How the Scots…Continued, part four.

Great Minds Struggle to Make Sense of the World

“Reason is and out to be the slave of the passions”. With that statement, David Hume turned 2000 years of philosophy on its head. It was from Lord Kames A Treatise of Human Nature that would plant these wild seeds into Hume’s beliefs. He took these ideas about reason further than ever when he concluded that society must devise strategies to channel passions in constructive directions. His analysis of the relationship between liberty and authority is beautiful and inspires me to consider doing more research on the topics and perhaps in grad school. The world offers liberty and authority (to protect that liberty) and neither of them can prevail absolutely.

Like Hume, Smith was trying to build on the ideas surrounding reason and rational behaviour. He advocated that man had an inborn moral sense that was more basic and instinctual (unlike the abstractness of Hutcheson’s idea of man seeking happiness). Smith felt that being moral requires an interplay of imagination; it demands that we put ourselves in another person’s place and put another person in our place. If only these ideas would be followed today! Ultimately, the role of a government in Smith’s ideal world would be to “employ the force of society to restrain those who are subject to its authority from hurting or disturbing the happiness of another.” If I could add one caveat on that, it would be to add the word secular in front of happiness. Applying these principals to the commercial and capitalistic systems he researched and wrote about in great length, he understood that there was a potential (and ultimately real) systematic corruption flowing from the commercial society. Essentially, those who get caught up in their profits, losses or their job, lose sight of the big picture. He deemed education to be of the utmost importance, to prevent such ignorance in knowledge and perspective.

It is the education of this country’s citizens that is essentially what allowed for such greatest to erupt in so many different areas.