A character analysis of Clytemnestra in 'Electra' by Sophocles

Electra is a tragedy written by Sophocles that chronicles a chapter of the ongoing difficulties of the House of Agamemnon.

Years earlier, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter to the gods when it seemed that some supernatural force was preventing the Greek fleet from advancing. The girl's grieving mother, Clytemnestra, eventually killed her husband in revenge. (Her motive was complicated by the fact that she was involved with another man, Aegisthus, who helped her commit the murder and whom she subsequently married.) Three surviving children feature in the play Electra: the boy Orestes, the girl Chrysothemis, and another girl, Electra herself.


When the play opens, Electra is grieving the death of her father Agamemnon. Electra defends the sacrifice of her sister as having been necessary and she finds fault with her mother Clytemnestra for having killed her father.

Clytemnestra first appears onstage a third of the way into the play, at which point she delivers two monologues. She has only short lines for the rest of the play.

In her first monologue, Clytemnestra criticizes Electra for having started the fight between them. She defends the righteousness of her choice to slay Agamemnon on the grounds of a mother's love. She makes the somewhat strange argument that a different man could have sacrificed her daughter or else another girl could have been chosen; she finds it particularly repellent that Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter by his own hand.

Electra asks to be permitted to share her opinion, which Clytemnestra makes a pretense of being willing to listen, saying "didst thou always address me in such a tone, thou wouldst be heard without pain." After listening to Electra's complaint, she angrily vows "thou shalt not fail to pay for this boldness, so soon as Aegisthus returns."

Clytemnestra's second monologue is a prayer to Apollo foreshadowing her own death, asking that no evil come to her. She asks to enjoy prosperity in the company of her friends and specifically with only those of her children "from whom no enmity or bitterness pursues me."

A messenger then comes to announce the accidental death of Clytemnestra's son Orestes, who had allied with Electra in opposing their mother. Clytemnestra rejoices in a muted and conflicted fashion as it seems that her prayer has already been answered. "'Tis a bitter lot," she admits, "when mine own calamities make the safety of my life." She had feared that Orestes might kill her. "A mother may be wronged," she adds contemplatively, "but she never learns to hate her child."

As it turns out, the announcement of Orestes' death is a lie. Orestes soon appears and, with his sister Electra's approval, kills his mother Clytemnestra and his stepfather Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of his father Agamemnon. The victims are not given an opportunity to speak before they are killed. Clytemnestra only manages to shriek a few words of alarm offstage before her end comes. Her conflicted character does not achieve any sort of resolution or final apology in this play.

Article originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 29, 2011.

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Greek god punishes skeptics in Euripides' 'Bacchae'

The premise of the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek tragedy "Bacchae" is the god Dionysus's punishment of the inhabitants of Thebes for denying his divinity. He causes all Theban women to go into a mad frenzy and to run into the cold mountains, drinking wine, dancing to flutes and drums, ripping apart cows with their bare hands, and making the contextually odd declaration that Dionysus is a beneficent god of pleasure who helps people forget their sorrows. Pentheus, the new king of Thebes and a nephew of Dionysus's mortal mother, is annoyed by the strange cult and refuses to acknowledge the god. Dionysus appears as a mortal man to specifically punish Pentheus, and here the play begins.

The action is interspersed with quasi-philosophical arguments in which Dionysus' apologists and deniers alike are made to look slightly ridiculous. The chorus members are true believers and insist that worshippers, despite their bizarre and immoderate behavior, are pious and pure. They also make somewhat contradictory comments about wine's effect on sexual desire. The blind prophet Tiresias exaggerates that drink is the only way that humans can mollify their sorrows and he makes the dubious claim that alcohol doesn't spark sexual desire in chaste women. The cult's nemesis Pentheus pontificates from a different angle but he is not a credible moral teacher either. He alleges that Dionysian worshippers are sexually licentious and therefore deserving of imprisonment. Having heard a rumor of a male stranger who has come to town heralding the god (this stranger would be the god Dionysus himself in human form), and without even having seen him or knowing his name, Pentheus wants him executed.

When the servants of Pentheus arrive to capture Dionysus, he surrenders laughing, warning them not to try to subdue him any further. They ignore him. Dionysus releases himself from the chains, shatters Pentheus' palace in a storm-like event, and mocks the king by causing him to stab at a phantom image of an opponent. He also magically releases his worshippers from their chains.

