The Treatise of Human Nature and Hume's Philosophy as a Whole

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SOURCE: “The Treatise of Human Nature and Hume's Philosophy as a Whole,” in A Humean Critique of David Hume's Theory of Knowledge, edited by John A. Gueguen, University Press of America, 1998, pp. 21-32.

[In this essay, White outlines the structure and purpose of the Treatise, claiming that the work contains the philosophical approach and positions that characterize Hume's entire oeuvre.]

Since Hume's initial inspiration finds its fullest expression in A Treatise of Human Nature, and most of his subsequent philosophical works are but a development or refinement of the program he set for himself at the start of the Treatise, a look at that work, especially at the Introduction, is indispensable. It can at the same time serve to locate Hume in his historical context.1

The Treatise is divided into three books: 1. Of the Understanding; 2. Of the Passions; 3. Of Morals. The work as a whole is sub-titled, “Being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.” In the Introduction, Hume explains why the theme of human nature is not only of importance for all branches of philosophy but literally of the first importance, the equivalent, one might say (though Hume himself did not say this), of Aristotle's Philosophia Prima. The existing state of philosophy is a parlous one: “there is nothing which is not the subject of debate” and while “the most trivial question escapes not our controversy, … in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision.”2 Furthermore, “amidst all this bustle, it is not reason which carries the prize, but eloquence.” As a consequence, a “common prejudice has arisen against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds,” and the term “metaphysics” has become a synonym for whatever is “abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended.” It is not surprising, therefore, that many people have succumbed to skepticism or just plain intellectual “indolence.”

The situation Hume describes is very similar to the one the young Descartes faced just over a century earlier when he had his famous dreams. Clearly the solution offered by Descartes and the other great philosophers of the seventeenth century to remedy the lamentable condition of philosophy had not been effective. Therefore, instead of questioning and rejecting the faulty premises which led to all the trouble, they are retained and a different solution is to be found, one which, on the surface at least, is compellingly simple and attractive.

It was enough to note that all the sciences, “even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN.” For they all “lie under the cognisance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.” Rather, therefore, than dilly-dallying on the peripheries of knowledge, as previous philosophers had done, “taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier,” we should “march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature itself.” For, once in command of the center, since “there is no question of importance, whose decision is not comprised in the science of man,” we may hope to erect “a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.”3

Hume asserts that there are four sciences which have a particularly “close and intimate” connection with human nature, namely “Logic, Morals, Criticism, and Politics.” These are the most valuable, for in them “is comprehended almost everything which it can anyway import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament of the human mind.” By “logic” Hume understands the explanation of “the principles and operations of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas,” while “morals and criticism regard our tastes and sentiments; and politics consider men as united in society, and dependent on each other.”

But if “the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences,” what is the foundation of the science of man? The answer: “experience and observation.” Hume does not seem to notice that he is now using the term “foundation” in a different sense. He had begun by speaking of one science—that of human nature—as the foundation of other sciences. Now he speaks of that basic science as founded not upon another science but upon a method, apparently taking it for granted that methodology is the ultimate determinant of every branch of knowledge. This indeed was the message that Descartes had bequeathed to posterity with his Discourse on Method and Regulations for the Guidance of the Mind. Hume accepted the message, but for the Cartesian mathematical deductive method he substituted the inductive method, based upon observation and experiment, which had been dominant in England almost since the days of Bacon and certainly since Locke and Newton. Hume saw the two methods as absolutely opposed to each other.4

HUME'S PHILOSOPHICAL PROGRAM

What did Hume understand by “experience and observation” and by “experimental reasoning”? Clearly he did not mean the kind of work a natural scientist does in the laboratory. Hume explicitly asserts that moral philosophy has the “disadvantage, which is not found in natural, that in collecting its experiments, it cannot make them purposely, with premeditation. …”5 What he meant was that in the science of man “we must … glean up our experiments … from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.” If “experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared,” we will have the basis of a science “not … inferior in certainty, and … much superior in utility, to any other of human comprehension.” In short, Hume seems to be anticipating in a general way the methodology of what today we call the social sciences.

It is surprising, however, that here he makes no reference to introspection, of which he will make extensive use almost throughout the Treatise. This is no doubt due to the fact that many distinctions we take for granted today were in the first half of the eighteenth century still in the future. Indeed it was not yet customary to distinguish between philosophy and science. Newton's work, for example, was considered to belong to natural philosophy, by contrast with the moral philosophy or moral science cultivated by Locke and Hume. Furthermore, as Etienne Gilson once commented with reference to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers before Kant, there is “something amateurish in even the greatest” of them.6

One should not therefore expect precise definitions, least of all from an empiricist philosopher such as Hume who, in his Introduction to the Treatise, explicitly declares that “the essence of mind” is as “unknown to us” as “that of external bodies.” Try as we may to “render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, it is still certain we cannot go beyond experience. …”7 Indeed, “any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected, as presumptuous and chimerical.” In Hume, therefore, definitions, as attempts of the mind to express essences, are naturally few and far between. He usually aims not at defining but at describing. This being the case, what Hume means by experience will not be found expressed in any definition or formula; experience means simply what the man in the street means when he uses the term.

