This belief is quite significant. The concept of transforming society can be understood in multiple ways. For instance, Marx believed that transforming society meant carrying out a revolution. Only through revolution could the old society and old system be overthrown and a new society be built. However, as French thinkers, they never did, or even opposed, transforming society through revolutionary means.
What they put forward more often is to transform society through ideas, concepts or culture.
This is the ideological basis behind the French Enlightenment. That is why philosophers like Montesquieu would establish their conceptions of law on the basis of an understanding of objective reality. This fully demonstrates that French thinkers inherited the method of thought provided by their teachers, the British philosophers, which involves exploring the existence value and foundation of our society from nature and the essence of things.
Therefore, this nature, this Law, this law, comes from nature. It does not come from viewpoints. It cannot start from human experience. It must come from some inherent nature of things. And this inherent nature of things transcends our understanding of things.
Therefore, it has a transcendental feature, but this transcendental nature is by no means Cartesian transcendentalism, because it does not aim to deduce the development of the entire human society through some preconceived transcendental notion of mine.
On the contrary, it is based on their so-called investigation of society, and they discover, even propose the fundamental laws of our human society through their empirical observations, which are actually based on the natural connections among various things existing in our society.
And the basis for this natural connection is that such a connection can be recognized and verified by all of us.
So, the ideas he expressed in "The Spirit of Laws", such as that God has His own law; the material world has its own law; everything that exists has its own law, and so on, I believe no one can refute them.
And this kind of law is actually what the Chinese call "Dao". It is a kind of law formed in nature. It does not depend on our understanding of it. Even in all human societies, it has its own state presented. It does not need to be concealed or explained. It does not need to add any artificial elements, and at the same time, you cannot separate any inseparable part from it.
It is precisely because of the existence of such natural laws that they all fully embody a fundamental principle: only by discussing a thing in accordance with its original form and inherent nature can we form a correct understanding of it.
So, I say, the starting point of their way of thinking is derived from British empiricism.
However, if we take a close look at their logical reasoning, we will find that although its starting point is derived from empiricism, we can also admit that this starting point is well-intentioned and beneficial; yet, its reasoning is not strong enough to firmly support this argument. Therefore, their final conclusion becomes less solid and reliable in philosophy.
He said, "If everything has its own law, and the emergence and existence of all things in the world are inevitable, there is another fundamental reason." From the front to the back, we can see that there is no strict logical deduction relationship in the middle.
When you say that everything has a law, it implies that the existence of all things in the world is inevitable. However, there is no strict logical deduction between the two. The inevitability of things does not come from the fact that things themselves provide us with the concept of inevitability. The concept of inevitability is the result of human understanding of nature. It is not the concept of the inevitable existence of things. Inevitability is our human explanation and basis for the generation of a thing.
The reason why we consider the emergence of a thing as inevitable, although we explain it as the result of another thing, is still not as profound as Hume's view. Hume said, "Any event has a cause and an effect, and this concept of causality is a natural and inherent nature of the human mind." When we understand the concept of causality as an inescapable and lifelong natural trait of human beings, I believe no one doubts it, because it has long been the foundation of our causal reasoning.
If I doubt this, it means that we have no way to make causal inferences. But if we can't make causal inferences, all our sciences can't be established at all. On what basis are all the sciences established?
It is based on this concept of cause and effect. Without the concept of cause and effect, how could there be science?
The starting point of science is to explore the causes that we do not know, just like when we look at a known phenomenon, we trace it back to the underlying basis that gave rise to it. In other words, when we observe the occurrence of a phenomenon, we ask why it is so. This is where scientific understanding begins. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that all human knowledge comes from wonder.
People are amazed at how it could be like this. Then you have to ask, what is the reason behind it? This is why scientists keep asking about the reasons behind it, to discover the main basis for the occurrence of things. We use our understanding of these bases to generate other related things.
This is the fundamental approach of our scientific understanding. Without this, our science could not have emerged.
So, in this sense, when we understand Hume's philosophy, he precisely reveals the most fundamental and natural way of human beings' inner world to recognize laws. Necessity emerges above regularity, but it is an explanation of regularity and is not a law itself.
That is to say, when one thing gives rise to another, is the logical relationship in between inevitable or accidental? By inevitability, we mean that this thing can only produce another thing that should be produced. If it produces something else, then it is no longer called inevitability but becomes contingency.
When we analyze the causes of a thing, we should see that when one thing gives rise to another, the logical relationship or causal relationship between these two things is inevitable. Just like the relationship between the sun and the earth that we know now.
Why does the Earth operate as it does now?
That is because of the gravitational pull of the sun, which causes our Earth to rotate in this way now. There is a definite cause-and-effect relationship between the sun and the Earth.
This causal relationship was explained by us, based on our understanding of the celestial body of the sun. Before the time of Copernicus, when people had not yet recognized the inevitable connection we know today, they did not think in this way.
Today, we believe that we have discovered the secret of why the Earth is necessarily connected to the Sun, so we think it is inevitable. But please, by no means should you assume that such inevitability is eternal. Because it is hard to guarantee that humans will not discover another celestial body within our solar system that truly determines the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It might not be the Sun at all, but that hidden celestial body that maintains a certain tension between the Sun and the Earth.
So, this relationship between the sun and the earth is no longer inevitable. It is not the result of another kind of relationship, but a result that we can observe. However, up to now, we may still be unaware of the cause of this result.
This is a way of thinking in a philosophical manner.
If we do not discuss philosophical issues in this philosophical way, we will merely see the satisfaction in experience, the given causal relationship or the given result. Or we will simply and dogmatically consider a certain result as either necessary or accidental. None of these can be regarded as the true way of philosophical thinking.
The greatest problem with the French Enlightenment thinkers was that they truly lacked philosophical speculative minds. Of course, there might be exceptions among certain philosophers, such as Rousseau. Perhaps Rousseau was the only thinker among the French who, relatively speaking, had the strongest speculative mind as a philosopher. However, it is a pity that this kind of speculation was not something he deliberately pursued.
So, where does genius lie?
A genius is someone who does something that only a genius can do without realizing it. This is what a genius is. If someone does something and then brags everywhere that only a genius could have done it, so he did it and he is a genius, that's not a genius.
Such people can't be called geniuses at all. A genius is someone others recognize, not someone who claims it themselves. It must be that others, through their work, discover that this work can only be accomplished by him and no one else, and the work he does is something that no one else could even think of. This is what we call a genius.
Rousseau was such a genius. He did many things that later generations really admired. The resources of thought he provided about philosophy, especially about philosophical speculation, were far more than the total of other French Enlightenment thinkers. We have to admire Rousseau. Among all the French philosophers, only Rousseau truly had a speculative quality, while most of the other philosophers remained at a simple level of empiricism and materialism.
