DAVID HUME
(1711-1777)
CONTENTS
 Hume: An Overview
 His Life and Works
 His Major Ideas
 Hume's Writings
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Hume
was a Scottish empiricist--well known for his skepticism and sharpness
of thought. Being a freethinker, he was easily critical of
thinking which rested on no other basis than traditional argument.
He also was sharply critical of thinking which did not arise from the observation
of actual behavior (empiricism) but which was merely speculative
in nature (rationalism).
Yet at the same time he was
a quietly confident and serene individual who was deeply comfortable with
the world--and rather conservative in his social and political views.
Even his own skepticism was tempered by his understanding of the human
need for some kind of underpinning of custom or tradition in life.
His major philosophical thrust
was against the rationalists who were prone to build great intellectual
edifices on the foundations of some "self-evident" truths. He considered
such intellectualism as being highly dangerous--likely to lead to polemical
excesses (as the highly intellectually charged revolutions of France in
1789 and Russia in 1917 were certainly to prove in the years after Hume).
To Hume, custom--which was the sum of actual human experience--was the
only healthy foundation on which to build human life.
Being an empiricist, he was
impressed with the patterns by which people actually lived out their lives.
Hume felt that we should pay close attention to the human record of our
actual or "natural" (as he put it) behavior in order to draw conclusions
about life. Hume on the other hand was most unimpressed by the great
intellectual "spins" that philosophers wove around hypothetical behavior
in building their great systems of thought. For Hume reality was
in the doing, not in the hypothesizing about life.
Thus we remember Hume for
his skepticism about our views on God, our great systems of religious truth,
the validity of "objective" ethical systems, even the claims of science
to have established an explanation of all life in terms of cause and effect.
All this was to Hume mere intellectual humbuggery.
Hume's impact lived long
after him. In fact it was Hume that awoke Kant from his "intellectual
slumber" (as Kant himself put it) and caused Kant to undertake the task
of responding to the challenge that Hume had issued to those who would
claim to understand human nature, even life itself.
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Hume's Early Life
Hume was born in Edinburgh,
Scotland, into comfortable circumstances. However his father Joseph
died when he was two and he was raised in his mother Catherine's family--a
family of lawyers (her father was president of the Scottish court of Sessions),
but ones also devoutly Calvinist (an uncle was a Presbyterian pastor).
His very intelligent and independent-minded mother carefully cultivated
these same traits in her sons, of whom David was the younger.
At age 12 he entered Edinburgh
University, staying until he was 14 or 15 (not an unusual procedure for
those times) and then returned home to continue his studies there.
His family urged him to follow the family tradition (his father's as well
as his mother's) of the law. But further formal study revealed that
his love was basically for broader philosophical matters--and he turned
wholeheartedly to this pursuit. But his intensity was so great that
in 1729 he suffered a nervous breakdown which took him several years to
come back from.
His Early Philosophical Works
(1734-1742)
But his love of philosophy was
not to be denied. For a while he worked as a clerk in Bristol.
Then in 1734 he traveled to France where for the next several years he
simply studied and composed notes on philosophy. In 1739 he returned
to England where he then turned his studies into a major philosophical
work, A Treatise of Human Nature. This came out in three sections
in 1739 and 1740. To his great disappointment there was little notice
of his work. As he put it, his work "fell dead-born from the press."
Nonetheless he pressed on.
His next writing effort, Essays, Moral and Political (two volumes
in 1741 and 1742) met with a small amount of success--in part because his
language and style were aimed at a more popular level. On the basis
of the acceptance of this work, in 1744 he candidated for the chair of
moral philosophy at Edinburgh. But he was rejected by the Calvinist
authorities with accusations of heresy--if not outright atheism because
of the contents of his Treatise.
The Wandering Years (1744-1752)
From this point forward for
the next seven to eight years years he wandered from job to job as tutor,
secretary, minor diplomat. Nonetheless during this time he continued
with his studies, producing in 1748, Three Essays, Moral and Political
and Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding. Philosophical
Essays was essentially a popular rewriting of book one of the Treatise
(he had learned the lesson with his Essays of the importance of
lowering the language level to make his ideas more widely accessible) and
focused on the issue of human understanding. Because of a title change
Hume himself made in a later edition of this work, Philosophical Essays
came to be known as the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. This
publication also included his essay "Of Miracles," and drew upon himself
widespread wrath. Three years later (1751) Hume published
Enquiry
Concerning Principles of Morals--which was a rewrite of book three
of the original Treatise.
Hume the Historian (1752-1762)
In 1752, after having again
been rejected for a professorial position (at Glasgow) because of his reputation
for atheism, he was appointed librarian of the law library in Edinburgh.
