Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason; let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in the subjects of common life and practice; let the errors and deceits of our very senses be set before us; the insuperable difficulties which attend first principles in all systems … when these topics are displayed in their full light … who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience (Philo (the character Hume has represent his own views), in Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1957: 6).
The existence of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience … It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another … When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume – of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance – let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning containing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion (Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, [1777] 1975: 164–5).
The Scottish philosopher/historian/writer David Hume1 has been revered as perhaps the most eloquent philosopher of the English language, and the man who exposed the pretensions of reason to become the foundation and guide for developing the new society (thereby destroying the ontological thesis of natural law2), rather than proposing anything positive for modernity.3 A radical sceptic in his philosophy, and a conservative in his political and social views, Hume appears at odds with the optimistic trend of the enlightenment.4 Refusing to build speculative images of future utopias, he turned to history to depict what we are and how we got here (in his lifetime he was recognised as an historian first, a philosopher second). In the tradition of Humean scholarship bequeathed by Kemp Smith (1941), Hume so ‘empiricises’ man that the scope of knowledge relevant to our concerns (and thus capable of guiding action) should be confined to understanding the sentient and emotional side of man, and we must be suspicious of claims made in the name of reason. Kemp Smith summarises key statements, such as ‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions’, to depict Hume as arguing that we are truly only within ‘Nature’s guidance, operating … not through reason but by way of feeling …’ Hume is seen to present a thoroughgoing naturalism, reducing man to a mere bundle of cause and effect from which all transcendental ideas of morality or the human soul are banished. For Barry Stroud, Hume’s central claim is that ‘reason, as traditionally understood, has no role in human life’ (1978: 14), placing Hume in the conservative strain of common sense philosophers.5
These views have become complicated by a mushrooming of Humean scholarship. Many recent interpretations are openly concerned, not with breaking down the texts of Hume – as the analytical tradition has historically done – but with contextualising and understanding the import of his work.6 Read as a contributor to the jurisprudential imagination, Hume offers us a way of implicitly understanding why two key underpinnings of the common law – experience and tradition – could survive in the face of the growing potentiality of legal positivism – a developing idea of law as the instrument of rational command, or the structuring of social order via a rational and logical code. In undercutting claims for reason, Hume allows claims for experience and tradition to survive and be ‘rationally defended’.
Hobbes replaced God with the concept of the calculating individual as the natural basis of social order. Modern social order was to be a structure made possible by law – by the commands of the sovereign – authorised by the rational understanding of individuals that such a focus of secular power was required by the indeterminacy of subjectivity facing the ‘natural’ human condition. In this secular world, the basic unit is the rationally calculating individual who becomes master of his existence and all that he owns. Law is the instrument of human power, the tool of a human subject who begins to loom over the world, subjecting the world to rational analysis, confident in his powers of reasoning, able to build a social structure, a society, through types of law – private and public, civil and criminal – all interconnected. The world becomes a domain of boundless opportunities to be mastered by legality: specifically, contract, property, individuality, and the defence of legal relations via criminal sanction.
Modernity will take its bearings by the desires, reasoning and happiness of individuals who comprise the social body. Law will serve to pacify internally and structure a set of localities – emerging nation-states – by providing a constitutional foundation, a social contract, and through the sovereign so constituted – the constitutional state – law will set out the conditions for social interaction within that terrain.
Hume, however, problematises confidence and optimism in this idea of an emerging modernity which will be both the realm of possibility for the self’s desires, and able to be ruled by the free rational self. Although Hume further undermines any remaining link between human reason and faith in God – and thereby aids the process of modernisation – he also undercuts hope in a secure home based upon the structures of Descartean rationality. Hume asks what sort of foundation underpins the idea of a free, rational self who comes to know truths of reason in morals and ethics, and who will create a new social order.
This chapter follows the path of Hume’s reasoning in the Treatise, specifically, in outline:
(i) Hume attempts to follow strictly the Baconian and Descartean dictates to undercut sceptically all religious or metaphysical idols and replace them with certain truths;
(ii) but he then asks: where are these truths to come from? Hume cannot trust pure reason; he argues that pure reason can tell us nothing of importance about the world; what then are we to use as the foundations of our knowledge of the world? Only facts of observation and experience of the empirical self – but can we trust the security of this basic ‘self’?
(iii) Hume seeks a ‘self’ which is both atomistic and whole, but finds only a confused and confusing mass of impressions and emotions – what is called the self is only an imaginative perception of identity, constructed in symbolic interaction with a whole host of entities in society. Since it cannot offer us security, we must trust the facts of the world. But:
(iv) if the self cannot be trusted, then we cannot trust facts gathered via our sense perceptions either, since it is the self that organises these perceptions. This means we have no way of gaining a sense of certainty – everything is deconstructable – nothing is certain. How are to cope with this understanding?
(v) Hume suggests we have a choice – (a) to retreat to nihilist passivity, and nervous and social breakdown, or (b) to work through the common sense narratives and categories presented by the ‘common life’. Hume proposes the second; but in what sort of mood should we locate ourselves in the ‘common life’? Hume suggests a mood of mitigated scepticism. Thus:
(vi) we must work within a tradition. All human endeavour, all knowledge, comes out of a social tradition. However, we must also understand that the tradition does not bring us ‘truth’, in the sense of absolute and undeniable entities of the purity and certainty we desire. We are doomed to exist only with conjectures and guesses, with accepting the tools and methods of our traditions; moreover, it is only by remembering and thinking through our tradition-bound methods and the concepts of our traditions, that we gain an idea of our identity (as people, as individuals, as lawyers, as judges);
(vii) thus, Hume asserts, the rules of justice, the rules of the legal order, are the result of historical processes, of traditions and experiences, and we should hesitate to make dramatic changes merely because we create thereby some appealing logical argument (based, for example, on ‘equality’). We need to understand the kinds of knowledge involved in rational arguments, and the limits of such arguments. Conversely,
(viii) if we search for knowledge of the actual operation of the world we may gather empirical facts and use them to guide our process of social construction.
As a consequence of this project, Hume offers an imaginative reconstruction of the modern subject which pragmatically straddles the divide between methodological individualism and social holism.
The Hobbesian legacy offers social theories built upon methodological individualism, or taking as the basic building block individuals, rather than some collectivity – for example, the polis – or a totality – such as seeing the cosmos as the product of God’s will. Individuals are deemed to be independent from each other and there is no natural social order. The problem is then how to harmonise individual wills into a social whole? Hobbes solves this – intellectually – through the image of the original social contract whereby rational individuals set up a sovereign as the central focus of legitimate power. Yet if religious tradition, myth, and custom, are undercut in favour of a new scientific approach to the basis of the social order, can a rationality be developed to sustain authority, or must naked power be its foundation? Hobbes solves this by postulating that the social order should be based upon individual consent, or, at least the rational understanding that each and every individual would have consented (since the alternative is a war of all on all).7 The social contract intermixes natural freedom (liberty) with legitimacy, providing us with a narrative of methodological individualism: modern society is created out of the mass of individuals and their wills.
How are we to relate to this artefact?8 Is the socio-legal constitution merely an instrumental form of social ordering of no value in itself, simply embodying our fears of life without it? Or does this modern socio-legal constitution express societies’ morality?
First the instrumental account. In the instrumental account the role of law in constituting the social body lies in the creation and thereafter the maintenance of rules (any rules; their moral content is of lesser importance than their effectiveness); the rules stand between the subjects and the social chaos which would result from individual subjectivism. Since the object of this system of rules is the preservation of order, as modernity takes organisational form, the fear of some critics is that those subjected to the rules will lose their individual creativity and become ‘mere objects of the administered life’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972: 32; more generally Weber, 1984).
The instrumental account – while claiming to be a realistic narrative – was weak in drawing upon the traditions of the past. It overlooked a fundamental aspect of religious experience: the expressive. The instrumental account did not provide a significance wherein each person could identify the social body. Would naked calculation prove enough? Or would that mean that a man owed allegiance to his society only if, and as long as, society provided satisfactions for man’s needs? What of the position of all those – the majority in early modernity – who were excluded from real participation in the social constitution (women, the property-less, slaves, the ‘others’); what would make them accept the position of those more fortunate?