The second punishment for Pentheus is humiliation. Dionysus prods the king to admit that he'd like to watch the Theban women in their drunken and possibly erotic dances. Officially Pentheus only wishes to put a stop to their suspected misbehavior, but there are overtones that his curiosity is not entirely for strategic purposes. Dionysus warns him that the frenzied women will kill him on sight, so - first reducing the king's mental clarity - he coaches Pentheus in disguising himself in women's clothes. He then speaks to the chorus and admits that his real goal is simply to have Pentheus embarrass himself in front of Thebes by parading in a dress. This may be in revenge for Pentheus' previous mockery of Dionysus as an effeminate man.

Dionysus's third and most severe attack is to place Pentheus at the top of a pine tree where he is totally vulnerable and attacked by the mad worshippers. His own mother, not recognizing him despite his protests, participates in his dismemberment and sticks his head on a pike. When she returns to the city, her father Cadmus gently wakens her from her fantasy and helps her to see that the head belongs to her son and that she has murdered him. The tragic death of the king affects the entire family.


The tale contains several important moral lessons. To the contemporary Greek mind, the surface interpretation may have been that of a cautionary tale about piety displaying the utter dependence of humans on the angry whims of the gods. There is, however, a deeper lesson in the extended example of how evil begets evil. Zeus impregnated Semele and killed her; her misfortune was compounded by her family's disbelief in her story; her divine son Dionysus goads the disbelieving king into deeper heresy, then congratulates him for fighting evil (drunken revelry) with evil (deceit), when the compliment properly belongs to the god himself for his cruelty and duplicity in leading the king to a hideous death. There is also a subtle warning at the end of the play about the risks of being overly concerned with honor. It comes to light that Pentheus had been trusted by his grandfather Cadmus as a protector of the old man's honor to the extent that he would initiate violence against anyone who had offended him. It cannot be foreign to the royal family, then, that the gods also have a sense of honor and will destroy mortals who ignore, deny, or malign them.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 4, 2011.

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Knowledge of the First Indemonstrable Principle

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 24, 2012.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Second Article to his thirteenth-century Summa Theologica that "the first indemonstrable principle is that one cannot at the same time affirm and deny the same thing." Appealing to Aristotle's Metaphysics, he says that "this principle is based on the nature of being and nonbeing, and all other principles are based on it." He quickly concludes that "the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil."

Appealing to a law of non-contradiction is a standard trope in Western philosophy that forms the cornerstone of many logical arguments. But is this principle really inflexible? How do you know what you think you know about it?

Qualities such as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, etc., are opposites, but you never see them at their "pure" extremes. Instead, whenever they describe something in nature, they appear somewhere along a spectrum. To say that something is partly wet is also to say that it is partly dry. This looks like a potential case of affirming and denying the same thing. Indeed, it seems that there is some inevitable contradiction in any assessment you might make about the qualities of a thing, since your words are only rough approximations of the world they describe and nothing is ever a pure example of the categories you attach to it. You try to be mostly right, but you are always a little bit wrong. You could speak for hours or write hundreds of pages and never get at the full, exact meaning of what you are trying to convey.

Furthermore, when such observations are made, they typically involve an observer whose subjective appraisal taints the "fact of the matter." For you to say that something is hot is to imply that it is warmer than you might normally expect and also to suggest that you attach a value judgment to it: a pleasingly hot dinner, perhaps, or a scaldingly hot one. Otherwise, if there were nothing interesting to report, why would you be speaking about its temperature? So when you affirm or deny something about your dinner, you're also affirming or denying something about yourself and what you find noteworthy.

This sort of psychological reading of even the simplest factual assertions introduces a new level of complexity. The hard material world may not seem to admit contradictions, but the soft abstractions of humanity certainly do. Happiness and sadness are opposites, yet you can be happy and sad at the same time. You may affirm and deny your happiness simultaneously because you do not know yourself well, because you know yourself too well, or because you wish to influence what others believe about your mental status regardless of whether you are convinced it is true.

As another example, if you ask someone whether they like chocolate, they might reasonably assume you are offering them a small dessert following a meal. In that case, they probably do like chocolate. But they would not like to be forced to eat three pounds of chocolate in the middle of the night. So there are different senses in which they do and do not like chocolate. It's that crucial interpretation that makes your sentence appear (mostly) true or (mostly) false.

Thomas Aquinas wants to apply the "first indemonstrable principle" to the ethical realm. To get started here, you would have to agree that good and evil are opposites; that to be one is not to be the other. This is not as straightforward as one might suppose, since it is not obvious whether evil is merely the absence of good or whether evil is some positive trait in itself that somehow opposes or frustrates good. Good and evil might be on a spectrum just as wet and dry are. After all, anyone giving an honest assessment of themself would have to admit they are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.

