David Hume and Martha Nussbaum on feelings

 David Hume, the 18-century Philosopher and historian from Scotland, is admired by many. 

He was an agnostic or maybe an atheist (depends on the readers view).

 Anyway he believed that people could be warmhearted and good to each other.

And that was because of feelings of empathy. 

The importance of feelings was in the foreground for him

He meant that reason is dependent on feelings. 

Hume himself, is said to be a friendly man and nice to have a conversation with because of his humor and wit. 

why? Maybe because he didn't spend so much time to ponder about metaphysical things: He wrote that if he did that to long he had to go to the inn, drink some wine and have a chat with people there and then the pondering was gone. 

Instead he liked to study human minds. 

He was one first in the west to say that we have no self. What we have is series of impressions that the brain tries to interpret.  

This is also what modern philosophy and Buddhism says. Some suggest that Hume read Buddhist literature when he spent some time in a monastery in France. 

But what about anger? Hume does not seem to have been an angry man. Or did he direct his anger on himself?  In the end he grow very big...

Like Popper he was very skeptic to inductivism. Scientific theories cannot be proven by observation. For example if you just see white swans you cannot say that it is proven that all swans are white (and they are not). 

But what about feelings like anger? It seems that anger rules over reason quite often. But is it not possible to overcome with reason?

Martha Nussbaum, the american Philosopher was in her younger days open for anger. Oppressed people could, for instance, make use of it.

Well nowadays Nussbaum has changed a bit; she supports the way of Gandhi,  Mandela and Martin Luther King. 

My comment is that of course these three  men felt anger sometimes, but they transformed it to acts that doesn't include revenge.

The problem is when you don't do this transformation and the anger instead are leading to bitterness and self-hate. 

Then even Nussbaum seems to think that its better to release the anger. 

Nussbaum suggests that shame and disgust often is guiding feelings in courts. And that has been misused to condemn gay- and lesbian people and is  disgust is included in, for instance, the cast-system in India. 

So, we are animals, animals with feelings.  Probably all of us are driven by feelings. It may not be desires, it can be curiosity, at can even be empathy or guilt.

Even scientist dreams about a better future. And maybe of fame and glory. 

religious people are of course also drive  by feelings. 

Hume did not have those feelings, but he liked to be a fellow human being. 

Nussbaum is defending animal rights, for example, in at talk called "Animals - expanding humanism".

This is a new step we are taking in our days. And its a big but necessary step. No use to blame meat eaters. Just show that vegetarian or vegan food can be enough. This attitude if of course also driven by feelings. 

Computers have no feelings they have no minds and we don't know how minds or creativity works.

But a world without feelings would be poor. Even if they  can cause both damage and beauty.

In mindfulness you can let them come and go - they are not you and you cannot willingly create them - your background, perhaps from thousands year ago, creates them with the help of the genes.

Even id Hume didn't now about genes. I think he would have agreed about that.

But anger that