One of the reasons why it is so important to study the history of ideas in philosophy, is because philosophers do. David Hume, in an extraordinary intellectual effort, composed the Treatise of Human Nature in his twenties. It is known that Hume set back his health considerably during that exertion. Hume was studying and writing during the high tide of the movement in Early Modern philosophy. His predecessors were, every single one of them, imposing harsh new judgments on the authority of sense perception, and on its status as a conduit of actual knowledge about the external world. The entire Early Modern Movement, in making this radical separation from the domain of common experience, nevertheless managed to seize the mantle of the name of empiricism. How this is possible—how it is possible for the philosophical movement that carries to unprecedented heights the indictment of perception, the only way most people have for obtaining knowledge—to do so under the banner of an almost populist celebration of the rights of human beings in general, is a subject worthy of considerable study.
It is generally held by scholars, that Hume discovered hitherto unknown limits to the powers of the human mind. All human mentality that ordinary people are acquainted with has to do with causation. The way that ordinary human beings think actually turns out to be best described by Plato’s Socrates. Everything that people know—which is originally discernible in the human being’s ability to correctly assign names to the diverse objects—is based on a recognition of cause. People name objects after their kind. Locke allows for this, even allows for the ordinary reliance upon the recognition of Aristotelian substances, but only in a domain that philosophy denigrates, or dismisses, when the question of truth arises. Why should this knowledge, with which people effortlessly conduct their lives from moment to moment, fail to register in the formal philosophical domain of truth? In Hume, this ordinary conception of cause, that is, the “whatness” of objects being their cause, or what makes them what they are—is repudiated. The momentum for this indictment did not come from what is known as the grass roots. People did not start writing to their political representatives, to tell them that they had fallen into the practice of confusing open doors for walls; or that their sense faculties proved to betray them, when they wielded dangerous instruments; or that they had lost their jobs because they could not come to a decision, as to whether they were awake, or dreaming. All these problems originated with philosophy. Philosophy, in other words, brought the problems to the world, and visited it upon them. Almost like a plague of locusts.
Perception is at the core of this entire story of philosophy in the Early Modern period. Bacon indicts it. Descartes indicts it. Hobbes indicts it. Spinoza indicts it. Locke, as we have seen, indicts it. Now comes Hume. Hume makes the argument that human beings truly can’t know causes at all. Hume makes the spectacular argument, that human mentality actually has only passions as its core. Yet Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume all themselves actually rely, for their indictment of perception, upon a pretended knowledge of causation. That knowledge would involve atomism: the argument that the true body in nature is indestructible. This philosophy of atomism has its origins in deductive metaphysics. As we prepare to make an examination of Hume, I once more summon the specter of atomism before the reader.
It’s true, Hume doesn’t like to use the name “atom” very much. Hume nowhere comes out and says “I am an atomist,” like Locke sort of does. Locke’s qualification of his atomism, that it is merely an experimental hypothesis, continues to be sufficient for a goodly number of Locke scholars to take him at his word. The problem that I keep attempting to set before the reader, is the severity of the indictment of perception that is visited, epistemologically, upon the domain of ordinary opinion. The cause for this indictment is contained in the theory of body that the philosophers begin with. Thus I always turn first to the philosopher’s theory of body, in order to examine whether or not it contains these atomistic characteristics. Hume’s does.
Locke and Bacon are the only two Early Modern thinkers to partly embrace the name of atomism. Yet in so important a matter, as to what body fundamentally is, I do not think we can limit ourselves to the manner in which philosophers label themselves and their theories. It is also characteristic of the Early Modern philosophers, that they consider themselves to possess a rather extraordinary liberty in the usages of speech. I don’t think our study should run aground based on such a liberty. The fundaments of atomism do not depend upon nomenclature. They depend upon convictions. The belief in the atoms as the essential building blocks of the universe, involves metaphysics. It involves steep deductions. It also issues in a severe condemnation of the capacity of sense perception to know reality. The first thing to be noticed is that for those philosophers who espouse these postulates, their knowledge (and it is a claim of knowledge, rather than the lack of knowledge, which underlies the claim of atomistic principles) rests upon great confidence in the human mind. Hume’s theory of “points,” his preferred language in the area of atomistic postulates, is such a deductive theory. Hume insists that there must be something indivisible in nature. In fact, for Hume, all of nature is built up out of these points; and these points are strange. Hume has a great deal of trouble naming them. Are they mathematical points? Are they material points? Is there, in nature, such a thing, as a middle way between mathematics and materiality? Hume insists that there is, at least in his early writings. Yet he claims to know that these points are indivisible; and that somehow, these are the cause of perception.
Thus I would like to say at the outset that Hume is not entitled to reach the destination that he claims to reach: the indictment of the human ability to know causes rationally. The Humean points are a pretension to knowledge, even though Hume conveniently omits to designate them as such. Thus it is not all rational mentality, which is indicted under Hume’s theory, just the sensory perception of the generality of the human race. It is the non-philosophers who are being reduced to standards of mere impulse and body. Ordinary mentality is being subjected to a severe dressing down, and there is nothing in this indictment that fails to be political in implication. This distance that I alleged, between the philosophers who truly take themselves to know something, and the generality of the human race which is denied the very faculties necessary to be able to have dispassionate mentality, prefigures a politics, one in which the ordinary opinions can never lead anywhere, certainly never to any kind of insight. It heralds a politics where the ordinary opinions are doomed to be permanently upbraided and corrected by philosophy in such a way that I fail to see how even a modest form of self-government can be conceded to exist in a people so ordered.
In the Treatise, which Hume later attempted to disavow, he argues with ferocity that we must concede the existence of the indivisible. On this much, scholars are agreed. The question that is before us, is what does Hume actually intend to indicate, as the indivisible something? Can it be a mathematical point? If a point is intended to measure magnitude, of any sort, is it possible to persuasively claim, that mathematical science is therefore incapable of further subjecting that “point” to more divisions? Hume does not openly proclaim himself an atomist, which Locke does claim.
Yet Hume takes us to familiar territory, in his arguments that there must be some limit to division in bodies. This is after all the manner in which the original atomist theory was provoked by Zeno, and originated by Leucippus. In the Treatise, Hume refers to the “points” as the indivisible objects. Hume subjects the reader here, to mighty philosophical powers. Early Modern philosophy had discovered nothing but success in enacting rather spectacular claims about body. Hume is nevertheless innovative here, as Locke had been innovative. Locke had argued that the atoms in nature are a hypothesis, which draws attention away from the physical essence of the atoms. Hume, when he talks about his points, declines to simply say that they are atoms, or material points. To the contrary: as Hume begins to explain to us that points are the true objects in nature, he expressly attempts to deny that these points are bodies. Yet, yet: Hume is not willing to leave it at that. Hume is unwilling to say that the points are merely mathematical. Hume wriggles and moves with deftness in his argument. There must be something in between the mathematical, or non-material point and the physical point. Is it possible for something to be a little bit body? That seems to be what Hume is trying to get us to accept. For these points of Hume’s, though he firmly denies to them the appellation of body, are yet said to possess physical attributes: not merely color, but solidity.
“Extension,” or dimensions, is the language that both Descartes and Hobbes employ for their definition of body. It is to extension that Hume turns, as he prepares to unfold his theory of points. “Now tis certain we have an idea of extension, for otherwise why do we talk and reason concerning it? Tis likewise certain, that this idea, as conceived by the imagination, though divisible into parts of inferior ideas, is not infinitely divisible, nor consists of any infinite number of parts.”[1] I think that we have to expunge the name of “imagination” from Hume’s argument. “Extension” appeals to a philosophic conception of body. “Imagination” certainly can’t be the origin of any kind of knowledge. Hume says that it is impossible for human beings to imagine that any object is infinitely divisible. Hume should be kind to us. He should turn to those philosophers who do argue that objects are, in some respects, infinitely divisible. Not only that they can be conceived so, but that they are so. Plato has made this argument in his Parmenides, that the parts of a whole are indeed infinite; I have never seen this argument confuted, and certainly Hume makes no attempt to do so. Human beings possess the idea of the infinite, which indicates that which can never be present all at the same time. I think this does constitute comprehension. Human beings can never know all of infinite parts, because if they could, the parts would not be infinite. They would be limited. Human beings are indeed capable of having the idea of the unlimited, as Anaximander has in his theory of the Apeiron.
Hume continues to talk about this idea of extension. We must either take Hume here to be referring to body, or else to be excusing himself from the tradition of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke who all use the name extension to refer to body. If Hume wishes to excuse himself from the discussion of body, he need only so inform us. He doesn’t.
At this moment, Hume appeals again to the idea of extension. He claims first that we have an idea of it. Secondly, Hume claims that we cannot conceive of infinite divisions in it. Locke had argued that we cannot resolve the riddle of infinite divisibility either way, but Locke was openly talking about body, the material. Hume is playing with us a little bit. He begins with the discussion of extension, which summons before the trained philosopher’s mind the nature of the material; and then proceeds to talk about how it cannot be divided infinitely. “Here then is an idea of extension which consists of parts or inferior ideas, that are perfectly indivisible.” Hume proceeds to make the following conclusions. First, that there is no contradiction inherent in the notion of indivisible somethings. Second, that “extension” can therefore be viewed in conformity with the model of indivisible somethings. Thirdly, that we can call these indivisible somethings, at least for the moment, “mathematical points.”[2]
One could infer that these “points” are atoms, but Hume does not wish to make this inference available to us. For Hume refers to these points as “mathematical.” Mathematical points cannot be bodies, however.[3] Mathematical points do not have length, breadth and depth. Mathematical points are representations of boundaries. Nevertheless, Hume characterizes the points discovered by his theory as “mathematical.” In the Treatise I he explicitly states that the points are not “physical.”
It has often been maintained in the schools, that extension must be divisible, ad infinitum, because the system of mathematical points is absurd, because a mathematical point is a non-entity, and consequently can never by its conjuration with others form a real existence. This would be perfectly decisive, were there no medium between the infinite divisibility of matter and the non-entity of mathematical points. But there is evidently a medium, viz. the bestowing of color or solidity on these points; and the absurdity of both these extremes is a demonstration of the truth and reality of this medium.[4]
Hume argues with slashing strokes. We must clarify what we think he means, before we can proceed. These points that Hume is talking about, he says that they are, or he suggests that they are, not “matter,” or the “infinite divisibility of matter.” When Hume alludes to the infinite divisibility of “matter,” is he conceding that matter or body itself actually is indivisible? No. The infinite divisibility of matter, Hume argues, is both an “extreme” argument, and an “absurd” argument. Hume therefore does not allow that matter or body is infinitely divisible. He simply wants to argue that his “points” are different from “matter.” We are still waiting for clarification: are Hume’s points material, bodily, or not?
