PLEASE NOTE; This post is a continuation of post #34, which can be found here:
Does the study of philosophy ever lead to answers?
@Diedre,
I'm back like a tornado to a trailer park!
At last it has come time to delve into a true and actual example of a philosophical idea that has had a huge impact on the world. The idea I have in mind for the task is 280 years old. It's an invention of the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. And when it was first published in Book III of Hume's three volume work,
A Treatise of Human Nature,
it exploded in the skies above western thought like a super-nova it was almost wholly ignored.
Yeah, you might have guessed it, one of the most influential ideas in the history of western thought failed upon its publication to impress almost anyone. It was like that quiet, shy kid who, whenever you see him, always looks so lost and abandoned that he just makes you want to take his hand and gently lead him to the lost-and-found kiosk in order to turn him in.
Today, perhaps one out of every two people in the Western cultural sphere to one extent or another embraces Hume's idea. Most of those in the other half have in some form encountered it, but perhaps haven't understood it well enough to have adopted it. The idea has at least three names.
The name we'll use here is "the Guillotine".
The Guillotine gets its name
not only from the fact that it separates something, but
just as much from the fact that the separation is final and devastating. The idea did not even begin to be 'appreciated' until at least eight years after its original publication, but when people at last began to grasp the Guillotine's meaning and importance, many people found it profoundly disorienting. But why?
In essence, the Guillotine severed their morals from what they were in the habit of believing proved their morals were the right morals to have. It was a steel blade imposing itself between their morals and the justification for their morals, and it did so with a ruthless finality. To the people of the 1750s, the Guillotine seemed impossible to escape, impossible to defeat.
Even today, almost three centuries later, it is orders of magnitude more widely accepted than are the efforts to escape or defeat it.
As an idea, the Guillotine is deceptively simple. It hardly looks anything like the effect it has once it is properly understood. Put in it's simplest terms,
"Is does not imply ought." Or, in one of the many ways it is stated today, "You cannot use a fact to prove a value."
"You cannot use a fact to prove a value." "All values are subjective." "There are no objective morals." "Morality is a matter of personal opinion or taste." "Your morals are just as subjective as mine, and vice versa." "There are no universal moral truths."
Those are just a handful of the dozens of ways the Guillotine is spoken of today -- most often by people who have never heard of David Hume. The other two names for the Guillotine are "the is-ought problem" and "Hume's Law".
Now, as a perhaps interesting thought-experiment, ask yourself -- on a day-to-day basis, which idea impacts me the most
in shaping how I look at the world? The Guillotine? Or the Theory of Relativity?
To me, it's the Guillotine. I understand the Guillotine. I only barely understand Relativity. So how can something that I only barely understand have a greater impact on how I day-to-day see the world than something I do understand? Hands down, the Guillotine.
I hope all of that has been interesting, and also illustrates the kind of answers that philosophy arrives at. Every now and then you come across someone who both understands the Guillotine and does not accept it as true. But no one like that has ever come up with something accepted as true by anywhere nearly as many people as the Guillotine. There are actually people in this world who do not accept that the earth is a sphere. But that doesn't make them right.
In my opinion, someday the Guillotine will be escaped or defeated (In fact, it might already have been) -- but most likely only in part. Kind of like how Darwinian evolution was to some degree replaced by the synthesis of the 1930s. The core idea of evolution has endured. The Guillotine will most likely hang around in one form or another for a very long time.
