Hume after Three Hundred Years

Abstract

Among the great western philosophers, David Hume enjoys at present as high and honoured a position as any, especially with the attention he has drawn in 2011, which marked the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth. The general drift of the accounts of Hume’s philosophical ideas has tended over the past few dozen years and more to be extremely positive and typically celebratory. Admirers of the man—widely regarded as the very model of the philosophical life—and of his philosophical views, are legion. Hume’s works are pored over endlessly, and his interpreters generally vie with one another for the degrees of subtlety and acuity which they elaborate from those texts. At earlier times, Hume was often read and assessed much more negatively. In his own day, primary focus was on his scepticism and irreligion. Several nineteenth-century critics, including John Stuart Mill, T. H. Green, and L. A. Selby-Bigge, saw a brilliant, yet massively inconsistent, Hume. I this essay I review and discuss their criticism of Hume, from which he emerges, nonetheless, a philosophical giant.

Notes

1. “David Hume’s reputation has never been higher,” Nicholas Phillipson says, as the opening sentence in his 1989 study Hume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 1. The claim was true then and remains so 22 years later: it is repeated in the book’s revised second edition, David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian (London: Penguin Books, 2011).

2. The passage appeared originally in a letter from Smith to William Strahan, dated 9 November 1776, just about two-and-a-half months after Hume’s death. Smith’s letter is regularly published as an appendix or postscript to the several publications in which Hume’s My Own Life appears.

3. L. A. Selby-Bigge, introduction to David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch, 3^rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

4. John Stuart Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 80. The passage appeared originally in Mill’s essay “Bentham,” which had been published in the London and Westminster Review in August 1838. Mill subsequently republished the essay, with modifications, in his Dissertations and Discussions, 1867; among those modifications was a deletion of most of the comments on Hume that had appeared in the earlier published text. The essay, together with Mill’s full Hume comment appearing in an appended endnote, was republished prior to the Collected Works volume, in Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York: Collier Books, 1965). Mill was of course a spirited polemicist and controversialist throughout his career. One basis of his animadversions was what he saw as Hume’s political views. That is not a topic which will enter into the present essay. Nonetheless, the section of Mill’s critique of Hume in this passage, omitted in the 1867 text, may be of interest. “David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French sceptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstraction, stopped far short of: Hume, the prince of dilettanti, from whose writings one will hardly learn that there is such a thing as truth, far less that it is attainable; but only that the pro and con of everything may be argued with infinite ingenuity, and furnishes a fine intellectual exercise. This absolute scepticism in speculation very naturally brought him round to Toryism in practice; for if no faith can be had in the operations of human intellect, and one side of every question is about as likely as another to be true, a man will commonly be inclined to prefer that order of things which, being no more wrong than every other, he has hitherto found compatible with his private comforts. Accordingly Hume’s scepticism agreed very well with the comfortable classes, until it began to reach the uncomfortable: when the discovery was made that, although men could be content to be rich without a faith, men would not be content to be poor without it, and religion and morality came into fashion again as the cheap defense of rents and tithes.”

5. See, for example, G. E. Moore, “Hume’s Philosophy,” The New Quarterly (November 1909), reprinted in G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922); and Roderick M. Chisholm, Person and Object (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1976), 37–44.

6. All of these matters are among the many issues of complexity and varied analyses and interpretations among Hume scholars.