Mathematical points, Hume argues, are a “non-entity.” Mathematical points do not exist then, for Hume. Nor does infinitely divisible body exist. Both of these are absurd “extremes” of argument. The points, Hume argues, his points, are somewhere in between body and mathematical symbols. We have made the arguments before in this book, that body is indeed, in a certain context, infinitely divisible. The parts of an object are so divisible. Plato has proved it. Yet Plato has also proved that the whole of a body, considered as the container for the parts, is not infinitely divisible. Yet this whole of Plato has the parts of time. It begins and ends. It undergoes change, of coming into being, alteration, and locomotion. Atoms cannot undergo change. Hume’s points cannot undergo change. What Hume has failed to account for, in his discussion of the points, is being. Do these points have the part of being or not? If they have the part of being, and they are indivisible, then this is the definition of atoms that Leucippus and Democritus developed. If these points lack the part of being, then we can stop wasting our time talking about them.
I think we really are quibbling when we wonder whether or not Hume’s points are physical or not. Hume has stated that they are not mathematical points, his points. Hume has stated that they are indivisible, these points. Hume also argues that these points have color and solidity. Color and solidity are properties of body. Even for those who subscribe to Locke’s theory of primary and secondary qualities, “solidity” cannot be dismissed as a merely mental object. “Solidity” is body. Hume is talking about body. In his Enquiry into Human Understanding, Hume gives up his pretension that the points are somehow aloof from the physical. The points, in the Enquiry, are conceded to be physical. Hume’s points are not only bodies, they are atomic bodies.
Whatever dispute there may be about mathematical points, we must allow that there are physical points, that is, parts of extension, which cannot be divided or lessened, either by the eye or imagination. These images, then, which are present to the fancy or senses, are absolutely indivisible, and consequently must be allowed by mathematicians to be infinitely less than any real part of extension; and yet nothing appears more certain to reason, than that an infinite number of them comprises an infinite extension.[5]
Thus the fun is not entirely over. In the Enquiry, Hume shifts back and forth, between talking about “physical points,” and “images” of physical points. Hume makes the distinction between these two very different things, vague to say the least. Hume has said that the points that cannot be divided, are physical; but then he writes as if to equate the physical points, with “images” present to the “senses or the fancy.” We are not interested in the senses or the fancy at this moment. We are interested in the philosopher’s account of body. We are interested in Hume’s account of the physical. Hume finishes up the passage with a flourish. We began with indivisible physical points in this passage; we were moved along to “images” of the “fancy”; and Hume concludes by linking the images themselves, added to one another, as extension, or body.
The long and the short of it is that Hume can’t finally have his cake and eat it too. If Hume is talking about body, he is talking about atoms. If he is not talking about body, but only about imaginations or thought experiments, then his entire theory of perception is going to go out the window. For Hume’s theory of “impressions” is based upon material points.
It is finally the philosopher who must figure out a way to excuse himself from the evidence of perception. Despite Hume’s strategy of argument, he is insistent upon characterizing reality as subject to the indivisibility principle. We must press his theory by demanding that he give an account of the part of being. Hume suppresses the part of being from the presentation. The theory cannot succeed without the part of being; but as soon as the theory owns up to its dependence upon the part of being, it becomes refutable.[6]
Philosophers of science today will recognize a problem that often emerges in physics: it has to do with the phenomena of change. There is an assumption that pervades modern scientific thinking, that the identity of a body must somehow be separated from all kinds of change. If a change of any kind is detected in a body, then the scientific researcher feels obliged to argue that there are two distinct bodies. Allegedly it is not possible for the mind to sustain the same name or identity for the object which is observed to change. Dr. Baxter, a Hume specialist, takes up this issue, as does Hume himself. Hume, in fact, indicts this reality of change in bodies, to call the validity of our perceptions into question.
Hume says that if, in our perceptions, we find what appears to be one body undergoing a change, that this is really insupportable. He suggests that we cannot know any such thing as real, a body undergoing a change. It must be the case, Hume argues, that we pretend to ourselves, that we are perceiving one and the same body, given the fact that there is some change noticeable. If the position of the object has changed, if the color of the object has changed, if the size of the object has changed, we cannot really say that it is one and the same object, Hume indicates. Therefore, our perceptions, which indicate to us that we actually do witness these bodies undergoing change, must be delusions. Hume’s philosophy denies that we can truly know any such bodies. In order for us to function in the world with some measure of success, Hume maintains, we must create fictions in our minds, as if to pretend that we know that the bodies about us have continued existence. This is a very weighty claim.
Why must it be denied that we can perceive bodies that undergo change? Because change is not regarded as something actually real. Why is change not regarded as something truly real? The arguments that underlay this claim are metaphysical and deductive. There is no cause to subject the reader to undue repetition. The metaphysics trace back to the original theory of atomism, and therewith to Parmenides and Zeno.
When Hume comes to talk of his objects, just as when he talks about his “mathematical points,” he is not able to be quite straightforward with us. As we have seen, Hume could have left his “mathematical points” without “color” and “solidity.” That is, there was no supernatural force preventing Hume from adhering to a strictly mathematical notion of his “points.” But a type of compulsion is nevertheless operative; for Hume wants to speak for the objects that are commonly thought to exist. Hume wants to exert authority and influence over the common conception of reality. Hume can’t really do without the aspect of “solidity,” that is, body. So he tries to quietly introduce it, as if a mathematical point offers him warrant for so doing. Similarly, when it comes time to talk about the “unity” of these points, Hume is not able to limit the points to unity. On the other hand, he also is not willing to admit that his points indeed have parts. The points, Hume argues, are constituted by some mysterious quality, that is “in between unity and number.” This very much follows Hume’s characterization of the mathematical points as possessing “color” and “solidity.” Yet there is nothing in between unity and plurality. To stipulate that unity has parts, is just an indirect way of admitting that unity is not the only part of the object. Hume is unwilling to vacate his claim of indivisibility for the points. We can help Hume: the points cannot be merely a unity, because mere unities themselves cannot exist in nature. Unities must either have the part of being, or not exist. Thus a true body in nature, no matter how small, must be a compound. To recognize the coequal natures of unity and being is Plato’s accomplishment: this is the metaphysical, and real foundation of any body whatsoever in nature, point or not.
If we go back to the arguments made by Zeno for a moment, we can acknowledge that Zeno indicates that one possible way out of the dilemma that he sees in infinite divisibility is that there are some irreducible magnitudes.[7] Our scholarship is widely agreed that the atomist philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus was born out of this philosophical moment.[8] It is believed that Leucippus was a pupil of Zeno, and that Leucippus adapted the theory of irreducible magnitudes as a way to reconcile plurality with the infinite divisibility theses. This is what Hume is attempting to build on. Yet it is not possible for any magnitude to lack the parts of unity and being. Calling them mathematical points will not accomplish the task; nor will combining the names of solidity and color with the name of “mathematical points” accomplish the task. No object can exist without the parts of unity and being. Objects that exist only in the mind of man, such as mathematical points, are not objects in de rerum natura. They are imaginations. We are concerned, not with imaginations, but with body.
Donald Baxter now enters into our discussion. Baxter recognizes that unity and being cannot be withheld from any feasible account of body. Any body that you like, Baxter acknowledges, must have the natures of unity and being both. The next step that Baxter takes in his argument, however, is problematic: Baxter decides to annihilate the difference between the natures of unity and being, and to call them both “unity.” This would preserve Hume’s argument for indivisibility; but it is an untenable argument, for the reasons we have set forth above. “Unity,” as a nature, is divisionless: it has no room for the nature of “being” within itself. To admit that the smallest object in nature, even the Humean points, is a compound, is to explode the indivisibility thesis: but that is not all. For to admit the co-equal reality of the natures of “unity” and “being” in any object whatsoever in nature, is to concede the reality of “whole” and “part” as natures. It is the admission of the reality of wholes which is crucial: for the whole, in its extremities, will have to have the parts of time (past, present and future). Thus change is metaphysically proven as an inescapable property of every real body in nature; and therefore, Hume’s attempt to argue that perception’s belief in change, is evidence of the incompetence of ordinary opinion, fails.
Baxter, in attempting to argue that “unity” and “being” are one, is trying to make Hume’s argument work: just as Hume attempts to slip the parts of “solidity” into his “non-physical” points. Just as Hume attempts to fit the part of being, and many other parts, under the rubric of “unity”; so Baxter tries to slide “being” into Hume’s equation, without at the same time conceding number.
Scholars like to talk about change in the atomistic manner. In Locke, when one atom leaves the “body,” it becomes effectively a different body. Plato’s discussion of whole and part does not permit this sort of alteration. One cannot exchange the extremities of a body. The extremities are limited; they come into being, and pass away. If one were to replace, piece by piece, every part of a boat, one could not properly call it the same boat. The boat above all is the container for the parts, and to replace the container is to replace the object. In any event, the atomistic account of identity conceals the real issue, which is that actual bodies in nature do undergo change. The sides of the boat take on wear and tear; there is a bloodstain on the bottom of the boat; it is a perishable object in nature, and perception is not misled when it observes the changes. There is, by necessity at least, no “feigning” involved.
Among the extremities of a whole, there are the parts of time that we have indicated. There is also shape, and color. These extremities are the realities that Hume is forced to admit into his definition of “mathematical points.” We have attempted to correct Hume’s analysis. Unity and being are the foundations of any object in nature; and the reality of the changing wholes is part of Plato’s defense of perception as real and true information. The ordinary human being does not ascend to the level of any scientific definition, or that degree of rigor and power in the struggle for knowledge; but the point is, that those philosophers who do pursue a scientific definition of the objects in nature, ought to be, in Plato’s view, obliged to perceptual evidence, as their original evidence.
Plato’s theory of scientific definition does not finally culminate in the reversal of the names as ordinarily assigned. The common individual knows what a horse is, simply by memory, however humble that form of judgment may be. Perception traffics in images, however: and images are not of much use in philosophic debate. The theorists with whom Plato argued were skilled in the practice of making things appear a certain way, against which mere familiarity with images was not much help. The science of definition aspires to logos, to conscious penetration of the image; it is the object for intellect, which really does not have the opportunity to occur in perception at all. Thus there is a world of difference between the power of scientific definition and the power of perception of images. Yet the patterns, in nature, are perceptible, in Plato’s argument; the patterns as perceptible are not unreal; but the form of knowing limited by perception is vastly inferior to the form of knowing available to intellect, which is where dialectic becomes useful.
Philosophy in society exists in a certain relationship with public opinion. In my understanding, modern philosophy is especially interested in constituting itself a sort of referenda upon the ordinary ways of knowing. It aims for a kind of indirect impact on the public opinions. With clinical detachment, the modern philosopher redescribes the contents of ordinary perception, in a way that the ordinary thinker, that plain person, must be entirely baffled by. It is a fair subject for investigation, whether this process of expert opinion, its practice of holding up the ordinary opinions for public review, can or does lead to anxiety, insecurity, or even a little bit of terror in the culture. When Hume argues that human mentality amounts to no more than affect—that there is only passion involved—the question should be raised as to whether or not this is an ambition of his philosophy. In other words, I wonder whether Hume does not wish for his scientific philosophy to be employed in such a way, that it converts otherwise calm perceptual recognition and judgment into quavering, timid, fearful materials.
Hume, in his famous theory of causation, finally denies that the human mind can have so much information as regards the realities of external bodies. “This very table, which we can see, and which we feel hard, is believed to exist, independent of our perception, and to be something external to our mind which perceives it,” Hume writes; “But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image of perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any intermediate intercourse between the mind and the object.”[9] It is important first to attempt to illustrate the box into which Hume believes he can deliver thought. Hume’s philosophy is, first and foremost, a set of arguments determined to make men feel a certain way: helpless, arrested, perplexed.