Thus a path was set for an alternative tradition – evolved by the romanticism of Rousseau, joined by Hegel (both discussed in Chapter 7 of this text), and inherited by Marx (discussed in Chapter 10 of this text). In this tradition, the circumstances that man finds himself in belittle him; mankind must aspire to become more than the sorry creatures their behaviour indicates they are. This tradition keeps alive the idea of transcendence; in the name of our ‘humanity’ we demand that our ‘essence’ is destined for something other than the empirical context of our arbitrarily restricted lives.
Alternatively we might find grounds for identifying ourselves with society and giving allegiance to it, when it is ours in the sense that it is our creation; that is, when we can see society as the outcome of uplifting desires and senses of ourselves pertaining to our spiritual nature. As Charles Taylor (1979: 113) put it: ‘Only a society which was an emanation of free moral will could recover a claim on our allegiance comparable to that of traditional society. For once more society would reflect or embody something of absolute value … only this would no longer be a cosmic order.’
Hume takes three major steps:
(i) he demarcates knowledge of facts from knowledge of ideas and the relations of ideas;
(ii) he deconstructs the claims of ‘reason’, showing that the only true knowledge we can have of the human condition is gained from observation and experience;
(iii) he proceeds to deconstruct the idea of the self, thereby demonstrating that we have to rely upon a ‘social’ experience and tradition instead of methodological individualism.
This was a key idea of the Treatise which Hume realised had not come across as clearly as he intended; he therefore stated it more clearly in the Enquiries:
All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra and Arithmetic; and, in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides, is a proposition which expresses the relation between these two figures. That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe …
Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so comfortable to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise (E, IV, pt I: 25–6).
Later commentators refer to this as ‘Hume’s fork’. Hume asserts that all knowledge falls into one or other of these two mutually exclusive and separate categories. Moreover we should always be clear as to what type of knowledge we are claiming.
First, knowledge of ideas and of the relations of ideas, concerns the construction of concepts and the logical relations between concepts; this knowledge of relations of ideas is built on the foundation of propositions which are necessarily true or express necessary truths (such as, a bachelor is an unmarried man), and we test such a structure by asking what follows or what does not follow, what is or is not logically compatible with that statement. The fundamental logical rule is the law of non-contradiction; a thing cannot be both ‘A’ and ‘non-A’ at the same time. One cannot both assert ‘B’ and then build a logical argument in which ‘non-B’ is asserted; and if you find such an argument it is clear that an internal contradiction has occurred. If so, the argument is clearly flawed. The problem with claims made for this type of knowledge, Hume saw, was that it was very limited in its ability to tell us anything new about the world; since the structure was constructed through a process of logical deduction and avoidance of self-contradiction, valid deductive arguments could never tell us anything more than what was already inherent in the premises of the argument. We assert and build upon such propositions by engaging in detailed logical argument and constructing logical models, but it is difficult to see how the enterprise elucidates anything substantial concerning the world around us. A great number of claims are made, however, for such knowledge, which are in reality either examples of ‘reason overstepping its limits’, or mere tautologies.
Second, knowledge of facts concerns statements relating to the way things actually are in the world, and these can be tested (or attempts made to test them) through checking how they correspond to the state of affairs they purport to represent. This type of knowledge reveals to us how things actually are in the world, but verifying this knowledge is difficult. Hume will demonstrate that the major problem lies in the relationship between observation, the construction of facts, and the logical impossibility of constructing ‘laws’ based on recurrence of the things we observe (for example, simply because we have never seen a black swan does not mean that tomorrow a black swan will appear; we cannot logically announce a natural physical law that ‘all swans are white’, all we can say is that ‘in our experience – ie as a result of our observations – swans are coloured white’. The fact that the sun has always risen in the morning does not logically determine that the sun will thereby rise tomorrow morning). Hume relied upon this distinction to undercut sceptically many claims to knowledge he saw other writers making.
A third of the way through the Treatise Hume begins to use the test of scepticism. In introducing ‘The sceptical and other systems of philosophy’, Hume argues that while ‘reason’ presents itself as a new dominant system of truth, we can enter inside its structure and show up internal contradictions and the extent to which it takes its foundations on non-rational grounding.
Reason first appears in possession of the throne, prescribing laws, and imposing maxims, with an absolute sway and authority. Her enemy, therefore, is oblig’d to take shelter under her protection, and by making use of rational arguments to prove the fallaciousness and imbecility of reason, produces, in a manner, a patent under her hand and seal. This patent has at first an authority, proportion’d to the present and immediate authority of reason, from which it is deriv’d. But as it is suppos’d to be contradictory to reason, it gradually diminishes the force ofthat governing power, and its own at the same time; till at last they both vanish away into nothing, by a regular and just diminution (T, 186–7).
This is what has come lately to be fashionably called deconstruction. Hume’s tactic is to infiltrate and internally dismantle the very structure which grants rationalism its strength.9 Hume had earlier warned that there were many writers who appealed to reason to invoke an image of expertise and trust, to claim that reason replaces ignorance and mythology, thus:
disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain.
Instead of a real advance in knowledge, rhetoric is actually the victor:
Amidst all this bustle ‘tis not reason that carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army’ (T, xi–xiv).
By contrast Hume asks us to:
… march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may every where else hope for an easy victory … [Through the exposition] of the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.
Hume here appears to obey all the dictates of enlightenment subjectivism, moving the basis of epistemology onto the shoulders of the subject, man, viewed as a self-contained entity. Moreover:
as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation (T, xvi).10
If the only real foundation we can trust is one of observation and experience can we trust the self to provide a secure point of reference, and thereby guarantee the process of observation and experience? To ascertain Hume’s answer we shall concentrate upon a small passage of the Treatise; namely Section VII of Book I; the Conclusion to that book entitled Of the Understanding.
Hume begins these pages as if pausing for a momentary breath in the midst of a grand enterprise; it is a moment of reflexivity – of turning the action of critical examination away from the observed world to the subject doing the observing.11
But before I launch out into those immense depths of philosophy, which lie before me, I find myself inclin’d to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage which I have undertaken, and which undoubtedly requires the utmost art and industry to be brought to a happy conclusion (T, 263).
Hume began, as usual, with a rationalist conception of the self, but this time he presented the fact of our reliance upon the idea of a coherent ‘self’ in such a way that we are fully conscious that Hume is not one of those ‘certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity’ (T, 251).
Hume subjects the concept of the self to the test of experience and observation; he tries to catch his own self through his powers of observation, but finds that he cannot – no distinct impression corresponding to the notion of the ‘mind’ or the ‘self’ is encountered. Instead, Hume tells us ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself … I can never catch myself’ other than those series of perceptions which are present at that time (T, 252). Thus:
the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations … there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different (T, 253).
The self is not some secure unified entity, rather it is a site where various messages and impulses pass and re-pass: it cannot serve as secure grounding.
The absence of this secure grounding in a coherent autonomous self spells trouble; political, personal and epistemological.
Politically, if liberalism, for example, is to be seen as beginning with the work of Locke and Hobbes, both roughly labelled as empiricist, its beginning placed great reliance upon a notion of the individual’s private consciousness (a conception of the self) as the foundational basis upon which the political entity of the autonomous individual could be fashioned.12
In the absence of such security how can individuals attain authenticity of opinion or desire? Hume explains his own experience:
I am first affrightened and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange and uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled from all human commerce and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate … When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance … such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning (T, 264).
As with Plato’s allegory of the cave, Hume feels he can only describe the problem through the narrative form asking:
Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou’d at last guide me on her foot-steps?
Hume’s narrative does not depict a process where we are guided by an emancipator – the sun goddess or the emancipator from the chains of the cave – who leads us to encounter the being of truth; Hume offers only the companionship of sceptical doubt. As a result:
After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view under which they appear to me. (T, 266)
The only guide is experience and habit. But this guide upsets us, it causes us to perceive as ridiculous our desire to encounter ‘the original and ultimate principle’, which has been ‘our aim in all our studies and reflections’.
How must we be disappointed, when we learn that this connection, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but the determination of the mind, which is acquired by custom … (T, 266)
We want to believe that there exist ultimate principles which reside in some realm external to ourselves; but when we analyse this belief ‘we either contradict ourselves or talk without meaning’. The meaning we find in the world comes not from some pure realm of Platonic essences, or from God’s mind, but from our own intellectual struggles.
