[lit-ideas] Re: Hume, Sweet Hume
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 16:49:45 +0900
On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John wrote
>
>
> For those who seek absolute certainty, appealing to custom is bound to
>> fail. Custom is too varied to be an unfailing guide. There is, however,
>> Edmund Burke's observation that custom represents the accumulated learning
>> of the past and should not, thus, be casually discarded. The path of
>> moderation is to accept custom as a guide unless there are good reasons not
>> to.
>>
>
> Hume's notion of 'custom' is not that of 'It's customary (our custom), that
> after dinner the men retire to the smoking room after while the women amuse
> themselves,' or of 'The Malarkian's customs seem strange to us.' He sees
> custom or habit as the mental force which determines us to expect, after
> repeated experience of things happening in what looks to us like an
> inevitable sequence, that they will continue to behave that way. 'Force'
> isn't metaphorical here; Hume was trying to make good on his claim to have
> discovered the principles of human nature, as Newton had discovered the laws
> and principles of the natural world.
>
My intent was actually closer to Hume than the good doctor Paul's reading of
me suggests. One of the usual effects of training as an anthropologist is
taking custom seriously as a force in human affairs. Where I might disagree
with Hume is in giving more weight to sociological factors than to
repetition per se. I think, for example, of Berger and Luckmann's account of
how innovations become naturalized through a dialectical process in which a
new idea is first externalized ( communicated to others) then objectified
(taken up by others and treated as given) and then, finally, internalized
(communicated to children or other newcomers to a group who accept them as
simply the way things are). A particularly critical step is the second,
objectification, for, once others take up an idea, it can then survive the
death of the originator or, in some cases, the originator's repudiation.
Cheers,
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
Other related posts:
