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1 Hume and the Problem of Theory and Practice in Philosophy and Political Theory Notes 1 Hume and the Problem of Theory and Practice in Philosophy and Political Theory 1 . David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–1740], ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; second edition edited by P.H. Nidditch, 1978), Book 3, part 2, section 12, paragraph 7, p. 572. 2 . David Hume, “The Sceptic” [1742], in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary , ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), paragraph 6, p. 161. 3 . David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955 and Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), section 1, paragraph 6, p. 18. 4 . Hume’s major works are: Treatise , Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1741– 1742, with subsequent editions adding new essays], An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding , An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [1751], ed. J.B. Schneewind (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, 6 volumes [1754–1762], (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1777], ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947). 5 . Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954, 1970), title page and chapter 1. 6 . “A collection of rules, even of practical rules, is termed a theory if the rules concerned are envisaged as principles of a fairly general nature, and if they are abstracted from numerous conditions which, nonetheless, necessarily influence their practical application.” Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying, ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’,” in Hans Reis, ed. Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 61. 7 . “Conversely, not all activities are called practice , but only those realizations of a particular purpose which are considered to comply with certain gener- ally conceived principles of procedure.” Kant, “On the Common Saying, ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’”. 8 . The term “cash value” was used by William James in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1981). It was meant to be metaphorical and applicable to metaphysical and religious questions. But the pragmatists were regularly accused by their critics of being crude materialists, the philosophical exponents of the values of a “commer- cial” society. 9 . There are notable exceptions, many of which are mentioned in the notes below. In addition to these works, see also: Jurgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), Terence Ball, ed. Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977), Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human 257 258 Notes Activity (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), Ian Shapiro ed., Theory and Practice (Nomos 37) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Richard E. Flathman, “Theory and Practice, Skepticism and Liberalism,” in Flathman, Toward a Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Brian Fay, Social Theory and Political Practice (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984). 10 . Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967) and “On the History of Theory and Praxis” in Terence Ball, ed. Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977). See also Nathan Rotenstreich, Theory and Practice: An Essay in Human Intentionality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), which covers similar ground and, additionally, covers pragmatism. 11 . For an account of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy as a practice, or way of life, see Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 12 . Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics , trans. David Ross, revised by J.L. Ackrill and J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book 6, sections 2–3, pp. 138–140 on contemplation; Book 1, section 3, p. 3 on not expecting precision from the study of human affairs. 13 . This is also the thesis of Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), who distinguishes action, work and labor from each other. Lobkowicz was probably influenced by Arendt. 14 . Lobkowicz, “On the History of Theory and Praxis,” p. 24. His interpreta- tion of Marx, which discounts the importance of Marx’s famous “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach,” is controversial (see his Theory and Practice , chapter 25, pp. 409ff.). 15 . John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1929). 16 . William James, “Pragmatism and Common Sense,” lecture 5 of Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking . 17 . On the utilitarians, see Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 18 . Hume, “The Sceptic,” p. 161. 19 . Hume, Treatise , Book 3, part 2, section 12, paragraph 7, p. 572. 20 . Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism [usually translated as “Outlines of Pyrrhonism”], trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Book 1. 21 . Sextus accused the Academic skeptics of denying that any knowledge of reality was possible and of being dogmatic in their denial. Diogenes Laertius, in his chapter on Pyrrho in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers , however, claimed that it was Pyrrho who denied the reality of the world around him, and that he denied this reality in practice. Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers , trans. C.D. Yonge, paragraph 3. In the rest of his account, however, Diogenes accurately summarized Sextus Empiricus’s version of Pyrrhonism. Notes 259 22 . Ancient skepticism was revived in the modern world, according to Richard Popkin, first by Catholics like Erasmus, who defended the authority of the Pope and the church against Luther’s certainty that each individual could discover the truths of Christianity on his own by reading the Bible. Thus when Descartes and other modern philosophers like Berkeley and Hume attempted to refute “Pyrrhonian” skepticism, this was not simply a “straw man” but a recognizable philosophical position. See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 23 . Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1962), Book 10, chapter 9, 1181b15, p. 302. W.D. Ross and J.L. Ackrill translated this passage as “philosophy of human nature,” while Ernest Barker translated it as “philosophy of things human.” See Richard McKeon, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1112, J.L. Ackrill, Aristotle’s Ethics (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 181, and Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 359. Aristotle defined man as a “political animal” in the Politics , Book 1, chapter 2, 1253a. On the (mis)translation of Aristotle, see Arendt, The Human Condition , p. 23. 24 . According to Pascal, “We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they wanted to divert themselves, they wrote the Laws and the Politics, to amuse themselves. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious. The most philosophic [thing] was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; if they presented the appearance of speaking of great matters, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.” Blaise Pascal, Pensees , no. 331, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958). Cited in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 22. Arendt believed that philosophers were hostile to politics and that this hostility originated with Plato. 25 . Plato, The Republic , trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1955, 1974, 1987), Book 9, 592b, p. 358. See also Book 5, 472c–d, p. 201. One motive for emphasizing the non-practical elements in Plato was to absolve him of the charge of “totalitarianism” that had been leveled by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). See Leo Strauss, “Plato” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 26 . “[T]he Academy was always, under Plato, ‘primarily a school of philosophic statesmen’,” according to Desmond Lee, quoting Francis Cornford. See Lee, “Translator’s Introduction,” Plato, The Republic , pp. xvii–xviii. Plato described his efforts in Syracuse in his “Seventh Letter,” in Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (London: Penguin, 2005). 27 . Aristotle, Politics , trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Book 4, chapter 1, 1288b21. Aristotle’s “advice” to tyrants
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