This is an amazing assertion. It threatens to overturn whole traditions by stripping them of their foundations. Hume says the difficulty is not perceived in the common life; rather we find the difficulty in ‘understanding when it acts alone and according to its most general principles’. When we are absolute in the pursuit of rationality, rationality ‘entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any meaningful proposition, either in philosophy or in common life’. Ultimately:
We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all … I know not what ought to be done … I can only observe what is commonly done; which is that this difficulty is seldom or never thought of … (T, 268)
The twin factors of subjectivism and a thoroughgoing search for a rational foundation to our beliefs have now wrought their revenge. The result is intellectual chaos, a multiplicity of impressions without any semblance of sense.
I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I an influence, or who have any influence upon me? I am confounded with all these questions and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty (T, 269).
Thus Hume graphically describes the crisis of grounding or foundationism. We search for an absolute position to secure those calculations which will constitute the intellectual foundations of truly modern institutions but cannot find certainty. Are we doomed to failure? Hume can only sum up:
‘Tis happy, therefore, that nature breaks the force of all sceptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having any considerable influence upon the understanding (T, 186–7).
‘Nature’ intervenes at the ultimate moment of metaphysical absurdity, dispelling the tension by either weakening the intensity of the dilemma or transferring attention to more practical concerns. Hume returns to dining, backgammon, and conversing with friends. He finds himself ‘absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life’.
This return to the common life, and the psychologism which appears to underpin it, provides the point of departure at which Hume is believed by many to despair of reason and to reduce the hopes for a new social order to hope in ‘the current of nature’, or the natural flow of man’s unintended interactions. Hume appears to say that, if we attempt to take control of the world rationally and plan future utopias, or the just society, we are doomed to intellectual incoherence; instead our designs ought to be limited and based upon experience and observation, themselves reliant upon a (non-rational) confidence in the natural operation of the world.
This founds a conservative tradition in that it appears to offer a faith in natural functionalism, wherein the metaphysical faith in God is replaced by faith in the natural operation of institutions and progressive interaction. Politically and economically, the world is better left to spontaneous ordering or the hidden hand of the market to work out the weight of values, rather than attempts to impose our structures of rationality. In philosophy, the subsequent development of epistemology consists, in large part, of of responses to Hume, which attempt to counter the idea of a void or abyss underlying our attempts to find secure intellectual grounding for modernity. Those who believed in the powers of pure reason found champions in Kant13 (see chapter 6 of this text), and Hegel (see chapter 7 of this text), whilst Nietzsche14 (see chapter 11) placed this crisis at the very centre of his work.
This problem is at the centre of the so-called crisis of social sciences in late- or post- modernity. It was recognised in Hume’s time as the argument that without God there would be no way of guaranteeing our demarcation of good from evil, and ultimately nothing to give human life secure meaning; nihilism threatened.15 It continues to do so; how is it countered? Hume appeared to advocate a stoic acceptance of some natural flow underlying life’s ultimate mystery. The converse argument of Nietzsche – to take courage and create our own ‘truths’ – has been seen to lead to irrational programmes. An alternative pragmatic solution is that of the later Wittgenstein, who accepts that we will never reach a foundation of absolute truth, thus we simply should work on the basis of one or other system. In On Certainty Wittgenstein holds:
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life (1969: 16).
Such a maxim appears very close to Hume’s return to the common life. Hume’s dictum that philosophy must have stock with the ‘gross earthy mixture’ of the common life, does not mean, however, that all we can do is analyse the rules and live by them, as Wittgenstein appears to offer (and, it must be admitted, the conservative politics of which Hume claimed ‘justice’ consisted). For although thought, philosophy, must begin within the common life, after the return to the common life we must recognise:
… we can give no reason for our most general and most refined principles, besides our experience of their reality; which is the reason of the mere vulgar, and which required no study at first to have discovered (T, xviii).
But our acceptance of the natural ways of the world is mitigated; David Faith Norton calls this a mitigated naturalism to accompany Hume’s mitigated scepticism. Scepticism is a moral decision; we need to develop a critical distance from the claims of power. As Hume states in the introduction to the Treatise, this decision is not made by those who hold to the ‘modern systems of philosophy’ – for they instead impose ‘their conjectures and hypotheses on the world for the most certain principles’ (T, xviii). The proper attitude to such claims is the sceptical one – but the sceptical attitude must itself be guided by an understanding of its social role. That is to say, epistemological scepticism must be socially responsible. It must coexist with social belonging.16 This return to the common life is not irrational, but eminently rational; it is rational to base one’s life and intellectual arguments within the narratives of the social world, exemplified, for Hume, by moral belonging. But the claims of participants in the common life can themselves be subjected to a mitigated scepticism proper to such life.
Thus, we must enjoin the narratives of the social world, for they should serve both as the framework for our aspirations and for the dialogical opponents of our activities. My social existence not only puts me into social interaction with a co-existing range of contemporaries in a geo-economic position, it also connects me with a peculiar form of temporal continuity, an existence in time/space co-ordinates, mediated by recall of the past, strongly felt for Hume in custom, which runs from predecessors to successors. It is a sequence which extends beyond the boundaries of my life, both into the past before my birth and into the future beyond my death.
Hume resolved this instability of the self through postulating an active role for the memory. The memory allows the imagination to shape a series of somewhat related perceptions into a unity to create a fiction of the self, through which order can be made of otherwise chaotic presentations. The fiction of the self is a product of memory, via the faculty of recall and reflection on our past perceptions, which represents them as linked together in a network of relations. The memory, via this act of recall and fictional creation, transforms a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions’ into the fiction which provides us with a notion, an idea, representing diverse perceptions into a patterned entity which is the only possibility of continuous identity that there is. What sort of presence then does the self have? Hume stresses that although the belief in the self is a ‘natural belief’, and thus demanded by the functioning of nature, it is a ‘confusion and mistake’ to claim it amounts to a real personal identity (T, 254). Moreover, the fiction of the self has another function. For when we do not utilise this fiction ‘we are apt to imagine something unknown and mysterious’. In other words use of the fiction of the self, and the reflexive acknowledgment that it is a fiction, saves us from the trap of metaphysics, that is from the enthusiasm of building a structure upon a falsely asserted true foundation.
Hume is sometimes taken as seeing memory as a passive process – as a mere set of weakened impressions of objects – but Hume makes extensive use of the active process of narration, and the memory as an interactive facility. To narrate is to make sense of entities in life via giving meaning to events, as in the presentation of a story, containing, perhaps, an imposition on the events of the past of a form which they otherwise do not have. Narration is essentially an active process. Hume uses narration in two ways.
First, he uses narration as an essential element of small-scale social interaction, whereby meaning is given to impressions which would otherwise just be relations of quantity, indeed, as the precondition for much of the causation of those quantitative ascriptions. Thus, the receptivity of the individual to his social environment is bound up with his concept of his ‘self’ and of ‘others’ which are products of his social and other memories, and of the sets of meaningful behavioural patterns he has absorbed from communication with other people. These include the ideas that a person receives regarding other people’s opinions of him and his actions – a feature Hume makes centrally to the notion of reputation. Reputation is, for Hume, a cause of the passions of pride and humility; he calls it a secondary one but in practical terms it is the most important (T, 316–7).17 Outside of society, and within the context of isolated metaphysical speculation, the scientific methodology of subject-objectification makes the self without meaning. Being inside society means, however, being susceptible to other causalities (influences) not capturable in the terms of an isolated object-subject relationship. Moreover, these reinforce, rather than go against, the skeletal findings of human nature. For since there is no distinct human self there can be no pre-social humanity – since there is no distinct individual mind, but only perceptions associated in various patterns, individual identity is something which is strongly determinate upon social experience, including socially instilled habits of thought and of interpretation of action, ie forms of narrative understanding of relationships in the social world.18
Second, the structure of his writings is usually in narrative form. The central metaphor is that of a voyage. Hume consistently offers more than mere chronicling, rather he puts forward an active narrative implying that all ‘events’, even when they are considered to be real occurrences of the past, disclose their lack of self-interpretation. We cannot refer to events as such, but only to events under a description, and the description is a function of the narrative the events make up. Hume, after all, begins his various examples with meaningful descriptions which set a coherence to everyday reality by permeating it with narrative – it was, for instance, ‘a person who stops short in his journey upon meeting a river in his way’ who was the subject of a crucial example. Hume’s authenticity lies in his developing and refining narratives which present the process of doing philosophy and analysing the role of understanding in human affairs.19
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason (T, 469).