Indeed Hume's whole philosophy can well be viewed as a defense of the usage of words in their common, everyday sense in opposition to the artificial, specialized usage resorted to by the rationalist philosophers. As Mossner, Hume's best modern biographer forcefully points out, Hume's ambition was “to overturn the rationalistic tradition that had dominated European thought ever since the distant age of Socrates,” and “this intellectual revolution … repeatedly prosecuted … throughout his life … constituted the prime motivation of his life.”8

Thus there was a positive side to Hume's philosophical program and a negative side, the two seldom in harmony, each struggling for the upper hand. The positive side consisted in the elaboration of a comprehensive science of man, taking off from those English philosophers such as “Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Mandeville, Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Butler, etc.”9 who had “begun to put the science of man on a new footing,” but had not advanced very far. Hume was convinced of the truth of those words of Malebranche:

The fairest, most agreeable, and most necessary of all forms of knowledge is without a doubt self-knowledge. Of all the human sciences, the science of man is the most worthy of man. Nevertheless, this science is not the one we have most cultivated and mastered; men generally neglect it entirely.10

Hume was well aware that the classical Greek and especially Roman philosophers had cultivated moral philosophy. But in his opinion “the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity labored under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical, and depending more upon invention than experience.”11

Consequently it was with modern philosophy that Hume was chiefly concerned, and in particular with its domination by the Cartesian rationalist tradition which seemed to him to reduce man to a kind of abstract reasoning machine and the philosopher to an ivory-tower critic quite remote from common life. Thus the negative side of Hume's program, although of course he never explicitly formulated it this way, consisted in the logical reduction to absurdity of many of the Cartesian and late Scholastic arguments. At the same time he sought to show that far from reason being man's highest and most characteristic distinguishing mark, man was more accurately characterized as a creature of custom, habit and passion, guided for the most part by the faculty of the imagination, with reason playing but a subordinate organizational or “methodizing” role. Hume wished to restore to man the sentimental and affective side of his life which continental rationalism seemed to have largely ignored due to the Cartesian splitting of man into two separate substances—an immaterial thinking thing or mind (equivalent to the self) on the one hand, and a material extended thing or body on the other.12 Hume constantly insisted that in every sphere of human life outside of mathematics man is much more a creature of feeling and belief than of cold, abstract reason: We “feel” and “believe” things to be true, and even the causal connection we make so much use of in our so-called “reasonings” is in fact a matter of belief rather than the result of an intuition or demonstration.

In opposing continental rationalism, however, Hume by no means escapes its influence. Quite the contrary. Not only does he accept certain basic principles straight from Descartes; he also finds himself pushed by Cartesian dualism to the opposite extreme. Thus, for instance, he frequently argues as if reason and experience were totally opposed sources of knowledge; that is, as if what we know or learn by experience had nothing to do with reason.

Hume is no more successful in his efforts to reconstruct the shattered unity of man than Descartes. The latter had converted man into an angel somehow linked to a mechanical body; the former reduces man to a highly developed animal. Neither philosopher could accept the classical definition of man as a “rational animal.”

Hume's anti-rationalist empiricist program included the reformation of formal logic.13 Obviously, classical syllogistic logic was not an appropriate instrument for a being whose highest faculty was the imagination. Hume did not, of course, put it this way. For him the problem was one of discovering the laws governing probabilistic reasoning. Descartes had been right to try to improve upon the old syllogistic logic of the Scholastics by laying down a few rules of method. But Hume saw no reason to accept Descartes' appeal to self-evident principles nowhere to be found in any of the empirical sciences, nor to accept Descartes' metaphor of philosophy being “like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches, which arise from this trunk, are all the other sciences.”14 Hume considered the theory of human nature to be the root and the moral sciences to be the trunk. Descartes' metaphysics seemed to him either nonsense when it referred to essences, occult qualities and similar notions, or a disguised psychology when it dealt with causality, substance and identity.