Severe philosophy does exist in a world apart from the domain of ordinary opinion. It even exists in a domain apart from the mainstream of conventional philosophy. The line of philosophers beginning with Machiavelli and reaching its crescendo in Hume is a breed apart: for they have learned a set of arguments, famously involved with the riddles of infinite divisibility, which enable them to leave the interlocutor speechless and lost.
Pierre Bayle does not really qualify as one of these severe philosophers. Bayle himself, when he writes about Zeno and the Eleatic puzzles, writes as a human being who has not figured out these riddles, rather than as one of the initiated philosophers who knows the game. Bayle does not recur to Plato’s dialogue the Parmenides, despite the excellent information made available there about Zeno’s arguments. Yet Bayle very well illustrates the predicament into which Hume and company would lead the philosophic tradition. On the one hand, nobody can escape dependence on their senses. Everyone must believe, and act on the belief, that it is possible to move, and for the hare to catch up to the tortoise. Perception validates the belief. Yet, as Bayle argues, the mind is nevertheless held spellbound, mastered by arguments which fully contradict the evidence of perception.[10] This is the crossroads to which the helpmeets of Eleatic philosophy have ushered human thought. In between perception and thought, we find a new version of the human being. We find a human being who is being taught that while he must live by his senses, that these do not and cannot deliver truth.[11]
Hume leans very heavily on this argument. The mind must go about its business in daily life as if it knows the truth, merely in order that it may function. Yet better not to think beyond what is absolutely or practically necessary to the task at hand. If one thinks even a little bit beyond the “how” questions of life, to the “why” or even more deliberately towards the “what” of things, the new philosophy promises a descent into the well or abyss of perplexity. “As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produced by the creative powers of the mind, or are derived from the author of our being.”[12] On these terms, indeed, man is almost held hostage by philosophy. Fearful that he cannot know truth, he has no standard against which to measure the arguments of such severe angle and inclination as the titans of modern philosophy bring to bear in the area of practical and political reason. One will focus in vain upon the moral arguments that Hume makes, unless one first tends to business on Hume’s alleged proofs that the mind cannot know the truth of external reality in any particular.
The Treatise is Hume’s classical work. Famously, Hume later asked his readers to disregard the Treatise, as a work that he no longer wished to be associated with. The philosopher however surely does not possess such a luxury. The arguments made in the Treatise have echoed loudly down through the centuries, mingling powerfully in the bloodstream of cultural and philosophical life. It is very much to the point that Hume is one of the last of the Early Modern philosophers; that the abstract discussions which seek to effect a new limited horizon for thought are on display. It is no mistake that so many philosophers today trace their work back to Hume, as if he represents the last word on actual philosophic discourse.
Two things should be noted at this point. First of all, the highly polished and seemingly less controversial Enquiries into the Human Understanding which Hume composed, after the harsh reception that his Treatise received, can be discovered to hinge on the same fundamental arguments as the Treatise. I say here, for the most part. There are one or two concessions made by Hume in the Enquiry which are highly significant: especially Hume’s concession that the “points” which he characterizes as the fundaments of all matter, are indeed “physical,” as opposed to not-physical, as stated in the Treatise. The other thing that needs to be noted here is that a significant number of scholars make the argument that Hume does indeed concede to human beings inductive faculties sufficient to enable one to know causes in nature. I believe that this last argument is mistaken, and I will attend to these scholars’ arguments below.
That the mind cannot know any external fact with certainty, that the mind beholds only its own ideas, are claims that Hume insists on with fervor throughout his philosophic career. Yet Hume believes himself to know something true about all bodies, which it is evident perception never supplied. “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,” Hume writes.[13] Hume subsequently indicates that “in judging of the actions of men, we must proceed upon the same maxims, as when we reason concerning external objects.”[14]
Hume’s portrait of the mind is an effort to achieve some good for the human being. Self-interest, Hume argues, cannot be divorced from any mental operation whatsoever, whether the human being is conscious of such motives or not. “Avarice, or the desire of gain, is an universal passion,” Hume writes, “which operates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons.”[15] Truth is made irrelevant, in a sense: for the human being, in Hume’s analysis, cannot know. Therefore the limit enforced by the human faculties must make do with organs that are not suited to know any truth beyond that which is useful to the organism in its effort to sustain its strength.
Hume follows Locke in his discussion of human identity. Hume’s reductivist approach to the mind leaves us with a consciousness that is severely limited to the momentary “impressions” and ideas that assail it. For Hume, in the first book of the Treatise, identity is reduced almost to the null set. Memory seems to be obliterated; ordinary self-awareness seems to be negated. The self is here limited to the passing sensation for its identity, which is to say that the limits of thought enforced by Hume eventuate in a sort of amnesia for the individual whose thought is being so guided.[16] Yet in the second book of the Treatise, in the domain of the passions, we find a more robust theory of the self, albeit one limited to turbulent and contentious passions. The first book of the Treatise sets up the identity to be later anchored in the passions in book II. For Hume, philosophic reason is in service to the enterprise of making man a being wholly dependent upon his feelings. Feelings deprived of truth of fact are as helpless as flags blowing in the wind. It is Hume’s philosophy itself which proposes to determine and establish the equation wherein the bearings of the passions shall be obtained.
The reader needs to begin to test an assumption. The very language of “limits” as applied to the faculties of the human mind suggests probity, assiduity, dutifulness, humility. Yet when such an attitude is anchored to atomism or “corpuscularian” philosophy, the reverse is the case. Atomistic philosophy is subject to fatal refutations.
The end of Hume’s first Enquiry sets up the issue nicely. Hume well articulates the central issue, upon which my own criticisms of his philosophy turn. The issue is of course perception; than which nothing is more basic, preliminary, decisive and ubiquitous in a human being’s existence. Hume’s teaching is that we cannot regard our perceptions as direct reports of what exists external to us. We must rather, if we wish to be “rational,” regard our perceptions as separate from what externally exists; as some sort of representations that are a breed apart from what really exists. Hume insists that this principle is the properly impartial one. “It is a question of fact, whether perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: how shall this question be determined? By experience surely, as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is and must be entirely silent. The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects.”[17]
Hume, throughout his Treatise, offers some arguments from the authority of sense-perception itself in the attempt to indict their reliability. These examples are as old as philosophy. Aristotle, for example, thought that it was precious strange that any philosopher would rely upon this type of argumentation. Yet Hume, his predecessors both ancient and modern, and his successors as well, have more deep-seated theoretical critiques of the senses that are truly the thing that must be dealt with.
Let us nevertheless indicate Hume’s examples from sense perception. I am familiar with at least two arguments that Hume makes in this particular area: (a) that if we press a knuckle to our eye, it will make us see double images; and (b) if we close our eyes, we “annihilate” the “objects” that we had a moment before experienced.[18] Norman Kemp Smith is like many scholars who appear to be persuaded by Hume’s discussion.[19] Yet it must be the more theoretical argumentation that holds Smith’s attention. If we physically obstruct our sensory organs, we produce distortion. Nothing much more needs to be said about the case of the errant knuckles. As for the closing of our eyes, we “annihilate” nothing: or else it would be recommended to every soldier in battle, that he quickly close his eyes as the enemy comes upon him, in order that he may “annihilate” the opponent and be preserved.
Smith gives way to Hume’s indictment of the senses, certainly the most powerful tide of modern philosophy, without attempting to come to terms with the Eleatic arguments that underlay them. Then again, Hume does not explicitly connect his theory of perception to his theory of body. They are connected, nevertheless, in the most intimate manner.
It is not commonly recognized that our ability to correctly assign names to objects is very important evidence of truth. For to assign the proper name to the drinking cup is a common phenomenon. It indicates no ownership, no division of self-interest. It furnishes a starting point for inquiries into truth. When Plato undertakes to make inquiries into justice or courage or knowledge themselves, he begins with the very same principle: what objects do people attempt to indicate with those names?
If we briefly contemplate the influence of Hume’s argument on this scenario, things turn out very differently. If it is conceded, as Hume attempts to get us to accept, that we really do not have reliable knowledge of what external objects are, and that we cannot possess this knowledge, then our disposition towards external objects undergoes a moral change. This much Hume does take from the classical sceptic doctrine. “My intention then in displaying so carefully the arguments of that fantastic sect, is only to make the reader sensible of the truth of my hypothesis, that all our reasonings concerning cause and effect are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.”[20] For Plato’s civilian, no morality at all is involved in naming the drinking cup. The memory of the form of the cup is brought into use, and the common name is assigned to the indicated object. For Hume, however, the individual is said to be incapable of having this perception accurately; and therefore memory is taken out of the equation. The individual will still assign the name of “drinking cup,” but he is said to do so, by Hume, out of self-interest.[21]
Morality, under the guise of “necessity,” is injected into the morally neutral factual situation by Hume. Indeed, it is impossible for human beings, under Hume’s view, to ever undergo a mental operation that is not dominated by self-assertion, by natural need. For Hume, the individual assigns the name of the drinking cup not because he knows the object to be that, but because he is compelled to use that name in order to meet his needs. For Hume, names are assigned based on utility: this shatters the common fact that Plato searches for in order to begin his inquiries. For Hume, it impacts all of an individual’s thought with a hard-wired impulse of self-preservation which thereafter morally colors his every use of names, his every onset of perception.
In Hume’s model of the human mind, however, we are not able to perceive the object “man.” We are limited, by the doctrine of “impressions” that Hume introduces as the foundation of perception, to the experience of certain atomic sensations, which in and of themselves indicate no external object.[22] Roundness, sweetness, redness, may be the properties of an apple; but among Hume’s impressions, these are distinct and separate sensations that have no supporting substratum that perception can identify.[23] One must construct or build, as it were, the idea of a man out of the raw impressions that are in his mind. In this Hume follows Locke almost exactly. That there are kinds in nature, including “man,” is ruled out by Hume’s doctrine of impressions. It is the impressions which are asserted to be real, and the impressions are limited to partless datums.
This process is ascribed to the freedom of the mind. Such freedom of the mind is dissolved into an imperative of the mind. The mind is alleged to force together these impressions without knowing whether they really exist in combination in de rerum natura. The mind is disposed to regard the impressions as linked together due to utility: that is, due to the self-interest of the individual, the need to act as if this knowledge is acquired. Hume insists that the knowledge is not acquired, or ever truly possessed: just as firmly as he insists that nature has implanted a tendency to feign knowledge in the human constitution, so that man will be able to avail himself of the world about him to meet his needs.[24]
Hume argues out of order by instituting his theory of impressions at the outset of his discussion of the human mind and body. In fact, Hume’s theory of perception, the “impressions” and “ideas,” is itself dependent on a theory of what body is. Hume’s theory of body moves in the direction of atomism.
