The simple duality: Humean passions

Abstract

Hume views the passions as having both intentionality and qualitative character, which, in light of his Separability Principle, seemingly contradicts their simplicity. I reject the dominant solution to this puzzle of claiming that intentionality is an extrinsic property of the passions, arguing that a number of Hume's claims regarding the intentionality of the passions (pride and humility in particular) provide reasons for thinking an intrinsic account of the intentionality of the passions to be required. Instead, I propose to resolve this tension by appealing to Hume's treatment of the ‘distinctions of reason’, as explained by Garrett (Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Keywords::

• Hume
• passions
• intentionality
• phenomenology
• simplicity

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Amy Schmitter, Peter Millican and Don Garrett for uncountably many excellent comments on multiple drafts on this paper. Thanks also to Louis Loeb and Amyas Merivale for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Jonathan Cottrell for very useful discussions on various issues. Thanks is also owed to the anonymous referees for this issue, whose careful and incisive comments greatly improved the paper. My passion of gratitude is strongly intentional towards all of the above.

Notes

^1. Along with the standard abbreviations to Hume's major works, DP refers to the Dissertation on the Passions (2007) by section and paragraph numbers.

^2. I prefer the term ‘intentionality’ to ‘intentional content’, because the latter carries a connotation of literally having a part that bears an intentional payload. This might be what is involved in possessing intentionality, but it need not be (and I later argue that it is not with respect to the passions); therefore, I use the more innocent ‘intentionality’ to avoid this unnecessary connotation.

^3. Not all passions have intentionality (e.g., a general anxiety or a cheerful mood). Hume does not seem to have a ready-made distinction that would divide the passions into the intentional and non-intentional (e.g., the direct/indirect distinction would not work, because there are intentional passions that are indirect [pride] and direct [desire]). In any case, the problem I set out in this paper only applies to the passions that are intentional.

^4. This characterization might be misleading, since ideas also have qualitative characters, being fainter copies of our impressions. What Hume means is that because impressions are more vivacious, their felt vivacity is more forceful than that of ideas.

^5. ‘Sensation’ is used by Hume to refer both to impressions of sensation and to qualitative characters. In T 2.1.5.4, Hume means by ‘sensations’ the qualitative characters of the passions, rather than impressions of sensation. These passions are simple and admit of no constituent parts, and so Hume cannot be referring to constituent impressions in speaking of the ‘sensations’ of the passions. Here, ‘sensations’ have to refer to the qualitative aspect of the passions, rather than perceptions in their own right. See also T 2.1.5.9; SBN 288–289; T 2.2.1.3; SBN 330; T 2.2.1.6; SBN 330–331; T 2.2.2.3; SBN 333.

^6. Cohon (2008) notes that Hume seems to equivocate between holding objects and the ideas of these objects as the intentional objects of the passions. I believe that, properly speaking, the intentional objects of the passions are the objects themselves rather than the ideas of them – Hume probably speaks loosely in speaking of ideas of objects as intentional objects, because we can only conceive of objects through our idea of them.

^7. Of course, we can represent objects we have never been acquainted with (such as Timbuktu) and so representation can also occur with inexact resemblance to the object and/or a more convoluted causal chain leading back to the object (for example, my idea of Timbuktu is causally derived from a description in an encyclopaedia, which in turn is ultimately causally derived from Timbuktu). Thanks to Amy Schmitter for much helpful discussion on this matter.

^8. Weller (2002, 201) also denies that T 2.3.3.5 claims the non-intentionality of the passions, thinking it to deny them ‘assertoric character’ instead; however, he assumes that intentionality requires representational content, which I denied earlier. It is particularly difficult to see how Weller would reconcile such an account of intentionality with the simplicity of the passions; he attempts to do so by claiming that Hume only means that the phenomenological feel of the passions is simple (Weller 2002, 226), but this seems a strained reading.

^9. One option in resolving this puzzle is simply to take Hume's position to be inconsistent as it stands. Merivale (2009) indeed sees Hume's account of the passions as being problematic in the Treatise, although for different reasons concerning the double relation of impressions and ideas. At least for the problem I highlight in this paper, I think that there are sufficient materials in the Treatise to avoid attributing such an inconsistency to Hume.

^10. For instance, Hume does use ‘absolute impossibility’ in a causal rather than modal sense in EHU 10.27; SBN 124–125; nevertheless, DP 2.4 in particular seems difficult for a causal reading to accommodate.

^11. Hume's official formulations of the Conceivability Principle (T 1.1.7.6; SBN 19–20; T 1.2.2.8; SBN 32) only explicitly state that conceivability entails possibility rather than that inconceivability entails impossibility, although he notoriously takes himself to be applying the Conceivability Principle when he claims that inconceivability entails impossibility: ‘’Tis an establish'd maxim in metaphysics, That whatever the mind clearly conceives includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible …. We can form no idea of a mountain without a valley, and therefore regard it as impossible’ (T 1.2.2.8; SBN 32, emphasis mine).