So Hume undercuts the ontological thesis of traditional natural law. Hume’s message is simple – matters of fact and matters of value are distinct spheres. One cannot deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Knowledge about the actual state of affairs of something does not tell us how it ought to be. However, Hume argues, this distinction is not usually drawn.
Hume held it was possible to replace the existing transcendental and religious basis of obligation with a ‘natural basis’, or understanding of the natural operation of the sentiments.20 In time scientific knowledge of moral sentiments, ie a knowledge of psychology and the natural composition of man and his environment, could rationalise and replace the power of religion over public opinion. Man should not look to abstract reason, but recognise the guidance inherent in his passions and natural desire. These, after all, have moulded civil society, and we need a proper understanding of them and use this understanding to guide the institutions of civil and political society.21
Thus empirical analysis should structure the imaginative domain: moreover, the enquiries of man should not be directed to obtaining conceptions of the ‘whole’, but focus instead upon situations of common life and seek knowledge of its guidance. ‘True’ philosophy is not concerned to give totally encompassing theories, indeed it can only focus upon the empirical appearance and does not plan to tell the whole story; it claims to leave the world ultimately a mystery. As he put it in the conclusion to the Natural History of Religion:
The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.
Yet, in a sense, this is a false ‘mystery’ – for Hume provides a notion to fill this void: it was ‘nature’ herself that broke out of the trap of reflexivity in approaching the abyss of reason – what then is this ‘nature’ and how is it so powerful?
The idea of ‘secret springs and mechanisms’ of social life implies we can potentially uncover the operative forms of an underlying determinism22 and this conception evokes a change in our attitude towards the world – our previous superstitious ‘admiration’ for the natural order of things is replaced by a more mundane relationship, which sees all objects merely as items governed by relations of cause and effect. Respect, or religious fear, in the face of mystery is overturned; it is only the weakness of our conceptual and investigative tools which prevent us from uncovering the operative mechanisms of nature.23
What then is man? Is man a naturally determined entity? What of free will? Liberty and necessity are reconciled as different sides of the same coin: the determination of the will by motives. Motives, for their part, are presented as causal entities operating within the reality of events. Motives are factors within the pattern of empirical causality; man is part of the flow of the world and the world is to be conceived of naturalistically.24 There simply is nothing outside the world which can be kept steady and thereby constitute the ultimate frame of reference to understand and rank particulars; instead, the principles of science, for example, the causal principle, perform this function, and sense is made of the world through observing the phenomena of the world with this principle kept constant. This conclusion to modernity’s problem of grounding – scientific naturalism – should lead men towards valuing intellectual modesty, encouraging them to moderate their enthusiasms and temper their expectations; expectations otherwise unduly aroused by fictions.
As Livingstone (1988) summarises, Hume presents a picture wherein authority, and in turn social order, is held together by the many and various manifestations of the social consciousness of individuals and the narrative structure of the social whole. Thus, social and political standards exist as a temporal conflux between future and past experiences and ambitions. Ideas and motifs are positioned by narrative recall of the past. As opposed to arguments for the timeless essences of the natural law and social contract positions then current, Hume sees the narrative standards constituting present political and social order as a mixture of the traditional and the contingent; they are not the objects of ‘autonomous’ reason.
This reliance upon the narrative technique means that Hume is often mixing the descriptive with a confidential prescription.25 Individual man has only a limited sphere of political interest; the model of the ancient polis is not one to which we could aspire. Hume’s critique of the arguments for a reconstituted polis are presented as fundamentally epistemological: those who recommend it produce ideal visions, produced out of the abstract flight of reason where:
every man framed the model of a republic; and, however new it was, or fantastical, he was eager in recommending it to his fellow citizens, or even imposing it by force upon them (The History of England, Oxford, 1826, vol vii: 136).26
Thus Hume refers to the Levellers in the Enquiry as ‘a kind of political fanatics, which arose from the religious species’. We need a political awareness based upon a proper study of natural history. Not all can personally participate in the political process – instead, we should look to constitutional representation – and we need encompassing rules of justice (law) that establish good authority. The passions of man are capable of moving man with many conflicting feelings requiring subjection to ordered repetition (the control of law). Law, in its turn, is most just when reflecting its growth from the structures of habit and custom – its primary role in normal life is the protection of the rules of property and reinforcement of mutual respect and reciprocity. As man moves away from the restraint of custom and tradition the restraint of law is vital. As Hume expressed it in the Enquiries:
good laws may beget order and moderation in government where the manners and customs have installed little humanity or justice in the tempers of men.
Only in the orderly state, made possible by laws of justice which support the authority of government and which incorporates the natural loyalties of the people, can liberty, commerce, and progress in the social ‘ease’ of arts and science be possible. Moreover, private happiness, secured through cultivation of private virtues, could only be enabled via such civic foundations. However, the stability of politics was, for Hume, being put at risk by exposure to metaphysical social currents which were at odds with maintaining political stability and the rules of justice.27
Ought mankind to dream of a perfect society? Again Hume demands modesty. Movement and gradual reform are possible, perfection through revolution or other events is not; thus ‘men must, therefore, endeavour to palliate what they cannot cure’. The framework of contemporary social order, ie the rather rigid rules of justice, is necessary because of certain empirical features of the human condition. Notably, the paucity of nature’s means for man’s provision; the fact that man is of limited generosity; the harshness of social life, however, is tempered by emotions of sympathy.
If every man had a tender regard for another, or if nature supplied abundantly all our wants and desires [then] the jealousy of interest, which justice supposes, could no longer take place; [nor says Hume would there be need for the rules of property per se] … increase to a sufficient degree the benevolence of men, or the bounty of nature, and you render justice useless, by supplying its place with much nobler virtues, and more valuable blessings (T, 494).
If we could replace material scarcity with plenty:
… or if everyone had the same affection and tender regard for everyone as for himself, justice and injustice would be equally unknown among mankind (T, 485).
The rationalist solution to the problem of justice was simply to produce solutions out of the ‘fancies of the imagination’, but thereby man would have neither security nor reality. We should turn away from the constructs of the rationalist, instead ‘look abroad into the world’ and base political and social aspirations upon the real, empirically operative foundations of authority. Authority cannot claim justification by evoking a rationalistically defined essence, but by observable actions in the natural movement of society. We require knowledge of functional integration, wherein:
… the happiness and prosperity of mankind [is as] a wall built by many hands, which still raises by each stone which is heaped upon it … [Society is to be an edifice of happiness] raised by the social virtue of justice … the building of a vault where every individual stone would fall to the ground [without] the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts (E, 304–5).
This slowly constructed building, the proper societal existence for man, is fragile and constructed over time. Life in it, the progressive social life of modernity, is not so much a question of ‘ethical’ participation in a common, overarching framework of social identity, but rather a process of studied indifference by individuals which avoids grand universal claims and similar styles of politics. Social movements such as the Levellers – who proposed state intervention over the question of the allocation of property and a politics modelled on participation in a reconstituted polis-type republic – offered Utopian visions of radical democracy deeply repugnant to Hume. First, Hume felt, their epistemology was wrong; and not only wrong, but unnecessary. We ought to throw out the motif of rationalism from any legitimation strategies. Second, we ought to be cautious in the face of the rhetoric of progress and Utopia. Even if some ‘progressive’ faith in man could be shared in moments of optimism, there was great danger in change; we need tradition and authority.
Rather than optimistic and heady calls for participation and freedom, Hume’s response can, retrospectively, be summed up in one word: institutionalism. Institutionalism represented the gradual victory of political moderation; the denial of party political fanaticism and a process which retained certain of the mechanisms of past legitimation strategies for authority in that it placed the citizen’s primary duty solely in terms of maintaining the rules of justice: in particular the rules of property and the established legal rights of citizens.