Consider Hume’s attack on the identity of the self in the domain of awareness, as distinguished from feeling. Just as Hume is promiscuous in his use of the name “object”—employing it to refer to shapes, colors, sounds, as well as to matter—the awareness of man is reduced to a “heap” of perceptions.[25] If perceptions unfold in succession, and if man’s mind is limited to perceptions, then is not the mind and consciousness of the man himself different in each new perception? Hume persists in this critique of self-awareness, and he later argues that man is not to be held responsible for a wrongdoing unless the deed is grounded in the general character of the person. Yet Hume has attempted to subvert the conception of a “general character.”[26]
Norman Kemp Smith may be mistaken, then, to think that Hume’s philosophy is propelled by value, that is, morals.[27] Hume has moral purposes at the heart of his enterprise, that much cannot be doubted. Yet the propulsion of the arguments hinges on Hume’s conception of body, not on valuations. In the case of Hume, the limits of the human mind are deduced from abstract speculations as to what the real bodies are. The real bodies cannot be known by perception, Hume argues; but this is a knowledge that he must possess.[28] How did he obtain it? He obtained it from other philosophers, but those other philosophers developed the alleged knowledge by argument. Hume does not consent to teach us what those arguments are. Like Locke, he prefers to treat of natural philosophy as if it were merely part of the experimental tradition. Yet the natural philosophy of indivisible body, which Hume holds, is not a piece of information that can be obtained by experimental means.
Don Garrett has noticed that Hume allows himself to talk about the “secret powers” of nature, but does not think that this indicates that Hume holds any a priori beliefs in a metaphysical sense. Garret claims that a satisfactory analysis of Hume must entail an historical investigation into his thought; to prove that what we ascribe to Hume in the way of thought, may be traceable to linguistic communities operative during the eighteenth century. This methodology does not serve in the case of Hume, unless we specify that the historical constellation concerns doctrines of meta-philosophy. The keystone of Hume’s Treatise, of the entire work, is the doctrine of the indivisible “points,” that is, of body, that he sets forth.[29] This must involve some knowledge that is not caught up in the general skepticism conveyed Hume’s teaching. It is admitted that Hume attempts to prove his doctrine of indivisible objects or matter through appeals to sense perception, but these are neither capable of bearing the weight of Hume’s argument, nor even sustainable. The arguments from infinite divisibility are not arguments that are discoverable by sense perception.
The natural philosophy in Hume’s work takes aim at the human capacity to know the whatness of objects. When our knowledge of the whatness of objects is suspended, a new kind of moral personality emerges. Fear becomes bred in the very bones of men, as it were; and fear makes men savage if they cannot control it. There is no other power that modern philosophy has cultivated with greater assiduity than the means to deliver unto men sources of fear that they do not know how to overcome. This conditioning is meant to alter the human personality, and alter the human personality it will. A new theory of moral valuation is the goal of Hume’s work, but it is not the principal means in terms of argument. Hume disclaims interest or dependence on natural philosophy, but he does not indict it.
Hume’s theory of irreducible body does not directly attempt to invade the precincts of ordinary speech and discourse. However, this theory of irreducible body does indeed mean to subject ordinary speech and discourse to a scientific authority that regards these forms of speech as merely instinctual, as bereft of probative value in matters touching on truth of fact. Thus it very much is, Hume’s theory of the irreducible magnitudes, fully a political doctrine, because the concept of the indivisible leads us to conceptions of body that elude the senses. For all bodies we perceive are not indivisible, but perishable. Hume does not point out to his readers, that the theory of indivisibles is the theory that disenfranchises sense perception.
The Enquiry is perhaps a masterpiece. Hume disavowed the Treatise because it is pugnacious and could not shape the intellectual manners of polite and polished society. This the Enquiry can and does do. Locke had taken decisive steps in that direction, although Hume is not inclined to acknowledge that debt. Locke’s “Letters to Edward Stillingfleet” are more powerful than Hume’s Enquiry; and it appears to have been Locke who essayed the associationist theory of simple ideas, or, as Hume would say, impressions. One should not underestimate the leverage that philosophy can obtain with its doctrine of indivisible body. Once philosophy casts its weight at loggerheads with the ordinary ways and means of knowing—once philosophy submits public opinion to convictions that wreak havoc upon perceptual awareness—a new territory of public mind is being trod.
This will become clearer later when we discuss the new set of attitudes that Hume prescribes for a civilized mind. One thing is conspicuous in this development: the sort of probing, critical disposition that is required to get to the bottom of the riddles of infinite divisibility would be harshly censured by Hume as a form of incivility, of obstinate disregard for common sentiments. The new whip hand of culture is subtle, but its powers of praise and condemnation are well concentrated across Hume’s arguments.
These impressions cannot be defined, Hume insists. All we can know about them is that they occur to the mind in succession; and that the most the mind can know is that the impressions it encounters seem to be related to one another, by contiguity or nearness of time in our experience of them. We really can’t say, Hume insists, that one “impression” is the cause of any other impression; we really can’t say that one impression is the effect of some other impression. And these ideas in our mind, for all Hume knows, bear no relationship whatsoever to the objects that exist external to the mind. “That our senses offer not their impressions as the images of something distinct, or independent, or external, is evident,” Hume writes; “because they convey to us nothing but a single perception, and never give us the least indication of anything beyond.”[30]
Yet, we have no sufficient reason to concede Hume his premises. We have no persuasive warrant for regarding the objects in our minds as separate objects, aloof from objects that exist external to our minds. Scent and shape, taste and texture do not exist separately in nature. Scent and shape and taste and texture are all extremities of an object: an object which is composed of the coequal parts of unity and being; an object which is a whole of parts, which has extremities that we can indeed perceive and name.
Hume is not a philosopher lacking in hubris. It is a very complicated chain of reasoning that lies beneath the theory that true body is eternal and indivisible. It has been sufficiently discussed above. Yet Hume would like to avoid theoretical engagements over this issue. Towards this end, Hume goes so far as to claim that he can prove the existence of indivisible body through the common experience of perception. To whit: Hume argues that he can prove that there is such a thing as irreducible perception. If there is irreducible perception, that is, perception that can no longer be divided, then by analogy we can infer the existence of irreducible body.
One of the examples that Hume offers in this regard is that of the inkblot. If we make an inkblot upon a piece of paper, we can certainly stare at it. It is just as certain that we can begin to remove ourselves from the near vicinity of the blotted paper, and that we can even ascertain a specific distance where the ink blot just begins to vanish from our perceptual faculties.[31] This is the limit of divisibility for the perception of the ink blot, Hume argues; take one step farther away, or attempt to reduce the size of the ink blot one jot more, and perception of the object, and thus effectively the object itself, will be lost to us. Q.E.D., there are irreducible perceptions, and by analogy we can infer the existence of irreducible points, be they mathematical ones with solidity and color, or hard ones with the same properties. “The table before me is alone sufficient by its view to give me the idea of extension,” Hume insists; “but my senses convey to me only the impression of colored points disposed in a certain manner.”[32]
What Hume proves is that the perceptual organs are vulnerable to abuse or interference; and that in such moments they cannot be expected to function usefully. Hume’s inkblot example is just about a direct reproduction of Hobbes’s famous example of the square tower that looks round from a distance. Has anyone argued that the senses function with unlimited proficiency? That our sense faculties are not limited by conditions of a certain proximity, of being in proper range of the objects, and being without obstruction? To move closer toward the square tower is indeed to discover that it is square, by no other faculties but perceptual ones. To move out of the physical range of the ink blot from the vantage point of our visual capacities is to do nothing else than burden our sense faculties with conditions beyond which they cannot function. Hume’s inkblot example not only fails to prove the indivisibility of the objects of perception; it cannot even prove the indivisibility of the perceptions themselves.
The inkblot is on a piece of paper. That paper must have the coequal parts of unity and being. It must be some “one” piece of paper, and this piece of paper must have the part of being annexed to it. As such, the ink-blotted paper is a whole-of-parts. Therefore it has extremities of being in time: that is, the moment when Hume made the blot on the paper, and the moment in time when the paper itself will be no more. Perception does not have any indivisible experience of dismembered datums. The blot has a color, and a shape, and the paper it is on has a texture. Any body whatsoever must have the parts of unity and being, as coequal parts. The minima are therefore wholes-of-parts. Because that is what a unity that has the part of being must be, a whole composed of parts. So the natures of a “whole” and the nature of a “part” are also proved to exist in reality. Every minima must have not only these four natures, but many more besides.
It is one of the staple parts of David Hume’s philosophy that human beings anticipate the double existence of objects. For Hume, every object exists first of all in our own mind. These are the atomic impressions and the ideas that are derived from them. These first objects, as Hume refers to them, are conceded certainly to exist. Yet it is denied that we have direct knowledge about the external objects which the impressions or ideas in our soul suggest to us. Allegedly, we cannot manage to overcome this barrier, try as we might. Hume’s philosophy aims for truth as he sees it. Truth as Hume sees it, is that direct acquaintance with the objects in our heads is as far as our knowledge goes. We can’t make the leap from objects internal to our minds, to objects external to our minds, based on reason or knowledge. “First that properly speaking, tis not our body we perceive, when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions, which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind as difficult to explain, as that which we examine at present.”[33]
Hume holds it a misconception among those who think that the objects are one and the same. Hume’s reduction of the objects in our minds to atomic “impressions” is meant first of all to cure us of what we take to be the objects in our minds, by reducing them as indicated. From the atomic impressions, the mind cannot reach the external world. Yet according to Hume, God or nature has implanted an instinct in us, that makes us drive beyond our perceptions, to certain assumptions based upon our needs or utilities.[34]
It is only extreme need which is capable of bridging this gap between the objects within and the objects without; formally speaking, the mind for Hume must disavow truth and embrace preservation in order to reach the external objects in assumptions. Yet in order for this entire mechanism to operate, men have to throw their reason under the bus. They must toss it aside, the question as to truth, and assume for the sake of their own interests that the external objects exist. Thus Hume’s God has made it possible for man to act and assume in reality, but not to know.[35] This is therefore Hume’s account of causation.
This predicament can be appreciated a bit more directly if we recur to Aristotle’s definition of man in the Metaphysics. Man is the animal who wants to know.[36] If Aristotle is right, and I think that he is, then Hume’s philosophical enterprise, Hume’s definition of human nature, amounts to a colossal effort to thwart the deepest impulses of the human soul. For Hume does not merely want to argue that it is impossible for man to know the objects external to him. Hume equally wants to condition man to turn away from the impulse to know what those objects are. In Aristotle’s view, nature has furnished man with the faculties that he needs to know the world about him. Hume’s version of nature denies to man such faculties and knowledge; but it gives him something instead. What it gives to man is an impulse to wave away intelligence; to pull away from reason; or to subordinate “what is” to the particular utility that an individual has need for.[37] Thus Hume wishes to supplant intelligence with will.
One can contemplate that the condition of paralysis is almost unbearable; but that it must be a chronic state in a culture that is guided by Hume’s theory of science. Hume’s theory of science will oversee the official collection of “facts.” It will enforce the distinction between the objects internal to our souls and those that we cannot know about, external to our soul. A new mental portfolio is being prepared for human beings. He is being trained to dissolve the issue of truth into the issue of passion or desire. Hume is attempting to dissolve the issue of truth into convention, that is, into that which we would like to be true. True and false therefore will cease to be substantively operative criteria in a culture nurtured by Hume’s science. One is not opposed to plurality; up is not opposed to down, right is not opposed to wrong, hot is not opposed to cold. All of these ideas can be combined without a problem, in Hume’s view. Or, as Hume likes to say, it is possible for “anything to go with anything.”[38]
We engage with Hume at the point of his system’s strength. Hume denies that we can know matters of fact, in the manner described above. Hume insists not only that the mind is withdrawn into a cocoon of perception which is perhaps unrelated to what external objects actually are; but that our very earnest attempts to know matters of fact must always degenerate into our willful sentiment. Thus the double theory of causation in this ingenious thinker.
