Heidegger

PASSION HAS NO REPRESENTATIVE QUALITY

MORE THOUGHTS ON HUME.

For me there is a conflict in Hume’s moral philosophy between his
commitment to causality, in which he accepts the necessity of causal impingements
between material entities and his extending of those causal predeterminations
to that of influencing human impulses, personality traits, and the
distinguishing behavioural features of their rational and emotional make-up - as also
being antecedally causal in origin and sway.

Hume wrote:

*Necessity may be defined two ways, conformably to the two definitions of ‘
cause’ of which it makes an essential part. It consists either in the constant
conjunction of like objects, or in the inference of the understanding from
one object to another.* EiHU. part II. 75.

I identify this uncharacteristic Humean analytic conflict or
insufficiency as lying both with his deterministic half-way-house compatiblism and with
the difficulty in distinguishing the enginery of causation which he
brilliantly recognised in his billiard-ball examples and his failure to extrapolate
it to the equally difficult to distinguish catenulate neccessities of human
decision-making (or lack of it.)

I consider the insubstantiality of Hume’s claim that passion has no
representative quality as detrimental to his theory of morality.

For me it is significant that even Hume, in my opinion the greatest
philosopher who ever lived, was not immune to the occupational malady of all
philosophers - abstraction. The semantic juggling-act which constitutes his moral
philosophy provides proof of this. In my opinion his uncritical acceptance of
historical philosophy’s traditional separation of human ideation into the two
distinct cognitive components of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ which represent the two
noetic balls with which he juggled, do not constitute two balls at all - but
are aspects of one ideational activity.

Contrary to Hume, I can distinguish no conjectural ability to behave morally
otherwise if the different concatenational influences which bifurcate back
into the experiential past come together in a present decisional node which
predetermines a certain course of physical action based upon emergent
psychological dispositions represented antecedally. In that sense I maintain that
‘passion’ does indeed have a representative quality - and that quality is a
psychological historical one.

Hume argues that moral intangibles are not perceptible by illustrative
reason. I claim otherwise in the sense that moral properties and our reasoned
conclusions are aspects of the same neuro-physical activity - the way we perceive
of the way the world is and the way we are prompted to act or remain
quiescent in certain situations.

I offer an example by way of clarification.

We encounter a tough-looking individual passionately bashing the daylights
out of a weaker man who is obviously in great pain and has given up any attempt
to strike back.

‘For God’s sake man stop! Use your reason. Can’t you see the man has had
enough?’

To our surprise the assailant is articulate, philosophically knowledgeable
and argues that he is using his reason. The supine man is a child abuser, who
he just caught in the act. He reasons that due to the leniency of the courts
he considers a beating will be more useful in dissuading the offender from
such future activities.

‘I am not enjoying doing this - in fact I find it most distasteful,’ he adds.
I regard it as a moral obligation to society to teach this man a lesson. As
a matter of fact,’ he continues, as he pins the man to the ground with his
hobnail boot on his neck.

‘Hume implied that even though our actions are deterministically
influenced, and in the case of this wretch his disgusting appetites are possibly
genetic in origin, that, with the exception of moral injury done by accident, when
a man is judged to be morally responsible for a deliberate misdemeanour we
must attribute the responsibility of the act to him and act accordingly. This is
what Hume is getting at when he wrote:

“A power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the
will;” which everyone has “who is not a prisoner and in chains”
(EcHU 8.1.23,)

I hold that when we condemn the concerns or actions of others and
characterise them as irrational and based on passion rather than reason, we are
merely rejecting the results of their ratiocinated processes that may well
differ greatly from our own. The young man who straps a string of explosives
around his chest and pulls the cord in a crowded bus may well be acting with grim
rationality in his passionate sacrifice of his own life as far as the
paradigmatic reasoning processes of his religious or patriotic beliefs are concerned.

In other words - one man’s reasoned, calculated commitment is another man’s
irrational passion - and vice versa.

The above illustrates that it is possible to represent passion, strong
feeling or emotion and provide a well-grounded, reasoned account of it.

Conclusion.

Hume claimed that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the
will, and can never oppose passion in the direction of the will” (T. 413).

He plays down the role of reason in the motivation of action, and that the
impulse to act must come from passion. In the Treatise he claims that reason is
the “slave of the passions” and provides what I consider to be tenuous
explanations for reason’s lack of the compulsion to act

(A) Reasoning is Thinking – merely an ideational activity - never the actual
initiator or instigator of causes and effects.

(B) Reason is Ineffective in preventing or overcoming the power of
passionate emotion.

(C) The Representation Argument, (which is what this paper is really about)
which concludes that passions, volitions and intentional actions can be
neither reasonable nor unreasonable.

For me the Representation Argument does not hold water. I am willing to
grant that in a fit of wild passion a man might strangle his partner who he
has just discovered in flagrante delicto with another man. At first glance it
would appear that reason played no part in such a tragedy. But if we grant
that in the moment of the initial confrontation the man reasoned that he had
been terribly betrayed, and in his mind [or more usually – in his culture]
such a thing was the most terrible act of immorality and harm that one person
could wreak upon another, then we could conclude that the frenzied act was a
combination of deterministically inspired reason and passion and in the mind
of the man he had reasoned that his errant spouse deserved to die?
Indeed, if he had not reasoned to take such a terrible revenge, we would be
justified in concluding that he had reasoned that she be given another
chance, or at least let to live with her transgression.

In both scenarios he had, in that split second before he acted, reasoned
upon a certain course of action, which for him was obviously reasonable. The
reasonableness or un reasonableness of his action as reasoned by others is a
matter of subjective opinion.

If he killed her a modern court would rule that there were mitigating
circumstances and that he committed the act: *whilst the balance of his mind was
disturbed.* In another form of language we might conclude with Hume that
passions, volitions and actions do not refer to other entities [such as the
specific erring spouse] they are “original existences* or in modern terms:
*antecedally internalised strongly held beliefs or obsessions.* Most countries allow
conditions that “affect the balance of the mind” to be regarded as mitigating
circumstances. This means that a person may be found guilty of “manslaughter”
on the basis of “diminished responsibility” rather than murder, if it can be
proved that the killer was suffering from a condition that affected their
judgment at the time.*

It would appear from this that the law is in accord with Hume’s
Representation Argument, and that the legal emphasis concentrates totally upon the Crime
Passionnel aspect. In my opinion that does not mean that the court or jury
completely excludes reason from its conclusions. The fact of the matter is that
in some sections of the public mind there exists a feeling that such
transgressions of trust, such as that of an erring partner or the abuse of a child’s
trust by a predator deserves death, or at least a severe punishment with the
implication that even if the murder was exclusively a reasoned, cold blooded
act, that even that deserved a certain degree of mitigation.

Finally I reluctantly oppose the master on three counts:

(1) I believe that the severalising of human ideation into separate
abstractional mental activity is an error.
(2) I hold that it is possible to represent a well-grounded, detailed,
reasoned account of passion, strong feeling or emotion.
(3) I believe that to equivocate that humans are causally determined on the
one hand, but are to be held to account for their actions on the other is
hypocritical. Hume should have admitted the obvious, which is perfectly in
keeping with his position regarding his statement that *reason is slave of the
passions.”

The punishment of crime is a pure passion for revenge – (vide: Saddam
Hussein)
we must learn to live with it.

regards,

Jud Evans.
Personal Website: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 1:50 am
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