Hume saw that the moral sciences required a new logic since they deal not with certainties but with probabilities. Descartes had argued that there was no middle way between the “certainty” of science and absolute skepticism. Locke, however, had begun to work out a theory of judgment which he called a “twilight state” between ignorance and “clear and certain knowledge,”15 while Leibniz (to whom Hume refers specifically) had drawn attention to the dearth of systems of logic which “treat of probabilities, and those other measures of evidence on which life and action entirely depend, and which are our guides even in most of our philosophical speculations.”16 Clearly, if Hume could come up with a set of rules for deciding what is probable, he would be doing for the moral sciences what Newton had so successfully done for the natural sciences.

The farther Hume entered into this difficult task the more he felt the attacks of skepticism. This was inevitable. Not only was Hume before all else an opponent of every form of dogmatism, but his empiricist theory of knowledge, with its insistence that the causal connection between things or events is nothing more than a belief, could not but undermine formal logic. Hume viewed logic as resting on the science of human nature, with the implication that logical connections are nothing more than psychological connections.

DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS OF HUME

Relevant to the understanding of Hume is the question—about which scholars are divided—of what precisely was the starting point of Hume's philosophy. Despite the order in which the three books of the Treatise appear, there are grounds for believing that “Of the Understanding” was actually conceived last, not first. Kemp Smith, the main proponent of this interpretation, argues that Hume's primordial interest was always ethics, an interest brought to fever pitch by Hutcheson's contention that ethical judgments “are based not on rational insights or on evidence, but solely on feeling.”17 The “new Scene of Thought which transported me [Hume] beyond measure” was thus, according to Kemp Smith, the realization by Hume that Hutcheson's assertion “could be carried over into the theoretical domain,” that is, into the theory of knowledge. And this would have the great advantage, if shown to be the case, of strengthening Hutcheson's theory and therefore weakening the opposing classical theory according to which ethical decisions depend on reason and will. Seen in this light, the opening sections of the Treatise are of a merely introductory nature predetermined by purposes Hume does not disclose to the reader until later. That is, Hume's theory of knowledge is intended less for its own sake than as a propaedeutic to his ethical theory, according to which “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey.”18

Another important but very different interpretation of the Treatise, which coincides with the above insofar as it also views the first sections, indeed the first three parts of Book I, as merely introductory, is that of C. V. Salmon and the phenomenologists.19 In either case, however, Hume's theory of knowledge is seen not only as standing on its own feet but as absolutely primary and central. According to this view, “Hume's Treatise is the first draft of a pure phenomenology.”20 Thus the problem which forms the core of Hume's inquiries, to which all that precedes it stands as a preparation, is that of explaining “the principium individuationis, or principle of identity.”21 For “Hume's science of Man was conceived as the investigation of the principles of human consciousness.”22 In saying that the science of Man “has been hitherto the most neglected,” Hume meant that before him no philosopher had taken seriously what that science involved, namely the investigation of “the subject” as “the only ‘object’ of philosophy,” since “within himself lies the philosopher's world, albeit large enough to hold the universe, and universum of knowledge.”23

Hume's ambition, as stated in the conclusion of Book I of the Treatise, is to contribute to “the instruction of mankind,” especially of “the learned world, which lies under such a deplorable ignorance … ; this is the origin of my philosophy.”24 Hume seems to want to play the role of a modern Socrates, a man (or gadfly) with the vocation to make men aware of their ignorance as a first step towards humility and possibly even wisdom. But whereas Socrates believed that with the help of dialectic and of definitions, truth as opposed to opinion could really be attained, Hume was not so sure: “For the essential feature of Hume's philosophy is its subjective attitude, the notion that the ultimate explanation of truth and all ontologies awaits the practice of introspection,” an introspection which “has to reveal the ultimate processes of consciousness itself.”25

According to this interpretation, therefore, more important than Hume's well-known discussions of reason and of causality is his effort to establish and follow through with the principle that “the origin of all the individual's knowledge is within himself.”

A recent interpretation of Hume's work as a whole, one which takes note of the phenomenological interpretation, is by Donald W. Livingston.26 It is valuable because it brings out the significance of Hume's mainly dialectical approach to philosophy and because it shows that Hume need not be taken for a phenomenologist, as he so often is, but rather should be seen as espousing a theory of knowledge tantamount to a “purged” version of the viewpoint of the common man.

Hume's frequent use of dialectic is often manifested by his resort to dialogue form, for instance in Section XI of the First Enquiry; this is significant in that his own view of philosophy—his theory of knowledge in particular—reveals itself only gradually as a result of first working critically through a number of inadequate theories.27 In saying that we can never “go beyond experience,” Hume means, among other things, that we can have no knowledge in advance of experience; we must pass through many experiences in order to arrive at any set of principles. In this process of ever greater self-consciousness, the initial experience only takes on meaning in the light of later ones. Thus the opening part of the Treatise cannot be properly understood except in light of Part IV.