When Hume undertakes to provide us with his theory of causation, it can be seen that this entire presentation of what causation signifies is based in the atomist ontology. In the atomist ontology there are only indivisible objects. Thus in order to say anything about anything, one is led to infer that she must talk about more than one object. The depth dimension of atomist theory, which compresses all into “being,” is concealed from view. All we are shown by Hume, is that there is no such thing as a whole-of-parts in nature, that we can talk about as itself a unity. Causation must involve multiple objects, objects “precedent and contiguous to one another.” We cannot begin to really talk about causation in a satisfactory way until we have established the objects that we would talk about. The atomist ontology gives us objects that don’t exist. The objects that Hume is talking about in his theory of causation, cannot and do not exist separately of themselves in nature. One mistake, one cracked foundation, leads unto a multitude of mistakes and confusions. We must know what the objects are. That is why the discussion of the points is so decisive for comprehending Hume.
The theory that a cause can only be discussed in the context of “an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it,” takes place within the domain of perceptions or impressions in Hume’s theory. The impressions are caused by the alleged indivisible points. The impressions themselves are said to be indivisible. What Hume’s ontology of cause attempts to prevent, is our being able to ever ask the question: “what is it?” Hume forces us to compare allegedly different objects. This philosophy of science therefore harshly shuts down the ordinary mind’s access to truth of fact. It makes of every single object, all of them wholes-of-parts, a multitude of indivisible objects, that must rather be compared with one another, than known individually. Hume’s philosophy is an example of doctrine overpowering mind, rather than unfolding its powers.[39]
The Humean theory of causation, therefore, is a philosophically artificial form of causation. It does not provide an accurate portrait of what perception is; and consequently it does not provide an accurate account of inferential power. Correct Hume’s theory of impressions—an entirely philosophical and deductive construction—and the cause and effect bifurcation returns once more into the solitary examination into a cause. Men correctly infer that the snow is cold. Men correctly infer that the fire is hot. Cold and heat are properly denominated as partial causes of the respective objects.
We come back to the scholar’s claim that Hume is an empiricist, that he regards experience as the origin of human knowledge. Yet both Locke and Hume impose philosophical definitions upon experience. According to Hume, the “sense impressions” come from we know not where, that is, from “deep within us,” some secret place. “Impressions may be divided into two kinds, those of sensation and those of reflection,” Hume writes; “the first kind arises in the soul originally, from unknown causes.”[40] The impressions are not allowed to be the effects of anything knowable.
The simple impressions, as Hume defines them, subject to a most mysterious and miraculous birth, are limited each to a single sense organ. Hume goes so far as to call these impressions “objects.”[41] Yet no human being experiences an “object” that is merely a smell, or simply a color, or no more than a taste or a texture. Plato inquires in his Theaetetus, what is that consciousness in us, that is able to tell the differences between a taste and a smell, a sound versus an image? Certain it is that no sense organ comprehends this distinction.[42] The consciousness that is able to discriminate between taste, touch, sound, and image, is evidence of precisely that self which Hume would like to reduce to a mere “heap or collection of certain impressions.”[43]
Common facts are the only possible foundation for common deliberation. The natural human orientation towards cause is situated in knowledge of single objects, that is, in kinds or forms. The experimental method of reasoning seeks to delimit reason to the act of comparison. Experimental reason, even as it plays fast and loose with the very denomination “object,” claims that causation involves a relationship between objects. As if comparison could issue in knowledge. One must first know what an object is, before one can properly compare it to something else. Yet this does not render comparison the nature of real knowledge.
It is one of the great problems of Hume’s philosophy when it represents the role of reason to be essentially one of “comparing” objects. This mystery I take it is now resolved. It is the definition of what a body is that causes the confusion. Once we establish that the real bodies must be wholes-of-parts, and do away with the mistaken notion of indivisible body; the pressure upon the category of perception is relaxed, and it becomes possible for us to talk about the perceptions of the wholes-of-parts, and their kinds: which part of learning Locke originally sought to cast into the category of refugee mental activity, stateless and without authority, good only for common people and indicative of no truth. Hume needs a bit of humility, or rather philosophy does. There is much more in the ordinary opinion that our current philosophies give credit for.
“All kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but a comparison,” Hume writes, “and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other.”[44] However, one must know what an object is, before one can perform any such operation upon it mentally. One does not learn anything about what an object is, at least originally, by way of comparison.
Hume suggests that the sense impressions we experience come in some temporal order. It is admitted that the mind can only single out one aspect of an object for special attention at any given moment; yet there seems no reason to concede Hume’s proposition that perception itself takes place in such a serial manner. If it is an object it has a beginning and an end. It exists with extremities of time, shape, and dimensions (or, if you like, extension), size, color, texture. The object will have both essential and accidental qualities. It may usually be dry, but presently wet due to a rain storm. Yet it will not have what the moderns call primary and secondary qualities. The heat is in the fire, not just in us.
Hume’s second theory of causation rests upon the shoulders of the first theory of cause. Hume never allows that we can know for certain, in any single case, that any two husks of sensation are actually fused together in one finite object.[45] In the second theory of causation, we behold Hume the political philosopher. In order to treat the fragments of sense datums as if they were a unity, the mind must pretend that it is so. Merely in order to defend the claim that we look at one object through a succession of moments, Hume argues, the mind is forced to engage in the production of fictions.
When Hume undertakes to describe the meaning of “diversity,” it is steeped in the atomist ontology too. From the vantage point of atomism, indivisible objects, change cannot be a part of them. Change is unaccounted for. Thus the appearance of change in one object must be interpreted by like philosophies as involving a fiction of the mind, supposing one object to exist where only a succession of different objects can exist. When our ontology restores to philosophy the reality of change as a characteristic of all bodies, we can then resume with the concept of diversity that is consonant with ordinary perception: namely, diversity between the kinds of objects.[46]
Galen Strawson’s book is an attempt to alter the way scholars think of David Hume’s theory. According to most scholars, Hume’s theory of cause and effect has its principle anchor in the psychological imperatives of people, rather than in our knowledge of the world “out there.” For Strawson, “regularity” is Hume’s chief account of perception. Strawson does not enumerate the precise Humean sense of this: that the “red” or the “sweet” and the round “follow one another in the mind’s perceptions, as an “apple.” I do not think that the mind experiences these “objects” successively or separately. Hume does.[47] Strawson is quick to agree. Strawson wants us to allow that Hume permits his psychological theory of causation to extend beyond our minds, to knowledge of the external world. This is the entire argument of Strawson’s book: there must be some true ontological cause behind “regularity” in nature as Hume depicts it. Strawson wants to argue that Hume is at least open to this. The expanded concept of causation, to include actual knowledge of reality, that Strawson wants to associate Hume with, however, is at cross-purposes with Hume’s argument.
Hume’s metaphysic is against this expansive notion of causation. It must rebuke even Strawson in his attempt to open up an avenue between experience and a broader theory of causal knowledge, because “belief” for Hume supposes the frustration of precisely that dimension of comprehension that Strawson tries to liberate. “Belief” is not “inductive” or at all rational for Hume. It is assertive rather than comprehending.[48] The intelligence in nature allowed by Hume operates against human awareness. Human awareness only obscures the intelligence of nature. This philosophy must rebuke man in his pretensions to escape ignorance.
Louis Loeb wants to make the case that Hume does present a “constructive” theory of cause and effect judgment in Treatise I. That the “constructivist” theory of judgment recognizes stability of belief as evidence in favor of its being, of “justification.” There is also a theory “destructive” of belief in the Treatise, Loeb allows. Yet Loeb seeks to reconcile the conflicting views. Loeb’s theory is not so entirely different from Strawson’s.[49] Hume’s theory of judgment so hovers over modern science that his arguments continue to strike nerves.
Loeb comes up with a rich perspective on Hume’s theory of causation. According to Loeb, it is only “reflective” people, especially philosophically reflective people, who are at risk of having their beliefs falsified by Humean science. The “landowners and day laborers” are likely to have stable beliefs because they don’t think in a speculative way, Loeb reasons. In Loeb’s construction of Hume’s argument, only those who would traipse into metaphysical quibbles will get entangled in the perplexities of Hume’s argument. As Loeb would like to indicate, philosophers would do better to simply imitate the non-philosophic in terms of their beliefs about objects. In such a manner, Loeb suggests, philosophers too could avoid conflict with Hume’s puzzles.
This reasoning however is questionable. Ordinary beliefs are conceded by Hume’s science to be sufficient for men insofar as they have need of acting. Yet the moment when an issue of truth or judgment arises, then the ordinary beliefs of the day laborer or landowner are of absolutely no value whatsoever. For they are, in Hume’s analysis, convenient deceptions enacted by the mind of man, helped along by certain instincts implanted by nature. Hume expressly denies that we can know the cause of any external object. All that we can be sure of is the cause of certain ideas in our head; and this certainty consists only in approximation of a psychological necessity we have of acting as if we possessed real knowledge, without really possessing it.
Hume does not propose, from the vantage point of his science, to treat ordinary beliefs as to cause and effect as the effectual truth of nature. Far from it. Hume’s entire first book in the Treatise, and his Enquiries as well, are advanced pursuant to a design of argument. That design of argument means to indict the most universally cherished beliefs, such as in the liberty of the will, and in the reality of the nature of justice. For Hume both of these things are fictions. “Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colors, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.”[50] It makes a great deal of difference to a culture to harbor the belief that human actions are “fated.” It makes an enormous difference to the moral culture of a civilization to maintain that reason and passion are antagonistic to one another, in the manner that Hume argues. Hume’s attack on the veracity of ordinary belief in the physics of his Treatise is the very foundation for these later charges. Humes’ argument about physics and cause and effect reach into the domains of morals and culture and politics in the second and third books of the Treatise. Loeb’s suggestion that those who do not puzzle about metaphysical issues will somehow be exempt from any molestation by Hume’s arguments is a mere whistling in the graveyard.[51]
Loeb ultimately has very great differences with Hume. Loeb wants to amend Hume’s argument, so that the vulgar belief in the continued existence of external bodies can ascend into the ranks of the causally justified, and therefore be recognized as stable belief. Yet to concede that the vulgar belief in the continued existence of external body is rational would destroy the means to what Hume really takes belief to be: an urgency or “vivacity” so strong that it must shove aside all appeal to any kind of reason, in impatient self-assertion.
In Hume’s model of mind, the relation between perceptual faculties and external objects is undone. The mind is said to associate simple ideas, not necessarily reflecting what is external to us at all. It may be a mere fiction of the mind! This is the basis for Hume’s insisting that reason in man and reason in the lower animals is all of a piece. The brutes don’t recognize archetypes, and for Hume, neither does man. We can’t say for sure what an external object is, in Hume’s account of fact. All we know is that our minds associate certain simple ideas by habit or necessity or some unknown cause.
