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Section 1 is titled "Of the Different Species of Philosophy." Human understanding amounts to two different types: doing and reasoning. One example of the relation between each comes from page 4 of the Enquiry, wherein Hume describes a painter painting the goddess Venus. The painter, let's say Raffy, needs both types of human understanding to perform his task. Raffy needs to actually know how to paint, and Raffy needs to have some mechanical understanding of the human anatomy; how many arms, legs, and heads there will be in order to properly depict Venus. The latter type of understanding explains why, when Raffy finishes his painting, Venus has two arms, two legs, and one head. Raffy has some understanding of what a human (or goddess) should look like, so he uses this in conjunction with his brilliant painting skills that he has developed since he was a young adolescent in order to conjure a finished product. Both of these types of understanding are imperatives to the finished product. If Raffy knew only how to paint, but has never seen a human before, he would not know how to paint Venus. If Raffy knew only what Venus looked like, detail to detail, but (like many of us) did not know how to paint, then he could only depict her in his mind's eye.
Another example of the above process that our professor seemingly forced on us is the method by which students ate fruits that were distributed to the class for any who wanted a snack. Students who ate bananas did not use paper plates while students who ate oranges did use paper plates. It is a given that students are capable of eating--this is doing. Reasoning is the students' knowing that oranges are juicy and make messes of things when they are eaten, while bananas are relatively tidy due to their having much less juice, and having a skin that can contain the eatable parts while they are being eaten. It then stands to reason that if one is to eat an orange in a classroom and a plate is available, then the plate ought to be used, whereas a plate is not needed for a banana. If students did not know the latter, they would certainly learn from experience. If students did not know the former, then we'd have a serious problem.
Hume declares that one needs to experience something before fully understanding it. For instance, if almonds ceased to exist today, how would one describe the taste of almonds to someone born after the fact? That person would have to have tasted almonds in order to know what they taste like, which is impossible, therefore that person can never fully understand almonds. This is partly true for all things. Only "partly true" because there are some things science has allowed us to understand, purely through reason and experimentation, without directly experiencing those things, such as atoms and the way light behaves. By the way, the difference between experimenting and experiencing is that the first tests hypothesis over and over again until proven correct, and experiencing is the acquisition of knowledge via the senses through particular events. To make this clear, say we wanted to know whether or not Spider Man was part spider. We could do one of two things: we could see that he spins webs, see that he climbs up walls with his appendages, and see him exert the same proportionate amount of force on objects when taking into account the difference between his mass and that of a spider. The conclusion that Spider Man is part spider based on the above inductive reasoning would be to understand Spider Man's "spiderness" through experience. Experimentally, we could extract some DNA from Spider Man, and compare it to the composition of a spider's DNA using the proper equipment to see if both DNAs share enough qualities. Both methods would reach the same conclusion, but Hume favors the first method because, for whatever reason, Hume distrusts DNA and anything else a person cannot directly experience.
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| Enjoy them while they last. |
So far, I'm not convinced that Hume's philosophy about human understanding is sound, since, as I have proven, there are more ways to understand things than only direct experience. This applies particularly to the things that cannot be directly experienced. Needless to say, atoms, the behavior of light, and DNA were hardly considered "things" in the 18th century. Strikingly, this flaw in Hume's philosophy seems incredibly obvious, so I'm also convinced that I either do not fully understand the reading, or Hume will fill this gap in future readings.