7. This claim is disputed by some of Hume’s interpreters. The precise role which the sceptical sections of the Treatise are playing in the work is itself variously understood. Some see a straightforward seamless whole—“no problem,” if we just read Hume with dexterous, gingerly care. Others think that Hume isn’t really talking about radical scepticism—solipsism of the present moment, or a supposed inability to establish anything about anything through reason—at all; that “reason” and others of Hume’s terms are terms of art, which must be understood in the right way, and when they are it will be seen that Hume actually isn’t even interested in radical scepticism and has more or less nothing to say about it, other perhaps than to dismiss it as unworthy of serious philosophical attention. Neither of these views seems to be defensible or to survive close scrutiny of what Hume actually says in the Treatise. More promising is the idea that Hume is engaged in something, in the sceptical sections, more complex than at first noticed, viz., that he is not actually laying out his own views or arguments, but speaking “in the persona” of the radical sceptic, as it were, taking on a mantle of “hyperbolic” or exaggerated argumentation, to show what devastating results would ensue if the goal posts—the standards required for justification—were set high enough. The main aim, according to this line of interpretation, is to show utterly convincingly the impotence of human rational endeavour, as a kind of set of case studies contributory to Hume’s anti-reason account of human psychology. That—and the fast and impressive dialectical swordplay the young Hume puts forth (and the depressive reaction in its agent which is either genuinely or merely rhetorically occasioned by it)—displayed, the main narrative, of the science of man, is resumed.Something like this view is encouraged by what Hume (just possibly, it is not him, but another, writing on his behalf but with his endorsement) was to say, a few years later, in the Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh (1745). This work was written as a response to criticisms of Hume and the Treatise, held to be sufficient to justify his being rejected for a university chair at Edinburgh. The criticisms include one of radical scepticism. Hume’s response is to say that neither he, nor anyone, is ever genuinely a sceptic, that some of the most illustrious thinkers (and some of them, like Huet, exemplary Christian clergymen) use sceptical argumentation for exemplary purposes, and that sceptical principles, in all ages and, hence, also in Hume’s, have figured “as Principles of mere Curiosity, or a Kind of Jeux d’esprit.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol. 1, 425; hereafter abbreviated as T.The claims in the Letter may of course be seen as special pleading in Hume’s circumstances, but on reflection, this seems unlikely. Hume is studiously, even stubbornly, honest, preferring the right qualifying phrasings as bases for disguising or muting his real views, and doesn’t do so here. The issue is: is Hume speaking altogether, or, throughout, in his own voice in T, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.5—and, likely, 1.2.6, which explicitly cites and anticipates the sceptical sections that will come later (and which there may be reason to view as having been written independently of the rest of 1.2, and inserted in its position there)? Or is it, rather (something like), were I a sceptic, of the most extreme sort, what will be a best case I might forward for my position, including (possibly) some premises I don’t myself actually accept? Here it is . . . In either case, Hume, in the Treatise, doesn’t explain what he means to be going on with regard to scepticism, the science of man, the rest of the Treatise (Books II and III), and their mutual relations. It certainly may reasonably be doubted whether a consistent, or an interestingly rescuing explanation, could be produced; and the resulting complex, of text and the challenges to its possible interpretation, are a significant flaw in the work. Not, I will certainly affirm, sufficient to condemn the work or to dislodge it from the extremely high place at which it justifiably resides. A significant flaw, nonetheless, probably caused by Hume’s inability not to unleash the two passional motivating vectors with which he is animated. By the time of the two Enquiries he is older and wiser.

8. Michael Devitt, a robust metaphysical realist who may be taken to be representative of extremely widely held positions of present-day philosophers, identifies two stances which may be assigned to many advocates of the positions referred to. One of these is what Devitt calls Weak, or Fig-Leaf Realism (and is attributed to Kant), viz., “Something objectively exists independently of the mental”—i.e., where the something is wholly unknowable. Another, Devitt names Sceptical Realism: “Tokens of most current common-sense and scientific physical types might objectively exist independently of the mental”—the “might” intended being epistemic. Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2^nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 302f. Devitt’s Weak, or Fig-Leaf (or Kantian, or noumenal) Realism affirms, as Nelson Goodman, who also discusses the position, says, the reality of a world “not worth fighting for.” Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 20; cited in Devitt, Realism and Truth, 17. One may usefully compare Hume’s remark in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: “Bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary, you in a manner annihilate it, and leave only a certain unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it” (12.1.17; Hume’s italics).

9. Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 12.1.16, n. 1.

10. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), 23.

11. Hume, T, 1.109; the earlier Selby-Bigge-Nidditch edition (Clarendon Press, 1978), prints the Appendix’s directions for insertions of new passages, into the text, with those passages, within the body of the Appendix (as they appeared in the original published edition of the Treatise in 1740; no subsequent edition was published during Hume’s lifetime). The “theistic” footnote will be found, accordingly, on page 633 of Selby-Bigge-Nidditch. It seems likely that all of these Appendix “passages to be inserted” are Humean afterthoughts, written after the main body of the Treatise. Though some of them, at least, might conceivably have been written concurrent with or even before the passages to which they were to be added, Hume having had a change of mind as to whether he wanted them published, and at those places, in the work. At any rate, they were published in the work, and are plainly endorsed by its author.

12. For an interesting and suggestive exploration of a number of respects in which Spinoza may be viewed as a significant backgrounding influence on Hume’s philosophy, see Annette C. Baier, “David Hume, Spinozist,” Hume Studies 19.2 (November 1993): 237–52.

13. David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92–94.

14. I appreciate that some of my earlier account of Hume’s views will itself imply definite answers to some of these questions. Like other readers of Hume, I certainly find some interpretations more likely right, even if my purpose here is to bring attention to what are frequently severe opacities in Hume’s texts. One of the very striking features of contemporary Hume scholarship is the extent to which its practitioners, including obviously learned, philosophically adroit investigators, write as though passages that problematize or flatly contradict their favoured readings simply don’t exist.