This brings you to the psychological angle which cannot be removed from questions of good and evil. If you meet two beggars and only have one coin, how do you choose which one to feed, or whether to feed yourself instead? To choose one person leaves another in the lurch. There is no option uncontaminated by complexity and the possibility of competing ethical valuations. You cannot choose good in one area without choosing the absence of good in another area. And whether you've chosen good at all is arguably a matter of opinion. The beggar who receives the coin will affirm that you've chosen good, while the one who goes hungry will deny that you've done so. How should you evaluate yourself? Why should it be impossible that both beggars' assessments of you are true? Why must you affirm one and deny the other?

There is another problem with Western philosophy's fixation on the supposed law of non-contradiction.  It is that arguments tend to reduce to only two sides. In the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, reflecting on Protestant-Catholic disputes about the proper reverence of the Virgin Mary, wrote in her essay "The Blessed Woman": "Truth has always had the fate of the shuttlecock between the conflicting battledoors of controversy." By this she implied that neither the typical Protestant nor Catholic argument captured what she saw as the real truth about Mary. In other words, the problem is that, when you frame your idea of what the argument is or should be, you tend to close off your imagination to solutions that lie outside the bounds of the argument you've just constructed.

Of course, there may be multiple religious opinions about all sorts of subjects, and many of these beliefs are compatible with each other. If one reduces these opinions to a simplistic debate about whether it is, or is not, proper to make a statue of the Virgin Mary, then one has framed the debate in a way that seems to force everyone to take sides - even those who are not Christian and should have no recommendation about the worship of Mary at all!

One would seem foolish, hypocritical, and untrustworthy if one went around publicly affirming and denying the very same statement. In this way, what Thomas Aquinas calls the "first indemonstrable principle" is somewhat of a social norm governing clear, reliable communication. Non-contradiction helps to manage useful pieces of information and creates boundaries in which people can respect each other. But it is not necessarily descriptive of the way things "actually are."

Fortunately, for many questions you are not called upon to affirm or deny anything at all. Most subjects to most people are irrelevant or beyond their ken. When you are asked to make a choice about some obscure or abstract question, you should be suspicious not just about which of two options is more correct, but about what motivates someone to ask someone to "pick sides" in the first place.

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Race, desire and reason in 'Ourika' by Claire de Duras

"Ourika" was based on the true story of a Senegalese girl raised by nobility in France before the Revolution. In the novel, Ourika believes herself in love with her brother by adoption.

Originally posted to Helium Network circa 2012.

The story "Ourika," based on the true story of a Senegalese girl raised by the Princess of Beauvau before the French Revolution, was extremely popular in France in the early nineteenth century. Initially, a few dozen copies were privately printed in 1823. The next year, thousands of copies were printed. The story inspired four plays, two poems and a work of art by the king’s court painter, and it was lauded by Goethe. It was embraced by a growing abolitionist movement. The French colonies outlawed slavery 25 years after its publication.

The author was Claire de Duras. Born in 1777, she spent her early life in several countries after her aristocratic father was executed in the French Revolution. She married the future Duke of Duras, and eventually they returned to France, where she hosted an intellectual salon in their palace. Duras was so well known as a storyteller that she did not have to put her name on the first copies of "Ourika"; everyone knew who had written it.

Race

An introduction by Joan DeJean says that, until "Ourika," French literature employed African characters “to provoke reflection on the plight of slaves: they are not seen as individuals with psychological depth.” The character of Ourika is different.

The story opens with a doctor who is called to the convent bedside of a melancholy young nun and has a “strange shock” (in John Fowles’ translation) upon seeing that she is a “negress.” The bulk of the story is then told by Ourika in the first person voice from her current perspective as she looks back upon her childhood. When the story closes, it is bookended by the doctor’s voice again, saying that Ourika has died.

Growing up in a wealthy household, raised by a white woman called Mme. de B., Ourika judges that “everything prolonged my mistaken view of existence and made my blindness natural.” At the age of fifteen, she overhears Mme. de B. discuss her nonexistent marriage prospects. The only educated, wealthy, high-class men in their 18th-century France are white, and none are likely to marry a black woman. Thus Mme. de B. says: “I see her alone, always alone in the world.” Ourika suddenly realizes the import of her black skin. The overheard conversation is the moment that “ended my childhood.”