^12. In correspondence, Don Garrett argues that pride and humility are only contingently directed at the self, but their causal connection is so deeply entrenched that it takes on a semblance of necessity. It seems unlikely that any causal connection, no matter how deeply entrenched, could render us incapable of conceiving that it not hold; the causal observation that the sun rises every morning is extremely entrenched, yet its negation is clearly no less conceivable for this. The impossibility of conceiving of pride as not directed at the self therefore strongly suggests that this connection is necessary.

^13. Hume does note in T 1.3.6.13 that these principles are ‘not the sole causes’ of united ideas, but maintains that they are ‘the only general principles, which associate ideas’. Extrinsic accounts of intentionality need to appeal to general principles, given that they aspire to provide an account of how passions are systematically intentional by means of their extrinsic relations; to postulate a different extrinsic relation as the source of intentionality for each passion would be extremely ad hoc.

^14. It might be objected that even if pride contained a non-impressionistic element, its impressionistic element (that is, the pleasurable sensation) is itself unanalysable and indefinable, and therefore pride would be unanalysable and indefinable. However, the indefinability of an element of the definition of pride does not entail the indefinability of pride itself: the fact that a concept X is defined in terms of indefinable elements does not entail that X is indefinable; indeed, quite the contrary! Of course, as an empiricist, Hume believes that all ideas are ultimately reducible to indefinable experiences, but this certainly does not entail that no ideas are definable.

^15. Pride might entail the existence of the self for other (arguably non-logical) reasons, for instance because of cogito-style arguments, but its being essentially directed at the self is not one of these reasons.

^16. That being said, I think that the direction of a passion is not truly distinct from its sensation. I later argue that intentionality is merely an aspect of qualitative character; to say that two perceptions resemble with respect to their intentionalities is simply to say that they resemble with respect to an aspect of their qualitative characters.

^17. Later, I will argue that ideas and impressions have different forms of intentionality. Nevertheless, it is possible for these different forms of intentionality to resemble in virtue of their object.

^18. Another form of explanation is conceptual analysis, but I bracket it because it does not explicitly crop up in Hume's discussions of originality.

^19. Thanks to Schmitter for pressing me on this point.

^20. It might nevertheless be objected that the three principles of association are meant by Hume only to associate ideas with ideas, as they unite our thoughts; this leaves it open that intentionality might be a sui generis irreducible associative relation that associates ideas with impressions. However, Hume clearly does not think that the three principles of association are limited to associations between ideas: causation associates a present impression with an idea (T 1.3.8.7); resemblance associates impressions with impressions (T 2.1.4.2); and resemblance also associates impressions with ideas, as in the case of triggered memories (for example, he notes that ‘a picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original’ in EHU 3.3; SBN 24). Thanks to Garrett for raising this objection.

^21. Even if the intentionality of this attached idea is itself irresolvable into more general principles (which seems unlikely since ideas are intentional in virtue of being representational, which is resolvable into causal derivation and resemblance), nevertheless the intentionality of the passions remains perfectly explicable in terms of an association with an intentional idea, as we could explain the ‘original property’ of pride and humility's intentionality by pointing to the causal relation between these passions and the idea of self.

^22. Merivale (2009, 199) disagrees, holding that the intentionality of the passions is a property of the mind rather than the passions, but this is difficult to reconcile with Hume's phrasing above.

^23. Other distinctions of reason according to Hume are between motion and the body moved, and between figure and colour.

^24. Note that having multiple resemblances does not entail complexity. Hume is clear that resemblance need does not require sharing qualitatively identical elements; he points out in an Appendix note to T 1.1.7 that simple perceptions can have multiple resemblances, as in the case of the resemblance between simple perceptions of green and blue, and the resemblance of simplicity between simple perceptions (T App 5; SBN 626). For some problems with Hume's view, see Baxter (2011). However, Baxter's objections do not apply to Garrett's framework above, as for Garrett (and myself) talks of ‘points of resemblance’ are just proxies for speaking of sharing resemblance classes.

^25. I borrow the phrase ‘constitutively determined’ from Horgan and Tienson (2002). In allowing for a kind of intentionality constitutively determined by qualitative character, I follow proponents of ‘phenomenal intentionality’ such as Horgan and Tienson (2002), Loar (2003) and Horgan, Tienson, and Graham (2004). My account is most similar to that proposed by Goldie (2002), who combines the feeling and intentionality of emotions.

^26. In correspondence, Schmitter describes this position as holding that intentionality is ‘a sizzling arrow of feeling’.

^27. Note that this account of passion-intentionality entails that all intentional passions are essentially directed at their particular intentional objects: a particular anger at James would not be the same passion of anger if it was not at James, for example. Pride and humility are unique in that all passions of pride and humility are essentially directed at the self that possesses them.

^28. The question of how and why we have qualitative experience is described as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ by Chalmers (1995); the difficulty of explaining qualitative character might explain why Hume thought it to escape explanation by analysis.

^29. Thanks to Schmitter for pushing me on this point, and helping me clarify my thoughts on the matter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hsueh Qu

Hsueh Qu is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. He primarily works on Hume's epistemology, as well as Hume on normativity more generally, but also retains a keen interest in Hume's account of the passions.