Just got done reading Habermas on Hume. (I had not been much familiar with Hume - just indirectly, through writers who sadly ignore all Hume’s most important points!) What I like about Hume is his grounding all conceptual thinking in experience. For Hume, for example, Descartes cogito assumes far too much. Turning to virtues, Hume traces these basically to behaviors we like (on aesthetic or emotional grounds). So far so good from my POV … Where Hume trips up, however, is with anything that smacks of structure or transcendence. For example, he really can’t tease “justice” out of personal feeling life. The next chapter in Habermas will be on Kant … but I’m already sort of neo-Kantian when it comes to structure, so that’s enough stage setting to dive into the “real structure with real force” idea and to check back with Habermas about all that a bit later!
To play this argument in the key of naturalism (we can save the Platonic realm of Ideas for another exchange), what is the structure? What is the force? I like how Hume starts with lived experience and then builds concepts up from there. But for us humans born into human society, part of that lived experience is ideas popping into our awareness that we, personally, could have scarcely manufactured from within our own skins. To me, those ideas popping in are the “structure” and the “force”.
Although I don’t buy Kant’s a priori transcendental categories, in a more general way, language and enculturation work as if they were transcendentals. Our personal experience is not entirely personal. We express ourselves through the language of the tribe. So an idea like “justice” comes to us, seemingly from the great beyond, but it really got drilled into us in generally Skinnerian ways from early childhood up through all of our adult interactions with those around us. A real excellent book to illustrate how this all works in Norbert Elias The Civilizating Proccess. All of the manners and morals current bourgeois society takes for granted were nearly entirely absent in the middle ages. “Guilt” was a feeling manufactured through a centuries-long process of the imposition of social controls. Self-restraint is entirely unnatural. It must be manufactured through structure and force. (Literally, force - everything about armies, prisons, policing, etc.). Freud called such voices in our heads “superego”. That term, and Freud’s larger system, are certainly debatable, but the general notion of social norms and values internalized within the structure of personality seems pretty psychologically mainstream. I’m pretty sure anybody’s LLM would back that up.
So … let’s just say for the sake of argument I’m not wildly wrong about all that … what’s it mean for 2R? What’s it mean for social change theory more generally? It strikes me that most of us traffic in tribal platitudes most of the time, and getting deeper and beyond that is no mean achievement. LLMs hyper-accelerate the tribal platitude thing. That can come in handy, as long as we cast the LLM in the role of a Cephalus or Euthyphro and keep the Socratic role for ourselves! The road deeper involves what Vervaeke calls “participatory knowing”. Any number of hair-raising shamanistic initiations are available for that! Me? Never saw a boundary I did not want to test. Somehow still breathing … due to some structure or force I can scarcely take credit for!