Here among all these volumes he was to take up a new love--history--and
began to put together a History of England. This came out
in 6 volumes between 1754 and 1762--and were very well received because
of its elegant style, its unprecedented objectivity and its coverage of
the broader socio-economic aspects of English life over the centuries.
Indeed, so well was it received that in 1760 a French and in 1762 a German
translation of the History was written. (Indeed, his History
was to undergo 50 editions over the next century and be considered the
standard for history writing during that period).
Recognition
as a Major Philosopher
He not surprisingly continued
during this same time with his first love--philosophy. In 1752 he
published Political Discourses--which within two years was given
two French translations, so well was it received there. He also turned
to the task of rewriting book two of the Treatise, which came out
in 1757 as Four Dissertations. This latter work included also
a study of the "natural history" of religion--a major contributor to the
decision of the Vatican in 1761 to place all his works on the Index
of banned books!
Diplomatic Life in Paris (1763-1766)
In 1763 he journeyed to Paris
with the Earl of Hertford to become secretary to the British embassy there.
His fame now was well established in intellectual circles and he found
easy entry into Paris society. Though Hume had no sophisticated polish
to recommend himself, he was of such a gentle and joyous nature that he
charmed Paris.
The Rousseau Episode (1766)
In 1766 he returned to England,
bringing with him Jean-Jacques Rousseau--to help him establish a new life
after his political banishment from his home in Berne Switzerland.
But Rousseau was in a darkened mood at this point and soon began to suspect
some kind of conspiracy by Hume against him. Stealing back to France,
Rousseau there denounced Hume publicly for treachery. To clear the
record, Hume was constrained to publish (with commentaries) their mutual
correspondence: A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between
Mr. Hume and M. Rousseau.
His Last Years (1769-1776)
In 1769--tired of life in the
faster lane in England--Hume returned again to Edinburgh and to the company
of numerous friends. At this point his major work was issuing subsequent
editions of his History of England and several editions of a collection
of some his earlier writings entitled
Essays and Treatises.
Very shortly before his death
in August of 1776, he finished an autobiography--quite detached in its
handling of his own life--entitled The Life of David Hume, written by
Himself. This finally reached publication the following year--thanks
in part to his good friend, Adam Smith.
It was not until after his
death that a work that he had held back since the mid 1750s was finally
published (in 1779), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, because
of the furor it was expected to stir up. Three years later in 1782,
two other long-delayed essays were published: one on suicide and
one on immortality. The reaction was appreciably hostile.
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On Human Understanding
The foundation of all of Hume's
philosophical works is unquestionably his theory on how it is that we come
to understand things. In his original
Treatise on Human Nature
(1739-1740),
the first book was devoted to this very question. Indeed, his popular
rewrite of that work,
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (originally
Philosophical
Essays--1748), is what unquestionably established him as an outstanding
philosopher.
Impressions and Ideas
As with Locke and Berkeley before
him, Hume thought that our awareness or perception of reality was a result
of external objects acting upon our senses. For Hume the most basic,
the most direct and the strongest of such perceptions comes in the form
of impressions upon our minds. These are such things as "hot,"
"wet," "red"--but also such things as "pleasant" or "hostile," These
impressions excite our emotions in the most basic sort of way.
For Hume there is also a
secondary order of perceptions: ideas. To Hume's thinking,
ideas are caused by impressions or assembled from impressions in the mind.
Ideas are reflections of impressions--ones that linger on after the event,
more considered, less emotional, even less sharp or distinct than the original
impressions that gave rise to the ideas. More abstract ideas indeed
may be--but they are still derived from the realm of perception.
Even Ideas Are Rooted in the
Realm of Actual Perception
For Hume, there was no such
thing as an a priori idea, born entirely within the inner recesses
of human logic or the human soul--as the rationalists proposed. True,
for Hume there was no question that ideas could become fanciful--and thus
at a bit of a remove from the realm of direct perception. But still
for Hume even fanciful ideas originated out of the world of actual perception.
For Instance: The "Reality"
of Angels
Take for instance the idea of
an angel: though Hume would claim that no one has ever seen an angel,
he indeed agreed that we can all conceive of one--not because angels have
some kind of transcendent existence, but because we have seen people and
we have seen wings and thus our minds can create a composite idea of a
person with wings. But our being able to conceive of such an angelic
being--even as a clear thought (as per the rationalists for whom a "clear
thought" was proof of its truthfulness)--did not establish in the estimation
of Hume the actuality of angels! For Hume, the complete empiricist
and skeptic, until we could actually produce an angel, one able to be perceived
by ordinary human facilities, common sense should tell us that belief in
angels was merely the product of our credulity, not of our wisdom.
