like it’s based off of the philosophy of David Hume?”

Sadly, I don’t know enough on Hume or his philosophy to answer the question.

 

[polytropos]

But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened-- dawn and death and so on–as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities.

Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the “Laws of Nature.” When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a “law,” for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about “a law” that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood.

There is, in my view, something fairly Humean about this. It’s true that there is not a logical connection between the apple breaking off and its hitting the ground; it’s true that we can imagine and conceive it flying into space instead of falling. But unless one (dubiously) thinks that consistent imaginability or conceivability implies real possibility, the conclusion that there’s no ‘necessary’ connection between the apple’s breaking off and its hitting the ground does not follow.

You might be able to drive a wedge between Chesterton and Hume in a few ways. They might be talking of different sorts of ‘necessity’. Even someone who does believe in ‘laws’ and ‘tendencies’ will concede that the apple does not fall to the ground “in all possible worlds”; there might be confounding factors (lots of wind?). Hume, also, reduces our notion of causal necessity to that of constant conjunction; Chesterton isn’t so much denying a connection but saying that it is mysterious and leaves open other possibilities. Chesterton also remains open to the possibility of a miracle, whereas Hume takes his account of causation to warrant skepticism about miracles. You might be able to take Chesterton as denying the use of the term ‘law’ to modern scientists.

I would deny Chesterton’s denial that this is not mystical. I don’t think it’s a particularly strong philosophical position. I believe it faces the same (or similar) defects as Hume’s account faces.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

What we should keep in mind about Hume is that he was an atheist, and his skepticism is rooted in his atheism. Of course he was not going to believe in miracles, nor in the ethics of elf land.

Here is C.S. Lewis in his book Miracles.

The question, “Do miracles occur?” and the question, “Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?” are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers, “Yes,” to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this “Yes” as a ground for answering, “No,” to the question, “Do miracles occur?” The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to the other form of the same question."