All this despite the fact that Hume’s account of perception bears no relationship, unless an alien one, to what people do consciously experience. All of a sudden the mind has authority to combine any “simple” ideas it likes. If we can “conceive” of it, Hume says, it is possible. “Whatever is clearly conceived can exist.”[52] Which reveals the quietly ambitious core of Hume’s model. Hume’s science can, and does, stipulate that any cause can produce any effect, “because no simple ideas are contrary.” That the modern philosophy wishes to rule people through their feelings is part and parcel of Hume’s project. Nothing can lead to this result more easily than a philosophy which pretends that there is no order in nature; that in accounts of fact, the mind is at liberty to suppose almost anything. Hume’s moratorium on seriousness in philosophy no longer seems so benign. Hume’s dictum that reason is antagonistic to sense experience as ordinarily known is the pivotal fact about his teaching.
Hume seeks to represent true philosophy as something that reveals the incoherence of human thought. Hume’s version of reason, accordingly, is usually portrayed as a skeptic doctrine, or else as a “naturalistic” one. By “naturalistic,” what the scholars usually wish to indicate is that Hume is an atomist, who believes that nature is a perfect unity, and that all of the objects in it can be reduced to the same, identical substance.[53] It really does not matter too much which one of these designations the reader chooses to embrace; for both the skeptic philosophy of Pyrrho and the atomism of what is called naturalism deny that the human perceptual organs can know for certain what the objects in the external world are.
Hume likes to advertise himself as a sceptic of a certain sort. Yet Hume does not belong to the Pyrrhonist skeptical school. Indeed, quite the contrary. For Pyrrho, skepticism provides a signal service to the human being: he is delivered from the burden of having to make judgments.[54] The Pyrrhonist philosopher, Sextus Empiricus tells us, believes that skepticism “is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a mental state of suspense, and next to a mental state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude.”[55]
Pyrrho found a certain bliss in this posture. “Ataraxia” is the technical term for the kind of happiness that belongs to the one who no longer has to worry about responsibility for making judgments. Pyrrho arrived at this skepticism, according to Diognes Laertius, by accident. Pyrrho one time found himself in a muddle, as regarded some particular issue. After careful and honest deliberation, Pyrrho discovered that he could not actually make any sort of judgment. This condition occurred to Pyrrho as akin to euphoria. He thereafter began a very different enterprise: seeking to collect sets of arguments which could serve the purpose of thwarting judgment, whenever any situation presented itself which called for one.
There is another aspect of Pyrrho’s model that is of interest to us. Pyrrho, in order not to run afoul of the moral laws of his time and place, indicated that the skeptic should acquiesce in the common beliefs.[56] In this manner, the skeptic could still preserve for himself the illusion that he was not making a judgment, by deferring his judgment to the community. None of these classically Pyrrhonist attitudes squares with those of Hume.
The first evidence for the above claim is the appendix to book I of Hume’s Treatise. There, we behold Hume tormented by his inability to know, at least allegedly. Hume claims that the arguments he has learned make it impossible for him to obtain the slightest reassurance that he knows anything, right down to the reality of his own identity. The only remedy for this misery, Hume argues, is amusement: playing at games, ceasing to think about philosophy, diversion.[57] For Pyrrho, the application of skeptic arguments itself is the tonic; whereas in Hume’s model, he at least advertises his mental condition as a conundrum, involuntary to some degree and not at all pleasant.
Secondly, Hume does not in any respect submit to the opinions of his peers. To be sure, Hume relies upon his sense perceptions when he goes about his daily business; and he makes a note to inform his readers that he leaves his philosophy behind him in his chambers when he goes out to attend to business. Yet as we will see when we examine book II of the Treatise, in Hume’s analysis of the passions, he does not acquiesce in any of the ordinary moral attitudes. He is far from being afraid to collide with the typical moral opinions of the community. To the contrary: Hume elects a confrontational approach, insisting that his own analyses of the passions are a knowledge as “necessary” as the doctrines of body that he sets forth in book I of the Treatise.
Richard H. Popkin believes that Hume is a sincere Pyrrhonist.[58] By this Popkin means that the Pyrrhonist in Hume recognizes the corrosive nature of philosophy on opinion. Reason, in evidently “all “ philosophers, or all competent philosophers, as Hume suggests, upsets the confidence of all opinions whatsoever, right down to matters of fact. Popkin characterizes the Humean personality, the Humean philosophical personality, as “schizophrenic.” This is because Pyrrhonist reason, for Hume, demolishes our every last pretension to know truth; whereas “naturalistic belief” is said to properly belong to the “sensitive” part of our natures. “Belief” is severed by Hume from reason and perception both. Mechanistic psychological and causal biological pressures, subconscious, push the mind into belief not based upon any rational evidence, but upon the needs of the organism.
The secondary literature on Hume evaluates ancient philosophy and the place of Pyrrho’s skepticism in it. Donald Livingston’s Philosophical Delirium applies a historical model of interpretation, to compare the ancient schools with the moderns. Hume wrote consecutive essays on Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Livingston seems to be building off of the caricature of the ancients that Hume himself offers in his essays.[59]
Plato, in Hume’s estimation, constitutes the contemplative life. Livingston follows Hume’s argument. In Livingston’s view, Plato’s model of philosophy is one of withdrawal. Livingston refers to this as the “heroic” moment of philosophy, which involves a “turning away” from the common life. Livingston is quite characteristic of the sweeping moral mood of the moderns in general. Virtues such as courage and truth strike Livingston as aloof and arrogant. Allegedly the common people do not have leisure or perhaps the luxury to engage in heroic exploits, or to worry about truth. Yet it is not the nature of courage to manufacture display, or to cut a dashing figure. It is the purpose of courage to oppose the forces of destruction, in philosophy as in other spheres of life. Plato certainly admires courage, as Socrates did before him; but it ought not to be confused with hubris. Livingston characterizes Plato and the Stoics as pretentious for being concerned with objects that are not at the center of common or daily life.[60]
Livingston really is a bit unfair when he characterizes Plato as aloof from the ordinary understanding. To be sure, the Platonic science of definition must and does part ways with the “sightlovers” of ordinary speech, at a certain point.[61] Yet Plato and the sightlovers of the Republic are at one in terms of recognizing beautiful objects. Plato does not claim that the objects the sightlovers regard as beautiful are not so; and Plato never claims to know of beauty in objects that the sightlovers are ignorant of. Plato’s science of definition aspires to perfect knowledge, to logos, as opposed to familiarity with images such as is characteristic of ordinary speech. Yet Plato’s science of definition must and does rely upon the ordinary familiarity with objects based on images as its original evidence.[62] When Plato’s Socrates insists that he “knows that he knows nothing,” it is a profession of humility. The point is to oblige philosophy to begin with the facts commonly known. The truth of the matter is that ordinary opinion greatly admires courage; and the last thing Plato is guilty of is turning away in a haughty manner from the concerns of ordinary life. In Plato’s greatest dialogues, including the Gorgias, the Theaetetus, the Republic and the Parmenides, Socrates takes the side of the ordinary understanding of right and wrong against Callicles, Protagoras, Thrasymachus, and Parmenides respectively. To be sure, these latter philosophical opponents cannot be construed as ordinary folk. Yet it is their refusal to begin with the ordinary understanding of facts that Plato converts into the foundation of his respective critiques.
Julia Annas seems to be closer to the mark: Hume is a dogmatist.[63] The true Pyrhonnian has no judgment: he is equipollent for opposed views. Hume argues that his sceptic philosophy proves that we can’t know of external objects. That is dogmatic. Hume insists that we cannot know the cause of our impressions. He insists that our impressions, perceptions really, are in actuality “simple”; whereas our experience insists that they are “complex.” Hume maintains that the mind constructs complex ideas. A true sceptic would not be capable of making any of these judgments. He would not be able to hold that our perceptions are certainly not directly of external bodies. Yet Hume holds this as proved by “the slightest philosophy.”
A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd edition. Analytical Index by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, I.ii.3, 32.
Ibid.
Donald Baxter deserves credit for pointing out that Hume engages in metaphysical thinking. However, this credit must be qualified. For Baxter accepts Hume’s definition of metaphysics as engaging in “abstruse reasoning” (1). Hume’s Difficulty: Time and Identity in the Treatise. London: Routledge, 2008. Metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense concerns investigation into being, into what does or does not exist. It is in the Aristotelian sense that Hume is a metaphysician. Baxter insists that “Hume doesn’t claim to know anything, or to have any reasonable beliefs” (4). Yet he does. Hume’s theory of the pseudo-mathematical points is a theory of body, of what the ultimate constituents of matter must be. Baxter ascribes the view to Hume, that only objects which are not divisible can be “single things” (27), and further, that only single things (non-divisible objects) really exist. What could such a “single thing” be, or consist in? In accordance with the Eleatic philosophy, which the divisibility theses derive from, the single things can only be nuggets of indivisible being. Speaking on Hume’s behalf, Baxter makes a like claim for the indivisible points. “Just as there can be no separate idea of existence, so there can be no separate idea of unity, singleness. . . . So it is not possible for some thing to exist that is not a single thing. So we cannot even conceive of something existing that is not a unity. . . . So the idea of existence and the idea of unity are inseparably joined. So they are the same idea, since distinct ideas are separable” (57). This is but exactly the issue that Plato raises in his analysis of Parmenides’s poem, but Plato disagrees with Baxter. Unity and existence can certainly be separated. After all, they are different. The fact that unity and being always accompany each other is no reason to ignore the difference between them. Especially since, once one recognizes their distinction, a whole additional train of forms follow deductively: whole and part, sameness and difference, et al. Neither can exist without the other; but the combination of unity and existence indicates the existence of a whole-of-parts, which involves two additional natures. The whole in turn has extremities of location and time. All of these forms, are we to say that they are the same thing? By Baxter’s logic, we would have to. Unity and existence are coequal natures, which any object must possess: but they are unlike natures. Unity is partless. It cannot contain “being” in its own nature. Nor can existence exist, unless it is part of some unity. A perfect unity cannot have the part of being. Thus a perfect unity cannot exist. Hence Hume’s assumption, as analyzed by Baxter, that only single (non-divisible) objects exist, is proved false. The minimal object therefore is a compound object. It is a whole-of-parts. The whole has the part of being, without being a perfect unity. The whole also has extremities, including the parts of time: past, present and future. Therefore true objects can and do undergo change, real change. This time cannot be reduced to coequal “moments,” as Baxter proposes; because the parts of time are different, different parts of a single whole. The moment of coming-into-being is not like the moment of passing away. The moment when being is acquired is not the same as the moment when being is lost. Baxter advertises Hume’s principle, that the reality, the indivisible reality, is in between “unity and number.” I’m afraid this is quite impossible. That which is other than unity proves, and constitutes, the very origin of number. Hume seeks to describe his “points” as “mathematical,” which is to say that he wishes to characterize body as at least quasi-mathematical. Yet Hume knows that mathematical points cannot constitute extension. Hume is therefore driven to insist that the alleged non-physical points have physical properties: color and solidity. Color and solidity are parts of bodies, of the wholes-of-parts enumerated above. Color and solidity are extremities of body: of unities that possess being, wholes that contain parts, of wholes that have shapes and dimensions, that exist, not in “space,” but in a place. Alas, there is no “intermediate” between unity and plurality. One is not many, not really. Oneness itself is not many, as Plato would say; nor can it be. Q.E.D. unity by itself is not being. Maria Frasca-Spada believes that Hume’s perceptual points do not, and cannot involve the physical at all. “The references to a secondary quality in order to define the perceptual points has a crucial consequence: extension is a factor that is not necessary to define Hume’s perceptual points—color is enough. In fact, the idea of an isolated point not only does not involve, but in fact positively excludes any idea of extension at all.” “Reality and the Coloured Points in Hume’s Treatise.” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 5(1997): 317. “Thus, colored and tangible, perceptual points are meant, in the Enquiry as well as in the Treatise, as a medium between extended, physical points and mathematical points, both of them absurd and impossible” (318). What is absurd and impossible is points with color and solidity which do not fall under the name “physical.” Colored, hard points are physical, as they are parts in a whole-of-parts, which the smallest body is and must be. Cf. Dale Jacquette. “Hume on Infinite Divisibility and Sensible Extensionless Indivisibles.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34(1996): 61–78. Jacquette is in agreement with the atomist logic, whereby the addition of extensionless points yields extension. Nothingness does not yield something. Something does not come from nothing. There are no indivisible “points” outside of the human imagination. Not everything imaginable is possible.