On Religion
The implications for religion
were quite clear (and it's important to note that Hume, who disliked controversy,
tried to leave his thoughts on these subjects in the realm of "implications"--at
least until after his death when his thoughts then could be put forth much
more directly). To Hume, there was absolutely no solid reason for
a belief in supernatural beings or supernatural places--except for the
human desire to draw comfort from the possibility that such benefactors
and such rewards awaited troubled life. In that sense Hume was okay
with religion--recognizing its "utility" as a civilizing agent. But
such utility would never cause Hume to say that therefore religious beliefs
as such were true.
On Science's Law of Cause and
Effect
If it seems that he was being
a "heavy" in his skeptical handling of rationalist philosophy and of Christian
theology, he was no less a "heavy" in his assault on the metaphysics of
modern science. He basically agreed with Berkeley that all we know
of reality is what is in our thoughts. We have absolutely no way
to validate what is "out there," what it actually is that our senses behold.
All we can speak of with certainty is what we perceive, the impressions
and ideas that we hold.
Then he took this skeptical
thought even one step further. Indeed, we have no way of getting
into reality out there to say with any degree of absolute certainty that
the appearance of one thing or event causes the appearance of another thing
or event. We cannot say that because we can not get into those supposed
"causes" to demonstrate how it is that they cause other things to happen.
We can only say that there is some kind of probable relationship between
two related events, in the sense that one event is usually accompanied
by another event. This is not to say that the one, however, caused
the other.
The Post Hoc Fallacy
This is the classic argument
concerning the post hoc fallacy. Post hoc ergo propter hoc
("following this, therefore because of this) as a fallacy can be summed
up with the example of the medicine man who in the month of March dons
a green outfit and dances around a bit, pronouncing mysterious incantations,
and doing a little of this and a little of that--all very necessary acts
needed to bring the greening of the trees that his outfit represents.
And indeed, if we observe carefully, his enactment was quite necessary--for
within a couple of weeks the first sign of green comes on the trees and
then they break forth into the dazzling light green of spring--all because
the medicine man did his all-important dance.
Hmmm! Obviously some
of us are not convinced. Just because one event always follows the
other, that does not necessarily mean that one produced the other!
This was the crux of Hume's argument about science's law of cause and effect.
We cannot say that because two events typically follow each other in some
type of succession that one causes the other. We cannot get into
the actual structure of an event to prove that. As empirical observers
destined to see only the reflection of things and events we can only affirm
their coincidence--not their causal relationship. Thus Hume had to
remain skeptical in the face of science's proofs of this thing or
that. His skepticism was indeed comprehensive!
On the Realm of Belief
Of course we humans do have
to make certain assumptions about life. Hume did not feel that this
was bad. He just wanted to make sure that it was grounded in some
degree of empirical proof. Thus when we saw that the ground outside
our home was quite wet it would have been a safe belief of ours that it
had recently rained--even though we had not directly witnessed the event.
This was the realm of beliefs that Hume found reasonably acceptable--provided
that we understood them as beliefs and not established fact.
Needless to say, he was not
willing to go beyond what could be demonstrated empirically to give credence
to beliefs. And this was where he got himself constantly in trouble
with his culture. His skepticism was always an affront to the belief
system of his time.
His Theory of Morality
Here too Hume was the skeptic
in the face of "proofs" of the absolute value of this or that moral theory
or ethical precept. But being a social conservative his own skepticism
was at times highly troubling to him.
He really outlined the utilitarian
doctrine (which Bentham was soon thereafter to pick up) in his view that
what motivates people is the perception of well-being that some thing or
some event brings them. A person will seek after that which attracts
them and will naturally avoid that which repels them. Each person
will have his or her idea of what that constitutes--and thus such ethical
values are entirely subjective and not at all objective as the rationalists
and the theologians of his day asserted.
This did not mean that Hume
felt that everyone should "do his own thing." To the contrary, the
only demonstration that something was good or bad was not in how one person
might view the matter--but how, over the longer run of human experience,
over the broader field of human life, actual experience demonstrated that
this or that precept worked better to produce the perception of well-being
among the people. (Actually this was not a new view--but went back
as far as at least Epicurus in the late 4th century BC.)
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 Hume's
major works or writings:
A
Treatise on Human Nature (1739)
Essays, Moral and
Political (2 vols.: 1741-1742)
Of
Superstition and Enthusiasm (1741)
Of
the Liberty of the Press (1741)
Of
the Delicacy of Taste and Passion (1741)
An
Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Political Discourses
(1751)
History of England
(6 vols.: 1754-1762)
Four Dissertations
(1757)
Essays
On Suicide And The Immortality Of The Soul
The
Natural History of Religion
Of
Tragedy
Of
the Passions
Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (1777)
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 Miles
H. Hodges
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