Human actions, beliefs, and political power need to be regulated, positioned, engaged in frameworks and located amidst rules and patterned expectations. In a broad sense, acceptable (‘moral’) behaviour is only possible within a structured society, and, combined with what Hume terms ‘the principle of parsimony’ (which here means that we have a natural disposition to respect established authority and be economical with our political enthusiasm) providing systematic frameworks for social life will enable social stability.
Hume claims that history, as Book III of the Treatise oudines, demonstrates that liberty, commerce, refinement and progress in the arts and sciences have arisen only in countries with good laws and constitutions; thus there is an historically demonstrable relationship between these two variables.28 The free society will be the society of good laws and disciplined citizens who have learnt to control their passions and desires.
One current of the 18th century was to use history to bring about societal changes, to help generate the kinds of upheaval of which the French Revolution stands as the supreme example. Hume labelled this use of history a branch of polemics giving sanction to political conflict, a fictitious history which wove webs of dreams and utopias. History ‘ought’ to be ‘scientific’, and real historical analysis, conceived as a study of growth and development, could in turn become a counter-revolutionary force; a ‘philosophic history’ in the service of a politics of moderation. Here Hume, as Duncan Forbes brings out, differed from the other key writers of the Scottish enlightenment in appearing to lack a degree of ‘sociological sophistication’. Hume allowed a greater role for chance, accident, and the intentions of key actors in politics than a structuralist sociology, ie a thoroughgoing in-depth deterministic approach, would have allowed.29
Man’s choices are empirically explicable within the ‘natural’ product that is society. Moreover, although the rules of justice are ‘artificial’, this is an artificiality that has ‘naturally’ come about and owes its necessity to natural processes. The necessity for the rules of justice is not a rationally consequentialist argument, whereby man chooses, as in a contract, as a mass act of will, but rather as a participant in the machinery of social change. However, this understanding of participation in natural depth can itself be conservative. If the constitution of the rules of justice was a process of utility, then man could freely change the rules of justice as his abstract arguments from utility led him, but there is an almost unchangeable image to Hume’s conception of the rules of justice. Nihilism is denied but the price is a recourse to an ideology of assumed function for the affairs of the world. Since society has come about as a natural product, its structure is essentially superior to those ideas of social organisation which any rationalist approach could give us.30
What then are we to be guided by? The natural bonding of society flows out of the interaction of everyday life, and operates best when the naturalness of sympathy is undistorted by rationalist speculation. ‘The question of government’ is not the arena of pure reason, ‘vulgar sense and slight experience are sufficient’ (E, 195). Social justice is not something which has its foundation in a body of first principles, but is basically adherence to the evolved rules of social life, in particular the ‘abstaining from the possessions of others’ (T, 489), and adjudicating questions of justice is to concern oneself with pragmatic issues of social behaviour.31 Although the ‘remedy’ to the problem of ‘justice … is not deriv’d [directly] from nature, but from artifice’, the reality is that:
nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and incommodious in her affections (T, 489).
As opposed to social contract theorists, the ‘convention [of justice] is not of the nature of a promise’ but comes out of ‘a general sense of common interest’: the actual mutual expression of which may produce resolutions in the nature of a promise, but any conception of a ‘state of nature’ out of which man contracted ‘is to be regarded as a mere fiction’ similar to the notion of ‘the golden age’ which Hume refers to as an invented poetical notion. Reliance upon the notion of an original state, or state of nature is, for Hume, an alternative usage of the golden age motif.32
We have seen that to those ‘liberal’ writers of the 17th century who are often thought of as Hume’s predecessors, ‘civil society’ – modernity’s early presentation of a concept for self-understanding – came about as a sudden act of individuals in pursuit of individual ends. But for Hume there is no sudden decision – no break with the slow and gradual processes of nature. Instead the performance of the virtue of justice, ie obedience to the rules of justice, is best conceived of as lying inside the gradual flow of nature which has operated through a vast amount of individual human actions. Nature has performed the task with great subtlety since these ‘rules by which property, right and obligation are determined, have in them, no marks of a natural origin, but many of artifice and contrivance’. They appear ‘too numerous to have proceeded from nature’ and ‘are changeable by human laws’, yet ‘all of them have a direct and evident tendency to public good, and the support of society’. Hume states that ‘this last circumstance is remarkable upon two accounts’ and it is illuminating to follow his statement through. We read:
First, because, though the cause of the establishment of these laws had been a regard for the public good, as much as the public good is their natural tendency, they wou’d still have been artificial, as being purposely contriv’d and directed to a certain end. Secondly, because, if men had been endow’d with a strong regard for the public good, they wou’d never have restrained themselves by those rules: so that the laws of justice arise from natural principles in a manner still more oblique and artificial. ‘Tis self-love which is their real origin; and as the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another, these several interested passions are oblig’d to adjust themselves after such a manner as to concur in some system of conduct and behaviour. This system, therefore, comprehending the interest of each individual, is of course advantageous to the public; tho’ it be not intended for that purpose by the inventors (T, 528-9).
Thus the intentions of the ‘inventors’ – judges, legislators, ‘class-interests’ and so forth – are not sufficient as causal entities truly to explain the evolution and operation of the system of justice. Even when we may observe evidence that law-makers create law for their own interest, for their own ‘interested passions’, they are within the flow of nature with the result that they ‘adjust themselves’ to ‘a system of conduct and behaviour’: the whole of which gives a social benefit ‘not intended … by the inventors’. Stripped of the justifications of abstract reason, the rules of justice still bind, and the foundation of their hold can be demonstrated by the proper investigation of ‘natural history’.33
This knowledge of natural history and the operation of the passions can be used against ideas of radical revolutionary change or the arbitrariness of the simple ‘command version’ of legal positivism. By contrast, we have a grand narrative of an evolutionary ‘empirical natural development of law’; this preserves the strength of law from easy change and defends it against charges of arbitrariness or partiality. There is no need for some fundamental set of innate ideas or external reference point, such as the existence of God, to give a basis to the moral sense of man. The growth and operation of natural justice can be accounted for by the facilities of human nature (self-love and some benevolence), the capabilities of human action (communication via sympathy, and restraint from seizing the possessions of others) and the entirety of social interaction (mutual recognition).
The search for knowledge is guided by our belief that it will aid natural social change. While Hume’s implication is clear – we need empirically to analyse our legal institutions and come to a real understanding of their operation – Hume appears confident that such analysis will aid cultural changes already taking place. In the penal system, for example, Hume notes a growth away from the ‘unnaturalness’ of the religious notions of equivalence to a growing system of natural responses made possible by sentience – the response to offenders is becoming ‘more natural’ as the hold of religion decreases. Law should be structured to enable the proper operation of the social body, and the modern creation of ‘civil law’ is an advancing product of the stream of nature which places together ‘industry, knowledge and humanity … by an indissoluble chain’ (1966: 278). Social control is linked to social relationships and the interaction of the individual with his fellows, the risks in social change can and will be contained through the expansion of the middle class, that ‘middling rank … who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty’ (1966: 284). Through their participation in industry, and the indulgence in the ‘luxury’ which follows, men are socialised for peaceful cohabitation even in the face of the greater pressures and opportunities allowed by the increasing division of labour.