Treatise of Human Nature, I.ii.4, 40.
An Enquiry into Human Understanding. Section xii, part 2, footnote on 156.
Scholars speculate about the influence that Pierre Bayle may have had on Hume’s discussion of points in his Critical Dictionary where he discusses Zeno. Bayle speculates that according to Zeno, reality might be made up of mathematical points. This is not a good account of Zeno’s argument, which we have examined in some detail at earlier points in this study. Zeno was committed to Parmenides’s theory of “being” as the monistic reality. Historical and Critical Dictionary. Translated by Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991, 351, 386.
Lee, Zeno of Elea, 13.
I have consulted the following sources on the relationship between Zeno’s philosophy and the emergence of atomic doctrine. W. K. C. Guthrie. A History of Greek Philosophy, volume 2: The Presocratic Tradition From Parmenides to Democritus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965, 384. Daniel Graham, “Leucippus’s Atomism,” in Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham, editors. PreSocratic Philosophy: The Oxford Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 347. John Burnet. Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Meridian, 1930, 9. Stephen Makin. Indifference Arguments. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, 9. Richard Sorabji. Time, Creation and the Continuum. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1983, p.322. C. C. W. Taylor. The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus: A Text and Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1999, 165. Robert Wardy. “Eleatic Pluralism.” Archiv fur Geschichte der philosophie 70(1988): 126.
David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 3rd edition. Edited by Selby-Bigge. Revised text by Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, section xii, part 1, 151–52.
Pierre Bayle. Critical and Historical Dictionary. Translated by Richard Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991. “Zeno of Elea,” 372.
The influence or relevance of Bayle’s thought is indicated by Hume himself in a letter. See Peter Millican. “Context, Aim and Structure of the Enquiry,” 28. In Peter Millican, editor. Reading Hume on Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. There can be little doubt that Hume’s theory of quasi-mathematical points as the constituents of matter owes something to Bayle’s article on Zeno of Elea in his Critical and Historical Dictionary (Translated by Richard Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991, 372). Robert Fogelin believes that it is Bayle who “sets Hume his problem” (25). Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Norman Kemp Smith likewise believes that Hume’s theory of indivisible points is a direct response to Bayle. The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines. London: MacMillan, 1964, 286. At this point, a couple of remarks must be made. The theory ascribed to Zeno in Bayle’s dictionary is inaccurate. Zeno is alleged, by Bayle, to have entertained the belief that there is no body whatsoever. Zeno in fact held Parmenides’s thesis that there is one “being,” which constitutes all things. Hume knows better than Bayle the design and purpose of Zeno’s infinite divisibility theses. The infinite divisibility theses are designed to prove the reality of indivisible body, which is in fact Hume’s position. This issue will be discussed more at length below.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I.iii.5, 84. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edition, with revised text by Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
A Treatise of Human Nature II.iii.1, 400.
A Treatise of Human Nature, 403.
“The Rise of the Arts and Sciences,” 113. In Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Edited by Eugene Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985.
Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.6, 251.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 191.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding section xii, part 1, 151.
Kemp Smith is persuaded that philosophical consciousness is fused to the conviction that our perceptions do not reflect accurately, or perhaps at all, the real objects. “The vulgar regard their perceptions as the real things, and therefore as continuing to exist while unperceived, and as remaining identically the same even when they have undergone change. Now since we have only to close our eyes to annihilate our perceptions, and since the perceptions which appear on reopening them are for us new perceptions, separated from the old by an interval of time, there can be no proof that they are the same and have existed throughout the interval” (476–77). The Philosophy of David Hume. London: MacMillan, 1964. The vulgar have the experience that the objects are not annihilated when they close their eyes. Sophisticated people too have that experience.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.1, 183.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 208.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.i.1, 2.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.i.7, 16.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.1, 183.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 207.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.6, 259, 261.
According to Kemp Smith, Hume wants to argue that feeling is the quintessential attribute of human mentality, and that reason is helpless against this force. Kemp Smith is certainly right in the sense that this is the situation that Hume seeks to induce with his philosophy. Yet it is not correct to suggest that Hume simply believes that human beings already are so guided. The basis for Hume’s disagreement with ordinary opinion, as Smith knows, is that the latter take their perceptions to directly indicate external objects. Hume’s philosophy, directly or indirectly, aims to challenge that conviction; and in so doing, to raise the emotional temperature of public opinion. Smith states that “if this be a correct reading of Hume’s purposes, the conclusion to which we are brought is that what is central in his teaching is not Locke’s or Berkeley’s ideal theory and the negative consequences, important as these are for Hume, which follow from it, but the doctrine that the determining influence in human, as in other forms of animal life, is feeling, not reason or understanding” (11). The Philosophy of David Hume. London: MacMillan, 1964. Smith believes that Hume wrote book II of the Treatise first, because the “self” in book II is thick and strong, while the self in book I is feeble at best. Smith is leaving out the design of book I as the inducement of feeling, through the unexpected and unwelcome philosophical resistance to ordinary opinion. In other words, philosophy needs to be recognized as a force, even a political force, in its capacity to induce feeling. When philosophy denies that the obvious perceptions of the people are real and true, the people is thrust into a bind: for they trust philosophers, as they trust all experts and highly educated individuals. When expert authority collides with perceptual evidence, it is colliding with people’s sole source of direct information about the world. The result must be fear.
Hume more than once references the “secret nature” of bodies, as well as “secret springs and principles” of the human mind. Enquiry into the Human Understanding, section iv, part 2, 38. Cf. A Treatise of Human Nature I.ii.5, 55, 64.
Garrett thinks that Hume’s reliance on the atomistic theory is evidence of reduced or removed a priori principles in his philosophy. “For by restricting the scope of demonstrative, or a priori reason, he is left free to investigate the role of other processes of human psychology in the originations and maintenance of assent” (75). Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Garrett prefers to view Hume’s discussion of infinite divisibility as mathematical in nature, rather than as dedicated to an investigation into matter. When Hume argues for his “points,” his argument is that they are indivisible. I am not aware that anything is indivisible from the vantage point of mathematics, except by the express will of the mathematician. If the mathematician stipulates that a point is an indivisible object, that it cannot be divided, this is not a mathematics that I have been acquainted with. What would be the point of arguing that any object, or quantity, is indivisible to mathematics? Mathematically speaking, everything is infinitely divisible; and in fact, every body contains infinite parts. Plato proves this in his Parmenides, hypothesis 2 of the second part. The smallest object in the universe is a compound: it must have both the part of being, and the part of unity. Together, these two parts constitute a whole. Once we have conceded the reality of the whole, we can look at the individual parts of this whole. As parts, each part will have its complement. If we begin with the part of unity, it will have the part of being. This part, then, can be examined in its parts. Each “part of the part” must have its complement of unity or being. And so on ad infinitum. It is ultimately the atomic argument in Hume which indicts the veracity of perception. Surely this is not a power within the purview of mathematics. Cf. Thomas Holden. The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, for a thorough presentation of the infinite divisibility thesis in the context of physics. Cf. Holden, “Infinite Divisibility and Actual Parts in Hume’s Treatise.” Hume Studies 28(2002): 3–25.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I.iv.2, 189. “If our senses, therefore, suggest any idea of distinct existences, they must convey the impressions as those very existences, by a kind of fallacy and illusion.”
A Treatise of Human Nature, II.ii.1, 27.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I.ii.3, 34.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 191.
An Enquiry into Human Understanding, section v, part 2, 55.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section v, part 2, 55.
Metaphysics 980a22. “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses, for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves.”
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 207.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.5, 247.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iii.14, p.170.
Treatise of Human Nature I.i.2., 7.
Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 193, 200.
Theaetetus 185ae.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2, 207.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iii.2, 73.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iii.14, 167–69.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.3, 220.
Strawson is doubtless correct to argue that Hume believes that there is such a thing as causation in nature. This is evident in the second book of the Treatise, where Hume argues that we can predict the onset of diverse passions from inalterable causes, and regard them all as “necessary,” as the effluvia of “absolute fate.” Hume certainly is not skeptical about the power of experimental science to discover the exploitable connections in nature. What Hume is determined to argue is that we create “knowledge”: that we learn how to exploit things without ever conceding that we can understand them. Morality across the board is the subject of Humean philosophy. Perception itself is reduced to a mechanism of self-interest, miraculous “instinct” which there is no risk of our ever thwarting. Galen is right to insist that “once this deep subjectivist motivation for Hume’s famous claim that necessary connection lies “only in the mind” has been discerned . . . that the claim is most seriously misinterpreted when it is understood to be an ontological claim that there is definitely nothing in the objects of the sort we (today) would think of as causal power” (159). The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism and David Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Strawson takes Hume’s purpose to be one of imposing a deflationary humility on the human race and its pretensions to know. Locke represents his model of mind in that manner, as a protection for human beings from embarking upon useless mental adventures. Yet the theory is not modest. Atomism is based on deductive metaphysics: it is a theory of causation. Hume does not call attention to this metaphysical theory of cause which is built into his “points,” but it is assuredly there.
Ibid., I.iv,2, 215: Reason and nature are “these two enemies,” in Hume’s lexicon. “Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attacked by reason. . . . Tis impossible on any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavor to justify them in that manner” (218).