She is plunged into self-pity and despair. She believes she will never be able to find an appropriate match anywhere: not in France because of her Senegalese skin color, and not in Senegal because of her French education and culture. Therefore, she says, “I exaggerated my ugliness to myself,” and she declares “I was cut off from the entire human race.” She hides her skin as much as possible by wearing gloves. She withdraws from company. This inner wrestling is an example of the psychological depth mentioned by DeJean.

Desire

On a matter less tangible than her skin color, Ourika also comes to be tormented by the question of whether she is in love with Charles, her adoptive white brother. When he returns from school, Ourika feels that he is perfectly open and intimate with her, and she reveres him – yet she cannot share her “secrets” with him. Her secret, of course, is “the extent to which the irremediable stain of my color had made me miserable.”

At the outset of the story, she says, “I believe I felt for Charles exactly as a sister,” contrasting it with a feeling for Mme. de B. that is “more religious than emotional.” Yet her comment about the sisterly feeling may be also be contrasted with the possibility that she feels romantically toward Charles. This foreshadows what is to come.

Charles becomes betrothed to another girl, and Ourika withers further. Mme. de B., in a moment of annoyance, informs Ourika that she suffers from “an insane and doomed passion for Charles.” Ourika has never considered this before, and wonders if Mme. de B. is right. “Had what had canceled my heart really been no more than a forbidden love?” She believes she loves Charles “innocently,” yet a “mysterious voice cried deep in my heart” that Mme. de B. was right. She resolves to become a nun, telling Charles that the convent is “the one place where I may still think of you day and night.”

The author never firmly resolves the question of whether Ourika is in love with Charles. Ourika seems puzzled over it herself, and even as she muses in retrospect, her words are ambiguous. Ourika’s depression may stem from considerations of race, unrequited love, or other aspects of her personality – or all of these things. She acknowledges: “Unspoken desires have a kind of modesty – if they are not guessed, they can’t be satisfied. It’s as if they need two people to exist.”

Reason

A third concern in the story, and the least tangible of all, is the role of reason. Ourika observes that people become less dogmatic as they get older. As she puts it: “Youth cannot qualify. For it, everything is either good or bad, whereas the rock upon which old age founders is usually the discovery that nothing is altogether one thing or the other.” This attitude naturally varies between individuals, too. In one of her discussions with Charles, Ourika finds herself less dogmatic than he: “For him all suffering had to have some rational foundation. But who can say what is or isn’t rational? Is reason the same for everyone?” Indeed, even as dogmatism may decline with age, reason may increase, as reflected in her comment: “There is something striking about great suffering in the old, since it has the authority of reason.”

Lastly, Mme. de B.’s friend, a marquise, comments that reason is anyway “powerless against evils that arise from deliberately upsetting the natural order of things.” In other words, individuals cannot escape the trap of social hierarchies using mere wishes and plans. Some social institutions wield more powerful than the reasoning powers of individuals who would abolish those institutions.

A work that had great impact

These three themes – race, forbidden love and philosophical generalizations – make the story a good candidate for literary analysis, all the more so because they are expressed by a character who may be a so-called “unreliable narrator” due to her own depression. "Ourika" had a large impact on the French abolitionist movement and on French literature, and this places it among those rare works that succeed at their political and artistic goals alike.

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Hobbes: Learn the "Rules of Civil Life" and Stop Civil War

"The end of knowledge is power," Hobbes wrote. The point of thinking is to get things done. One of the most important tasks to achieve, he believed, having lived through the seventeenth-century English Civil War, is the cessation of wars.

Hobbes blamed civil wars on the citizens' ignorance of their moral duties: "The cause...of civil war is, that men know not the causes neither of war nor peace," he wrote. "Now, the knowledge of these rules [of civil life] is moral philosophy." More philosophy, more peace.

But this does not seem right. Many of the people who initiate civil wars surely have an over-developed sense of their moral duties as citizens, and they are outraged by people and institutions with fundamentally different beliefs. Such thinkers resort to violence, not for lack of philosophy, but for lack of dialogue with other philosophers.

If one of the warring sides is defending a political belief that is popularly considered to be more obviously right--perhaps democracy against totalitarianism, freedom against fear--then one could also argue it demeans the people and degrades their ideals to imply that both sides are ignorant, when one appears to be correct. It may also be unproductive to blame either side for a lack of education or moral literacy if each perceives itself to be defending itself against imminent physical aggression.

Source:
Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.

Wollstonecraft: Unmarried and pregnant--man's responsibility, or woman's?