The power of government can only provide a crude instrument for social control; naked force, the visible coercive instrument at a government’s disposal, is limited in its scope; instead custom and habit are the true restraining forces on man’s rather asocial tendencies. Various restraints on man’s conduct operate in the micro-situations in which man interacts with his fellows; individual man feels the need to preserve his reputation, and relate to the reactions of others to his actions. Effective control lies in influencing ‘opinion’. Adam Smith was even more specific; knowledge of the ‘natural sentiment of justice’ (ie psychological impulse), could in time substitute for either clear coercion, or the hold of religious belief and the transcendental idealism thereby associated. For both men, the key to social progress lay in influencing the ‘collective judgments’ of society. Indeed, both Hume and Smith saw decline in the power of religion as giving a more ‘natural’ bent to social ‘opinion’, or in Smith’s phrase the ‘moral sentiments’ of society.34 Hume holds that moral sentiments are common to all humanity and are empirical instincts ‘absolutely universal in all ages and nations’. Most men did not engage in reflexivity. They were moved by unexamined feelings owing much to unexamined religious ideologies; moral sentiments are truer since they are a consequence of our active engagement with the reality of our social and material world. An engagement which allows us ‘little leisure or inclination to think of unknown invisible regions’.35
The whole enterprise of ‘moral theory’ is thrown into question by Hume’s analysis. What then is the role of philosophical discussion concerning moral distinctions under Humean empiricism?36
The issue has dramatic considerations: how can we build a system of ethics based upon the faculty of feeling, sentiment, or sympathy, without reducing ethics to a matter of taste, where moral judgments are subjective and relative? Hume argues that moral sentiments are found in all men, that men praise or blame the same actions and that praise or blame are not derived from a narrow self-love. Instead, we have a natural process of sympathy. Again, Hume’s target in describing morality is a pure model of rationalism: a model whereby morality is the subject for reason alone to tell us its nature producing a table of ‘abstract rational difference [s] betwixt moral good and evil’ (T, 466). By contrast, Hume’s primary argument is that, as morals have to do with practical life, as a consequence ‘moral philosophy’ must be something which will:
influence our passions and actions, and go beyond the calm and indolent judgments of the understanding, [and] … since morals have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be deriv’d from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already prov’d, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason (T, 457).
The role of reason is secondary to the empirically operating mechanism of the world - reason must serve only to bring to light what nature has decreed.37
Hume now makes a further claim, for not only is the distinction between good and evil not something that exists in the categories of reason, it is not even something that depends upon ‘any matter of fact’ discoverable by a simple positivistic investigation:
Take any action allow’d to be vicious: wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you toward this action. Here is a matter of fact: but ‘tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it (T, 468-9).
Moral theory is only talk, its elements of ‘reason’ a superstructure which fits over the true, subjectivist economy of ‘certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts’ which run throughout and structure the reactions of the self. In reality:
… virtue [is] whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary (ibid).
The sentiment of sympathy, or fellow-feeling, is a ‘principle in human nature beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general.’ Thus we ‘bestow praise on virtuous actions, performed in very distant ages and remote countries; where the utmost subtlety of imagination would not discover any appearance of self-interest, or find any connection of our present happiness and security with events so widely separated from us’. Similarly, ‘a generous, a brave, a noble deed, performed by an adversary, commands our approbation; while in its consequences it may be acknowledged prejudicial to our particular interest.’ Hume’s idea of moral sentiment and sympathy opposes the traditional ethical theory which holds that morality consists in the relation of actions to a rule of right and an action as good or evil depending upon whether the action agrees or disagrees with the rule. Hume rejects the hypothesis that there are moral rules, saying that such a thesis is ‘abstruse’ and ‘can never be made intelligible’. Among those qualities which give the spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation are ‘discretion, caution, enterprise, industry, economy, good-sense, prudence and discernment’. There is also virtually universal agreement – even among the most cynical of men – concerning ‘the merit of temperance, sobriety, patience, constancy, considerateness, presence of mind, quickness of conception and felicity of expression’. What is there about these qualities which generates our praise? The fact that these qualities are both useful and agreeable. Useful for what? Hume replies:
for somebody’s interest, surely. Whose interest then? Not our own only: For our approbation frequently extends farther. It must, therefore, be the interest of those, who are served by the character or action approved of.
Usefulness is ‘a tendency to a natural end.’ Thus the essential moral distinction is really that between what is useful and what is pernicious:
if usefulness … be a source of moral sentiment, and if this usefulness be not always considered with reference to self; it follows, that everything which contributes to the happiness of society, recommends itself directly to our approbation and goodwill. Here is a principle which accounts in great part for the origin of morality: And what need we seek for abstruse and remote systems, when there occurs one so obvious and natural?
We thus return to where this chapter began; into considerations of the grounding of the modern self and the interactions between social theory, conceptions of self, and the interdependent structuring of social relations. Hume warns us that, just as the search for the self causes us to experience chaos in moving beyond the rules of everyday life, so too does the justice of the social needs adherence to the settled rules of the social in order to prevent chaos. The rules of the self and the rules of the social reflect the precepts of that epistemology. The foundations of modernity are tradition(s) modernity thought its rationality had left behind. If law is to be the instrument of the sovereign’s will, he had better watch his back, for fear his instrument deconstructs. For, unless positioned within a tradition, there is no presence or absence, no particularity or difference, no justice or injustice, no grounding for meaningful expression.
1 David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, and his early love of literature indicated to his family that he would not follow their plan for him to become a lawyer. Though he attended the University of Edinburgh, he did not graduate, preferring free study across a range of subjects. His abiding passion lay in literature, philosophy and general historical learning. He spent the years 1734–1737 in France, under conditions of ‘rigid frugality,’ composing his Treatise of Human Nature. When this book appeared in 1739, Hume was disappointed in its reception, remarking later that ‘never a literary attempt was more unfortunate’, for the book ‘fell deadbom from the press …’ His next book, Essays Moral and Political, published in 1741–1742, was an immediate success.
Hume then revised his Treatise, simplifying or popularising the arguments for the general public, and published it under the new title An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Besides his extensive books on the history of England, Hume wrote three other works that were to enhance his fame, namely, Principles of Morals and Political Discourses, and, after his death, Adam Smith brought out the book which Hume’s friends had advised him not to publish during his lifetime, Dialogues on Natural Religion. Smith received more criticism for allowing this book to be published than he did for anything that he himself wrote.
Hume went to France in 1763 as secretary to the British ambassador. His books had given him a substantial reputation on the Continent, and Hume had a mixed relationship with Rousseau, whom Hume later invited to come to live in England when Rousseau was facing hostile criticism in France. The stay was not a very pleasant one, with Rousseau displaying suspicion at every arrangement Hume made for him. For two years, 1767 to 1769, Hume was Under-Secretary of State, and in 1769 he returned to Edinburgh, where his house became a centre for literary and philosophical conversation. He died in Edinburgh in 1776.
2 Hume argued that whatever knowledge we could gain from how things operated – matters of fact – we could not infer directly from that knowledge an answer to the question ‘how ought things to be?’
3 As David Faith Norton put it: ‘David Hume’s philosophy has been exciting responses for nearly 250 years. The overwhelming majority of these responses have been negative, based on the understanding that Hume’s philosophy is itself negative, a dogmatically sceptical denial of man’s knowledge of truth and value.’
4 Hume has recently been the target of a writer from the Critical Legal Studies movement. In Legal Theory, Political Theory, and Deconstruction, Matthew Kramer (1991: 145–6) argues ‘conservatism looms as the ideology of particulars. With rage and often with eloquence, conservative thinkers have derided the grand schemes of visionaries who seek to turn politics into an arena of experimentation … Hume was the philosopher of particularities par excellence.’
5 A position later subjected to criticism by Hegel: ‘since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to the oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity. For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level.’ (Phenomenology of Spirit, para 69).
6 To the names of Kemp Smith, or alternatively those who saw only the classic sceptic, recent names have been added such as Duncan Forbes (1975), Donald Livingstone (1984), David Faith Norton (1982), Frederick Whelan (1985), and Alisdair MacIntyre (1988). The result is an increase in perspectives and modalities of understanding, the effect of which is to enrich, as well as make more difficult, the task of coming to grips with Hume. Hume was always a synthesiser in each and every one of his texts, whether they be properly philosophical, for example the Treatise on Human Nature (1978 [1739–40]) (all further references to this text annotated as (T, page number), or the Enquiries (1975 [1777] (all further references to this work annotated as (E, page number); or essayist, for example The Histories, the Dialogues (1957) and the Essays.
7 To repeat the legitimation strategy contained in the Hobbesian social contract: ‘every subject is Author of every act the Sovereign doth … the Consent of a Subject to Sovereign Power, is contained in these words, I Authorise, or take upon me, all his actions’ (Leviathan, Ch 21: 265, 269).
8 Put another way, if through law modern society is constituted (either through some founding document in an act of political will, such as a declaration of independence and written constitution, or slowly, as in the British Constitution) what is our relationship to this constitution?