Loeb offers an innovative approach to interpreting David Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s aim, Lobe believes, is to nudge human beings away from dangerous mental adventurism. What is this dangerous mental adventurism that Loeb thinks Hume wants to protect the human race from engaging in? Reflection. A more commonplace mental activity could not be designated. The plain person, after reflecting on a long day’s work, thinks on the happiness of her family, of the future or her career, of the amount of time left to her to live and what to do with this precious time. When Loeb extrapolates on the mental life of the plain human being, he believes that he is beholding someone who is bereft of reflection. Like a dazed mule in harness, this is how Loeb views the majority of the human race; and this thoughtless state is what Loeb believes Hume valorizes as the ideal mental state for all. This may well be an accurate analysis as to Hume’s aspiration. It is not therefore an accurate account of the nature of human mentality in general. Loeb believes that it is only those pesky individuals who insist on having mental life that Hume’s theory will discomfit in any way. This I think greatly underestimates the average human mentality. “Hume’s conclusion is that if tranquility is to be secured, it will have to be within a system of beliefs” (9). “I maintain that skepticism about reflection is in order because intense reflection fails the stability test” (28). “If Hume inclines to the more demanding theory, his position is that no belief is justified, for either the reflective or the unreflective person. It is unclear, however, that Hume has any epistemic objection to the stable beliefs of the unreflective person” (92). “The belief system of the unreflective person is not infected by the instabilities endemic to the beliefs of someone who is more reflective” (92). Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. “For Hume, if knowledge is possible, it is possible for the common person and not just as a consolation prize.” “Inductive Inference in Hume’s Philosophy,” 106. In Elizabeth Radcliffe, editor. A Companion to Hume. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Loeb’s point of view has some problems. First, nobody engages in severer reflections than David Hume himself. Not only does he engage in reflection, but his theory is anchored in it. Hume, when he insists that the true body is indivisible, indicts the authority of perception to know the true objects in nature. This belief in perception, however, underlies virtually all of ordinary “belief.” It is Loeb’s position that Hume wants to leave ordinary opinion unmolested in its alleged stability. Customary society carefully regulates the passions. In customary belief, fierce passion is mostly threatening. Yet the public opinion that Hume seeks to stir up in book II of his Treatise is quite dismissive of the ordinary beliefs. In customary society, the accumulated memory-knowledge of generations masters passions. In Hume’s model of society, reason, and custom too, are to be as passion’s slaves. Stability is not the good that Hume starts out to preserve and protect from disruptive philosophy. In Loeb’s view, Hume has no theory of body: “Hume wants to secure the result that there is no satisfactory formulation of the belief in body” (216). Stability and Justification. Yet Hume’s entire Treatise, and his Enquiry as well, are anchored on the doctrine of indivisible physical points. That’s atomism. There never was an atomist who could regard ordinary opinion or belief, left to itself, as a tolerable state of affairs.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 469.
A Treatise of Human Nature III.i.1, 468.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.5, 233.
There has long been a debate in the secondary literature as to whether Hume should be seen as a naturalist or a skeptic philosopher. Hume is certainly not a Pyrrhonist skeptic, no matter how skillfully he brandishes some of the weapons of that philosophical sect. Pyrrho was not an atomist. Hume, who insists on the reality of indivisible body, violates the first Pyrrhonian principle, which is to avoid rational judgments. The Pyrrhonist is allowed, by his own creed, to go along with the majority in situations on which his survival depends. In such circumstances he claims that he is necessarily living by appearances. Yet Hume cannot pretend that in his atomism, he is relying on experience for guidance. Moreover, Hume is not simply an atomist. He is an Epicurean atomist, with political and economic ambitions for this theory. Robert Fogelin, in Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), maintains that “Hume holds that virtually all the plain man’s perceptual judgments are false” (146). This is in line with atomist philosophy. There can be no mistake. Hume’s doctrine of “impressions,” as Locke’s doctrine of “simple ideas,” follow the atomist teaching. The easiest way to prove this is to compare these models with those of Epicurus and Lucretius, as both models are fully available to us. Those who argue, in the tradition of Norman Kemp Smith (The Philosophy of David Hume. London: MacMillan, 1964), that Hume is a naturalist suggest that Hume wants to view man as part of nature, but this tells us little. What the naturalistic thesis wants to argue, first, is that nature is a unity, and that man therefore must be thought to be governed by the same laws as ostriches and salamanders. The naturalist camp, including Paul Russell, (Freedom and Moral Sentiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) concedes that Hume argues that “we cannot infer the existence of a material world on the basis of our perceptions” (30). Once again, however, the role that Hume plays in the new version of Epicurean physics is ignored. Russell makes a great deal of the proposition that human beings must rely on their feelings as opposed to their reason, when making judgments about the world (66). To this claim, two points need to be established. First, Hume’s atomism is based in reason; and secondly, that it is through the deployment of atomistic postulates via scientific authority that this feeling in the others—a feeling which is anything but natural—is to be elicited. Barry Stroud discusses how the emergence of this feeling depends on one’s being afflicted by atomistic teaching about the senses. “For Hume it is essential to one’s understanding of human nature, and to one’s life—and therefore philosophically important—to recognize the force of natural instinct over the deliverance of reason. It is important to see what actually happens to someone who is rightly convinced of Hume’s negative conclusions and is thereby thrown into the plight he describes” (276). “For Hume we must see and appreciate both the doubts and negative conclusions and the so-called “solution” if we are to discover the important truth about human nature. We must first find the negative “philosophical” or “skeptical” view completely convincing—indeed unanswerable—in order to perceive and acknowledge the sheer force of custom, habit, or instinct which can submerge it with hardly a trace” (278). “Hume’s Scepticism: Natural Instincts and Philosophical Reflection.” Philosophical Topics 19(1991): 271–91.
Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. English translation by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, ix.76, 78, 489–91.
Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. English translation by R. G. Bury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, I.10, 9.
Ibid., 519.
A Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.7, 264.
Popkin subscribes to the view that Hume is a Pyrrhonist. However, In Hume’s view, Pyrrhonism is quite compatible with the making of judgments. The Pyrrhonist, per Popkin, reasons that there are no rationally defensible grounds for any judgment; but he accepts that circumstances force him to judge, force him to hold opinions, in order that he may live. “A close examination of David Hume’s views will show that he agreed with the Pyrrhonian theory of the inability to find any rational and certain basis for our judgments” (57). “Hume then offers a psychological theory explaining why these arguments bring about such a diminution of our faith in our reasonings. . . . Thus what preserves our faith in our reasonings is not rational evidence, but only some psychological quirks of our constitution” (64). “David Hume: His Pyrrhonism and his Critique of Pyrrhonism.” In V. C. Chappell, editor. Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1968. Popkin misunderstands Pyrrho. Pyrrho is no honestly befuddled investigator. He is a philosopher addicted to “ataraxia,” a mental bliss or elixir of the spirit felt by the individual (if he is Pyrrho) when judgment proves impossible in a given case. Pyrrho actively seeks to suspend judgment. It is his goal, not a hard fact that he must cope with. In that he finds his happiness. No place for judgment is directly made available by Pyrrho to his student, except that one should defer to the demos in case of conflict. Hume could not be more different from Pyrrho. Hume is a determinist. All body, as well as all mind, is said by Hume to be determined by an “absolute fate.” It is not possible to be more contrary to Pyrrho’s teaching, or to that of Sextus Empiricus. Hume condemns the demos for believing that their perceptions provide knowledge about the world. In order to this condemnation, Hume must believe that he knows better, not less, than the others. Hume’s theory of perception is the attribute of his atomism; Pyrrho, as is well known, regarded atomism as an indefensible dogmatism. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Edited by R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, I.213: “But it is also said that the Democritean philosophy has something in common with skepticism, since it seems to use the same material as we; for from the fact that honey appears sweet to some and bitter to others, Democritus, as they say, infers that it really is neither bitter nor sweet, and pronounces in consequence the formula ‘not more,’ which is a sceptic formula. The skeptics, however, and the school of Democritus employ the expression ‘not more’ in different ways; for while they use it to express the unreality of either alternative, we express by it our ignorance as to whether both or neither of the appearances is real. So that in this respect also we differ, and our differences become specially evident when Democritus says ‘in verity atoms and void.’”
According to Donald Livingston, the skeptics were originally a group of philosophers who set out to discover truth. Livingston believes that Pyrrhonism started out as idealism. Allegedly, these philosophers, committed to living a philosophic life, then discovered that their reasoning led them to an arrested mental state. The result of this, Livingston argues, was depression. By accident as it were, however, Livingston continues, these philosophers backed into the realization that there is a hidden beauty in the unreflective belief of the demos. Hence, in Livingston’s view, the doctrine of skepticism has a natural affinity for the demos; and that the shining virtue of this sect is humility. “The skeptics began as philosophers who were determined to live by the dictates of philosophic theory, no matter what those dictates were. . . . But they soon discovered that for every theory of reality supported with philosophical reasons, they could find a contrary theory equally well supported, and so they were forced to suspend judgment. . . . This led to depression. . . . While in the melancholy state of suspended philosophical judgment, they noticed for the first time the radiant world of unreflectively received common life” (8). Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The facts seem to call for a different interpretation. The original skeptic, Pyrrho, was a philosophical rebel against the demos: for in the demos, ordinary praise and blame necessitate judgments. Like Epicurus, who admired Pyrrho’s theory, Pyrrho sought to live beyond the reach of ordinary praise and blame. For Pyrrho, bliss is the suspension of judgment itself, for it deflects the pressure from the community which necessitates judgment, and the commitment of the self. Pyrrho is first and foremost a rebel, and the last thing he has admiration for is ordinary judgment. Now it is true that the sceptic will seek to live roughly in conformity with the customs of the community; but he will do so expressly excepting himself from making any judgments as to the reality, or appropriateness, or truth value of any customary activity. For to be so mentally engaged would cost the skeptic his quietude. “For our aim is to indicate what appears to us; while as to the expression by which we indicate this we are indifferent. This point, too, should be noticed—that we utter the expression “nowise more” not as positively affirming that it really is true and certain, but as stating in regard to it also what appears to us” (I.190–192). Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Translated by R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. “Non-assertion, then, is avoidance of assertion in the general sense in which it is said to include both affirmation and negation, so that non-assertion is a mental condition of ours because of which we refuse either to affirm or deny anything. Hence it is plain that we adopt non-assertion also not as though things are in reality of such a kind as wholly to induce non-assertion, but as indicating that we now, at the time of uttering it, are in this condition regarding the problems now before us. It must also be borne in mind that what, as we say, we neither posit nor deny, is some one of the dogmatic statements made about what is non-apparent; for we yield to those things which move us emotionally and drive us compulsorily to assent.”
Ibid. In Livingston’s point of view, skeptic philosophy—Pyrrhonism—represents and embodies a rejection of ancient philosophy’s penchant for reflection and meditation. “From the perspective of the true philosophy, the philosophical pride of the heroic moment of reflection now appears as a vice, as vanity and arrogance” (37). “Contrary to what the autonomy principle demands, philosophers do not and cannot philosophize independently of pre-reflective custom” (57). Oh that it were so. Livingston needs to inquire as to the Pyrrhonist’s view of perception. It is Plato who regards the unreflective perception as a kernel of knowledge that philosophy should take its bearings by (Theaetetus 191–192). Pyrrho denounces the evidence of ordinary perception, as does Hume.
Republic 475d.
Republic 509e–510a.
Julia Annas offers a penetrating view on the divergence between Hume’s alleged skepticism and the classically Pyrrhonist variety. “Hume and Ancient Skepticism.” Ancient Skepticism and the Skeptical Tradition 66(2000): 271–85.