Abstract

Hume and Descartes, arguably the most important figures in modern philosophy, disagreed on everything fundamental save one: that human motivation is divided between two quite different and non-overlapping sources—the mind and the body—and that each of these contributes something very different to behavior. This particular doctrine is deeply rooted in Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy. (Still, while they agreed on the core doctrine, they diverged in important details—with Hume being especially unwilling to attribute much in the way of real control over behavior to Reason.) In not countering Descartes on this important idea about motivation, Hume unwittingly conspired to create a dogma—a doctrine handed down unopposed by a competitor into the next generation’s philosophical legacy. And this is rather unfortunate. Only Hume—or, at any rate, someone coming from his angle on things—could have helped to provide his posterity with philosophical substance that counters the mechanistic option. (And if we are ever to climb out of the mechanistic hole, we will have to invent an anti-mechanistic philosophy that has little or no continuity with others in its immediate history.) The moral is that philosophy adds real value when it is able to provide, in an uninterrupted way, foundations for a variety of different perspectives on a fundamental question—or at any rate, to keep received options alive. Philosophy can, in this way, prevent ossification of opinion into dogma. Because Hume did not provide a counter to Descartes on this particular occasion, one that might have drawn on ideas we find in the ancients (Plato or Aristotle), science has paid an enormous price.