9 The Introduction (T, xiii) begins: ‘Nothing is more usual and more natural for those, who pretend to discover anything new to the world in philosophy and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their own systems, by decrying all those, which have been advanced before them.’ [If we, 18th century men, were] ‘content with lamenting that ignorance, which we still lie under in the most important questions, that can come before the tribunal of human reason, there are few, who have an acquaintance with the sciences, that would not readily agree with them.’ [But] ‘’Tis easy for one of judgment and learning, to perceive the weak foundation even of those systems, which have obtained the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles taken on trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are everywhere to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself.’ Hume decries the use of rhetoric by using rhetoric.
10 Furthermore, there are certain preconditions, or structural frameworks for the freedom to engage in such ‘experience and observation’, namely as Hume witnesses from the predominance of Scottish and English writers in the recent rise of scientific studies of human nature, ‘a land of tolerance and of liberty’. What this implies is that not only is there the probability of a direct link between metaphysical systems of absolute certainty and intolerant politics, but that the socio-political world may strongly constrain the activities of thought and discussion within it.
11 Having finished his ‘examination of the several systems of philosophy, both of the intellectual and natural world’, it is ‘now time to return to a more close examination of our subject, and to proceed in the accurate anatomy of human nature, having fully explain’d that nature of our judgment and understanding’.
12 The extent to which this interpretation of Hume’s deliberations upon the self undercuts the liberalism of the Lockean legacy can be seen by contrasting its effects with MacPherson’s classic summary (1962: 3): ‘The possessive character of individualism in the 17th century was found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as a part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom … was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.’
Let us remember that John Locke places the reason for men forming society as the protection of their property and yet the basis of private property was the interaction of a self-enclosed ‘self’ and the objects of the world: ‘Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has a right to But himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property’ (Locke, Second Treatise, sec 27).
13 For Kant, Hume had failed by not suspecting the existence of a pure science of reason he ‘ran his ship ashore, for safety’s sake, landing on scepticism, there to let it lie and rot; whereas my object is rather to give it a pilot, who by means of safe astronomical principles drawn from a knowledge of the globe, and provided with a complete chart and compass, may steer the ship safely, whither he listeth’ (1902: 9).
Kant’s narrative follows the terminology of Hume, transforming, however, the barren rock of scepticism into ‘an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth – enchanting name – surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion’ (1965: 257). Kant’s own system must also inevitably encounter crises, the occasion which ‘we cannot put aside and yet cannot endure. All support here fails us and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the purely speculative reason, which makes not the least effort to retain either the one or the other and feels indeed no loss in allowing them to vanish entirely’ (1965: 513). Ultimately: ‘the thing itself is indeed given, but we can have no insight into its nature’ (1965: 514).
14 Nietzsche’s implicit retort to Hume was that the desire to return to the common life from the crisis was no more than one of the many symptoms of human weakness; a symptom of our inability to rely upon ourselves, a denial that we are alone as individuals and thus must carry the burden of our solitude; a failure to assert our individual will as the ultimate ground for everything, and to realise that we are self-grounded and not constrained by any external order of things. The Nietzschean solution transforms Hume’s current of nature into ‘an inner will’ which he ‘designate(s) as “will to power’”. Basing himself upon a critique of Kant, Nietzsche tells us: ‘The sore point of Kant’s critical philosophy has gradually become visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction “appearance” and “thing-in-itself” (1967: 300). Pragmatically, Nietzsche holds: ‘the categories are “truths” only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us: as Euclidean space is a conditional “truth”’ (1967: 278). The image of the abyss is ever present with Nietzsche – it is the remembrance which stimulates Zarathustra in his message that the play of life must continue over this suspension. A message which continually breaks the impasse of the lack of grounding in the ‘fact’ that ‘the criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power’ (1967: 290).
15 As Hume lay dying from bowel cancer, the essayist Boswell visited him hoping to find him finally ready to accept God’s existence. The patience and stoic resilience with which Hume refused to compromise his position in the face of death greatly depressed Boswell. Not even several bottles of port and visiting a prostitute could lift Boswell’s mood!
16 Here Hume is rather conservative seeing the ongoing journey of the intelligent individual as one who defends the ongoing traditions of the time, his non-sceptical moralist positions likewise participate in what Hume presents as the proper narrative of intellectual progress.
17 The notion of reputation is placed alongside the notions of character and name, all of which as Hume uses them in the context of his moral psychology, imply a strong concept of self-identity. But the context of these considerations, as opposed to the context of the destructive analysis in the early parts of Book I, is social life.
18 The social reality of identity, contained in the social existence of character and name, of virtue, of pride and humility, is something whose present existence depends upon the understanding derived from the interpersonal associations and interactions of the relationships of life. The individual keeps his character, his name, by behaving in his habitual manner. Through his customary activity, through his conditioned sentiments, his reactions to stimuli, his ongoing social reputation is continued as ascribed identity. The ‘heaps and bundles’ of the impressions of his activity, are constituted either into the character of an honest man, a man of integrity, or alternatively, by the acts of social memory received and constituted by testimony, precept, habitual understanding, and other modes of social communication. The testimony and opinions of others, are part of the general ‘bundle of perceptions’ but they also help structure this bundle into coherence. Via sympathy, understood communicatively, the individual stands always within interpersonal relationships which allow him to relate to himself as a participant in those relationships, the essential meanings of which cannot be fixed either from the perspective of some exteriority or from some absolute intuition, but depend themselves upon the performabihty of their interaction. Prevalent throughout Hume’s writings is the absurdity of absolutely new conceptions making sense in social relationships. The mind simply rejects them. So it is that the ascriptions of character draw upon, and are dependent upon, elements of already existing … social understanding. This we can call the narratives of social life – those conjunctions of words and expressions that tell us that such and such an activity is fit for such and such an occasion, that present us with images and expectations of behaviour for character and situations, and which mean that the mind has only comfortable impressions when the narratives are followed, and upsetting ones when the narratives break down or when the behaviour we encounter is at odds with the narrative expectation.
19 In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre, having introduced the perspective of the human agent as both actor in, and author of, his own story, immediately states the essential sociality of this phenomenon: ‘We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives’ (1982: 199).
20 Hume is clear that this enterprise implicitly goes against certain forms of power, specifically the religious. In the Dialogues he holds that the true use of religion was to take advantage of the psychological situation where ‘motives of morality and justice [need reasoned support] but nature compels man to set religion up as a “separate principle’”, which inevitably becomes ‘only a cover to faction and ambition’ (D, 114–5).
21 In the terms of Hume’s friend, Adam Smith, both our survival and potential for happiness have not been ‘entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason …[but to] original and immediate instincts’. The science of moral sentiments can put the question of obligation on a grounding which is strictly ‘empirical’. As Adam Smith specifies it, the question now ‘is not concerning a matter of right, if I may say so, but concerning a matter of fact’ (1976: 114–5).
22 ‘The actions of matter, are to be regarded as instances of necessary actions: and whatever is in this respect on the same footing with matter, must be acknowledged to be necessary’ (T, 410). Moreover, ‘in the communication of their motion, in their attraction and mutual cohesion, there are not the least traces of indifference or liberty. Every object is determined by an absolute fate to a certain degree and direction of its motion, and can no more depart from that precise line, in which it moves, than it can convert itself into an angel, or spirit, or any superior substance’ (T, 400).
23 In applying this to the human personality, Hume appears confident ‘of an entire victory … having proved, that all actions of the will have particular causes’ (T, 412). An understanding of human nature is seen as applying the lessons of the physical sciences which Bacon had provided. The causal principle is thus central and if there is a mistake in the causal principle then we have no certainty of knowledge, but if the causal principle is independent of subjective desire we can look forward to an expansion of knowledge and sound improvement in the ordering of human affairs. Hume first subjects the causal principle to sceptical attack but ultimately holds that the causal principle is secure from scepticism because it is not founded in reason but in ‘nature’; the structure of the world is not built upon truths of reason but is a variable mass of entities in interaction obeying ultimately only the flow of causality.