Wollstonecraft opined that men should be compelled to provide for the unmarried women with whom they sleep and impregnate, as long as the women remain sexually faithful to their providers. Such an arrangement she terms a "left-handed marriage" (distinguished from proper marriages which she deems superior and preferable).

Her argument here is difficult to follow. The passage reads:

"...yet when a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage, and the man should be legally obliged to maintain the woman and her children, unless adultery, a natural divorcement, abrogated the law. And this law should remain in force as long as the weakness of women caused the word seduction to be used as an excuse for their frailty and want of principle; nay, while they depend on man for a subsistence, instead of earning it by the exertion of their own hands or heads."

As far as I can tell, the exhortation goes as follows:

Unfortunately, contemporary women are weak in moral principles and financial resources.

Women can and should be strong in these respects.

As part of their empowerment, pregnant unmarried women should stop blaming their "seducers" for the sexual activity in which both parties willingly participated.

(Implied) If men do not enjoy providing for their lovers and their offspring, then they should admit that women have sexual and financial responsibilities, i.e. assent to Wollstonecraft's feminist platform.

It is unclear to me how the claim that pregnant unmarried women should stop blaming their "seducers" is compatible with the idea that men should provide financially for their lovers. Wollstonecraft critiqued the contemporary assumption of her wealthy economic class that men were expected to earn money for their families while women were expected to sit at home and look pretty, and she envisioned a future in which women took responsibility for their own lives. The present and the future visions are clear, but her intermediate step--the specific practical recommendation by which the society would arrive at a more perfect future--is not clear at all. She said that men should provide for women until women got sick of the attention and, perhaps, if I read her correctly, until men became feminists (ceasing to use the word "seduction" as an excuse for women's behavior). We need a better-detailed program for social change.

Source:
Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Chapter 4: Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes.

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Wollstonecraft: Fondness and friendship

"To gain the affections of a virtuous man is affectation necessary?" In formulating this question, Wollstonecraft put her finger on an ancient question that even today populates advice columns. Courtship involves playful pretense and mystery to stimulate mutual interest. But when does coquettishness cross the line into affectation, that is, a false persona that hides the true self?

Asking if a woman should "condescend to use art and feign a sickly delicacy in order to secure her husband's affection", Wollstonecraft answered, "Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!"

In the search for romantic partnership, many people (both male and female) display their own weaknesses and are attracted to weaknesses in others, to some extent because they are searching for a partner who can tolerate, complement, or even fix their problems. This is not an entirely bad desire. Everyone is imperfect, and everyone has needs; these facts certainly influence our choice of partner, and our behavior with our partner! Yet, we have all seen examples of how the simple admission of vulnerability can go awry, in certain couples where one of the partners behaves in a manner that just seems annoyingly fake and therefore desperate.

Source:
Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Chapter 2: The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed.

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Berkeley: What color is that dismembered body part you are imagining?

In the last post, we quoted a 1772 text from David Hume that referred to compound ideas, that is, the combination of known concepts such as "gold" and "mountain" to generate new ideas and fantasies such as "golden mountains." Here is a similar idea from George Berkeley, 62 years earlier:

...for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever.

Rightly (in my opinion) Berkeley points out that, while one can imagine a human being, one cannot imagine a human being without particular qualities of height, color, etc. This illustrates two meanings of the word "abstract." One can imagine an abstract human, or even an abstract body part such as a hand or head, separated from all context and having no basis in reality; but remove all physical description and sensory reference points from the abstract idea, and it is no longer an image of anything. I imagine the same is true with virtue. When we imagine virtue, we imagine examples of virtue. The abstract ideas of kindness or honesty would mean nothing if they were so far abstracted as to be no longer grounded in human relationships.

Source: George Berkeley. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. (1710) Introduction, Paragraph 10.

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Hume: Ideas are imitations of sense perceptions