24 Donald Livingston observes that ‘the ultimate system which Hume officially adopts is pure theism’. Livingston points out, however, that this is no traditional religious theism. (The Natural History of Religion, HE Root (ed), Adam and Charles Black, London, 1956 – referred to in the text as Natural History, page no – had given a naturalist explanation for man’s religious belief, seeing such belief as the result of psychological need.) From observation of the complexity of the world we are led to suppose there is some purpose or design, and from this we are led to the idea of an intelligence which is ‘single and undivided’. Thus: ‘Even the contrarieties of nature, by discovering themselves everywhere, become proofs of some consistent plan, and establish one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible’ (Natural History of Religion p 74, quoted in Livingston (1988). Livingston contends that ‘advanced scientific knowledge might well collapse without this belief’ seeing this as ‘a new and specifically Humean insight’. Whereas ‘Newton, Boyle and others had argued that scientific reasoning can provide independent grounds for the belief in a supreme intelligent author, Hume is arguing the other way, that belief in a supreme intelligent author is a ground for scientific thinking’ (ibid: p 179).
25 The programme for political moderation, a programme for some reliance upon habit, custom, caution and diffidence in reasoning and a critical stance toward all non-evident contentions amount to a programme derived from Hume’s analysis of the way the world is. Either that is the case, or Hume’s normative stance is but the beginnings of a tradition for modernity, the ultimate foundation of which is a considered act of philosophical choice. Note that Hume does not fall into the logical premises of his ‘is’-‘ought’ trap. He does not base his normative stance upon his possession of a certain number of absolute truths in a positive sense. Indeed his position derives from the sceptical crisis entailing the absence of such truths, but out of this he provides a solution which in itself must amount to some form of claim to a ‘truth of Hume’s empiricist meta-narrative’.
26 The substance of this argument is reproduced by Popper (1945) in his The Open Society and its Enemies.
27 Individual freedom can be best ensured by making clear the relationship between the public and the private worlds in which individuals find themselves. We must not expect too much from the promises of the public, for if we were to commit the fallacy of pinning our hopes and fears upon the external public realm of the politics of state, we would risk losing the moral control we have over our own lives and happiness. It was not the role of government to instruct as to the proper ethical formulation of social order, instead the proper role of the state should be to react to and help further the functional needs of the natural social body – to obey the imperatives of empirical operation and naturalist desire.
28 Duncan Forbes reads Hume as offering the contrast between ‘modern regular government and medieval irregular government, where the personality of the king was all-important, and respect for the rule of law, as such, weak or non-existent. In such circumstances men who would have made excellent kings in a modern monarchy were bad kings’. Forbes (1979: 94–109) suggests Hume as ‘a remote ancestor, in a general sort of way, of Max Weber’s essentially bureaucratic modern state’.
29 This difference is ambiguous, for, on the one hand, Hume appears to have had some aversion to the very idea that sufficient knowledge of the ‘reality’ of determinism could ever be arrived at, that would enable such a structural analysis of history as Marx was later to provide, and yet, on the other, he feels the need to state that there must be some scheme of natural flow, even if we are never to be a party to it. The first can give us a notion of history as resulting from decisions that men, both as individuals and temporary groupings, have carried out, rather than presenting these men as arriving at decisions resulting from intentional states implicit and understandable in their nature as objects where these intentions result from causal conditions – which must be carried out and are inexorably fulfilled by man. Man thus becomes the tool of other forces. Hume cannot, however, be seen as a champion of radical openness in human affairs, as an early proponent of the ‘pragmatic’ contingency of human affairs – the demand to give a proper foundation inherent in empiricism becomes too strong.
30 A key example is the idea of distributing property according to the principle of desert, as opposed to the Humean defence of present possession (lawful possession, that is). In the Treatise, Hume had suggested that the sentiment of sympathy would lead men to consider equality-type considerations (his own version was that a deserving man would be given goods over an undeserving man), however, this appears as an anomaly to the rigidity of the rules. In the Enquiries Hume considered the rationalist imagination as giving rise to social change by inducing men to pursue an abstract ideal – again that of distribution by desert. ‘A creature, possessed of reason, but unacquainted with human nature, deliberates with himself what rules of justice or property would best promote public interest, and establish peace and security among mankind: His most obvious thought would be, to assign the largest possessions to the most extensive virtue, and give everyone the power of doing good, proportioned to his inclination. In a perfect theocracy, where a being, infinitely intelligent, governs by particular volitions, this rule would certainly have place, and might serve to the wisest purposes: but were mankind to execute such a law: so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity, and from the self-conceit of each individual, that no determinate rule of conduct would ever result from it: and the total dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence’ (E, 192–3). Hume thus gives some recognition to the argument from desert, but counterposes arguments based upon his ‘empirical’ knowledge of human nature and the events of history – his overturning of the Treatise position, where in the conflict between sympathy and justice, justice wins, may reflect his growing concern with historical analysis. It can also be seen as an argument showing that the use of reason must necessarily take place in an imperfect world and be combined with the evidence of empirical investigations.
31 Justice, ‘a general peace and order’ or ‘a general abstinence from the possessions of others’, reflects the self-interest of each person who desires to be secure in person and property. This security and happiness can be achieved only in society in an arrangement of justice and, to an extent, justice is a reflection of self-interest. The usefulness of justice is that it satisfies self-interest. Thus, Hume claims, public utility is the sole origin of justice, and that reflections on the beneficial consequences of this virtue are the sole foundation of its ment. But although social utility or self-interest drives men into society or into a scheme of justice, it is something besides self-interest which provides the moral basis for justice. The moral quality of justice is not founded on self-interest but rather the sentiment of sympathy. We condemn injustice not only when our own personal interests are involved but also whenever it produces pain or disagreeableness in others which we can share through sympathy. ‘Thus, self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice: but a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation which attends that virtue.’
32 Hume draws us into a distrust for rationalist approaches to the notion of justice by the rhetorical use of a social principle of parsimony – he states that if the ‘rule’ of justice ‘be very abstruse, and of difficult invention’ then society must ‘be esteem’d in a manner accidental, and the effect of many ages’. Hume’s position is that a low degree of rational speculation is required to grasp the concept of justice, for the rule of justice is nothing other than ‘the rule for the stability of possession’; a ‘simple and obvious’ position such ‘that every parent, in order to preserve peace among his children, must establish it; and that these first rudiments of justice must every day be improved, as the society enlarges’ (T, 489). Man’s natural condition requires such rules of justice, since what is ‘to be regarded as certain, is that it is only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin’ (T, 495). Although the operation of justice may involve articulation of those principles which assume the character of universality and generality, these, important as they may become for the continual operation of the system of justice, cannot be considered essential to its origins or its actual binding force: since ‘’tis certain that the imagination is more affected by what is particular than by what is general: and that the sentiments are moved with difficulty, when their objects are, in any degree, loose and undetermined’ (T, 580). Defence of the institution of justice is essential and this is superior to the possible wrongness of the particular: ’Whereas a single act of justice, considered in itself, may often be contrary to the public good … ‘tis the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is advantageous’. Thus ’before any tribunal of justice’ it may be ‘an instance of humanity to decide contrary to the laws of justice … the whole scheme, however, of law and justice is advantageous to the society’ (T, 589). Further, once the rules of justice have been established they are ‘naturally attended with a strong sentiment of morals; which can proceed from nothing but our sympathy with the interests of society’ (T, 579-80, emphasis in the original).
33 In Tiie Wealth of Nations Smith presents arguments for increasing the general level of prosperity of all citizens – while minimising the role of politics. The growth and extension of the middle classes is crucial for social order since ‘no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable’. Smith related the condition of individual men to their experience of the division of labour and the environment they experienced.
34 Smith’s jurisprudential project was to create a Theory of Moral Sentiments (to use the title of his major work on jurisprudence, 1976) without foundational reference to the grid templates of theology. Moral sentiments differ from religious because they are direct passions, while religious conceptions are secondary effects of such passions.
35 Natural History, pp 21 and 31.
36 In the Enquiries (E, 170) the problem is set out thus: are morals ‘derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we obtain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgments of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species’. Hume’s aim is to achieve a ‘reformadon in all moral disquisitions and reject every system of ethics, however, subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation’ (E, 175).
37 Thus, for instance, Hume declares the reason incest is allowed in the animal kingdom and not in human culture looks as if, through his use of reason, man has declared its ‘turpitude’, passing laws against it. But the moral explanation lies not in our rationality, since that is to argue in a circle: ‘For before reason can perceive this turpitude, the turpitude must exist; and consequently is independent of the decisions of our reason, and is their object more properly than their effect’ (T, 467).