David Hume believed that the most direct, "lively" mental images are those caused by sensory impressions, and that the gyrations of the imagination and intellect are weak imitations or hybrids. "All the colours of poetry, however splendid," he wrote, "can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landscape. The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation." I am unsure whether I agree with this, particular as, during my morning meditation, my opinions on Hume's book nearly succeeded in crowding out my attention to a bird chirping outside my window. He also applied this to emotion, pointing out that we can recognize or imagine emotion in ourselves and others without actually feeling that emotion: "A man in a fit of anger, is actuated in a very different manner from one who only thinks of that emotion. If you tell me, that any person is in love, I easily understand your meaning, and form a just conception of his situation; but never can mistake that conception for the real disorders and agitations of the passion." One might add--I wish to point out--that when we hear of others' fortunes and misfortunes we often have our own emotional responses. Thus, when we hear about someone's unjust punishment, we actually become angry on her behalf, and when we watch the hero kiss his beloved on a movie screen, we actually feel the love we imagine he feels. Many of our mental creations are hybrids in the simplest and most literal sense. "What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived...When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain..." And yet, these ideas ultimately must be rooted in experience. He wrote, "A blind man can form no notion of colours, a deaf man of sounds." He also applied this to virtue: "A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty, nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity." Though it feels depressing to say so, this seems true to some degree. Why is it that deeply felt impulses and ethical commitments are so difficult to sympathize with in other people who experience them differently? If we were capable of understanding each other better, surely this would promote peace.

Source: David Hume. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (1772) Section II: Of the Origin of Ideas.

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Bonus: An adaptation of a short paper I wrote for college c. 2000. Revised 2022.

Hume's Enquirey into Knowledge of Matters of Fact

Hume, in Section IV of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, divides the objects of knowledge into two kinds: relations of ideas (whose truth we can prove) and matters of fact (which could always be different). So, how can we be certain about facts? Hume claimed that philosophers had yet explored it to his satisfaction.

First: We know some facts by immediate sense perception or by memory. Others, we know because we assume that an effect has an appropriate cause. A friend sends us a letter about a trip to France; this suggests to us that the friend is in France. The cause-and-effect relationship isn't known a priori but rather from experience.

Next: When we draw conclusions from experience, they aren't purely rational. We simply can't reason that the future will be exactly like the past. We've eaten bread in the past, but what is this breadlike meal before us now? Is it also bread? Will it nourish us? Hume questions the rationalist tradition that knowledge gained from experience is ultimately founded on reason.

In Section V, Hume offers a "sceptical solution" to his doubts. We have "natural instincts" to draw conclusions. It's custom or habit. Our reason is powerless to alter our conclusion. We see one action followed by another. The pattern repeats. We begin to believe it is cause and effect, though we have no rational explanation. And our experience does become "useful to us" when we draw the conclusion.

Logic is limited, he observes. Logic manipulates "relations of ideas" but not "matters of fact." That's why the scientific method involves experimental testing of a hypothesis. Scientists don't always work out their answer with pencil and paper alone, not only because it's hard, slow work to do it that way, but because it might not even be possible to do it that way. Repeated observations may be a better method. With the assurance attained through observation, our beliefs become pragmatically useful to us. We acquire knowledge. This is applicable not only to scientific ventures but to all of human life.

Hume acknowledges our beliefs are never certain.

Neither should we. After all, theories are only hypotheses that have been confirmed multiple times, and "natural laws" are only theories that have stood the test of time. If a contradictory event is ever observed, the theory or natural law will shatter. We can never prove matter of fact beyond doubt. Theories and beliefs are subject to factual observation. We are only certain of our beliefs insofar as they have not yet been proven wrong and our certainty remains useful to us.

Hume is aware that, starting with our observations, we must make an irrational, explicable leap to gain knowledge of cause and effect. After all, we could not function in the world without knowing anything about cause and effect. Though we gain this knowledge from custom and habit rather than from reason, we have no choice, he says, but to trust it.

Hume recognizes that some components of human knowledge are so fundamental that we cannot investigate them. At some point, we can no longer reason about our reasoning process or observe our process of observation. Hume's skepticism about the foundation of knowledge manifests intellectual humility. His conclusion that we gain knowledge through "custom or habit" is satisfactory for a non-scientific approach to human understanding.

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Smith: Sleeping soundly through famine

Adam Smith wrote of the ordinary man:

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he will not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?

There is a truth to this, at least regarding our immediate focus. You lie asleep at night worrying about your boss, your computer file, your friend, your bicycle, etc. — not someone you've never met on the other side of the world, no matter what grave things you imagine might be happening to them.

Smith is asking not only what you think about, but what you would do. Are you "willing to sacrifice" others' happiness for your own? That is a question of what you believe you want, but also perhaps what you'd actually do.

Of course, if the hypothetical situation is silly enough, it may not sound like a real moral question. No one is offering to free a child they've kidnapped if you'll turn over your bicycle.

Nonetheless, a hypothetical can be a starting point for self-examination.

Source: Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. (1790, reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) pp. 136-137. Quoted in "Humanity and Citizenship," by Amartya Sen, in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Martha C. Nussbaum with respondents. ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

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See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Adam Smith. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.