This dialectical approach seems to some extent to anticipate Hegel and historicism; it is employed particularly in Hume's effort to characterize the nature of human understanding. Thus in Part IV, Sections 2-4, Hume works through three logically successive theories of experience, taking the problem of external perception (how do we know there is an external world?) as the paradigmatic epistemological problem. These are, first, the unreflective vulgar theory, which simply identifies perceptions with their objects (one's perception of a tree and the tree itself are the same thing; i.e. the world is what we immediately experience); second, the phenomenalist theory, which criticizes the vulgar one for failing to note that what we immediately experience is only in the mind; and third, the theory of double existence, according to which what we immediately experience is indeed in the mind but “represents a world specifically different from our experience.”

Hume criticizes all three theories, which he thinks exhaust all the possibilities, on the grounds that the first is simply uncritical and the other two inevitably lead to absurdity and thus to skepticism. Nonetheless it is necessary for the philosopher to work through these various positions and through the purgation of Pyrrhonian skepticism in order to arrive at “true philosophy”—a new and so-to-speak transcendental perspective arising from an awareness of the limits of the previous theories and of the fact that the vulgar or common man's theory of knowledge is actually built into our consciousness, structuring our entire cognitive outlook. Thus, what Livingston calls “the autonomy principle” (the typical rationalist claim that the philosopher can somehow criticize from outside the customs and prejudices and beliefs of common life, even throwing into doubt the whole order) is shown to be false since it necessarily presupposes the existence of the very order it claims to be in a position to criticize. By contrast, “true philosophy” presupposes “the authority of common life as a whole” and is satisfied with its modest role of “methodizing” and “correcting” the customs and beliefs of common life, since “it is only through these customs and beliefs that we can think about the real” at all.

Thus Hume is skeptical only in the sense that he believes that the philosopher can never succeed in understanding ultimate reality; that is, the order of reality as a whole. At this ultimate level the philosopher is indeed “alienated.” But this is not, Livingston emphasizes, a positivist position; positivists consider metaphysical questions to be meaningless, whereas Hume considers them unanswerable: “The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavors to elude or avoid it” (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P.H. Nidditch, 3rd ed., Oxford, 1975 [hereafter EHU], p. 31).

But if “these ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry” (EHU, p. 30), and therefore at this ultimate level skepticism must be accepted as necessarily built into true philosophy, our inquiries are not worthless. They have a cathartic value and at least teach humility and modesty by reminding the philosopher that in the last resort he too is just one of the crowd. To some extent Hume in this context reminds one of Nicholas of Cusa with his doctrine of “learned ignorance,” if not also, on the purely natural level, of St. Paul's condemnation of the vanity of mere human learning.

Hume's “mitigated skepticism,” which is the theory of knowledge he comes to defend in the concluding section of the First Enquiry, may be helpfully contrasted with the attitude of Descartes to knowledge, and also with that of the Scottish common-sense school. Hume agreed with the former that common life is made up for the most part of passion, custom, tradition, and prejudice. But rather than seeing these as obstacles to understanding, as Descartes did, Hume accepted them as the only prism through which we can understand the real, however much that prism may darken the horizon, for we have simply no alternative.

What Hume does not accept is the resort of philosophers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and the Scottish common-sense school to some external authority invoked to guarantee the validity of the customs and prejudices of common life; that is, of sense experience. Hume thinks it philosophically more honorable to live with uncertainty, never knowing for certain that our perceptions actually capture reality, than it is to gain certainty by the ruse of calling in some Deus ex machina. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Hume, there have been not a few who have deemed this choice of uncertainty in preference to dogmatic certainty to be a point of honor and one of the deepest expressions of human freedom.

The reader will have appreciated by now that it is no easy matter to interpret accurately Hume's philosophy either as a whole or in its various aspects. One of the best-known editors of Hume, Selby-Bigge, rightly pointed out that “he says so many different things in so many different ways and different connections, and with so much indifference to what he has said before, that it is very hard to say positively that he taught or did not teach this or that particular doctrine. … This makes it easy to find all philosophies in Hume, or by setting up one statement against another, none at all.”28 This is why another scholar, John Passmore, can say that to call Hume “a naturalist, a phenomenalist or a skeptic would be seriously misleading; we should add that he is an anti-naturalist, an anti-phenomenalist and an anti-skeptic.”29

These remarks suggest that Hume is at his best as a critic of the arguments of others, but one who having seen the logical flaws in their arguments finds himself in an impasse. Reason seems unable to go further; it must either yield to belief or oppose itself. This seems to be the message of the First Enquiry which, as Anthony Flew has said, reflects mainly Hume's negative program, as opposed to Book I of the Treatise, which reflects mainly his positive program.30

Notes

  1. In references to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, the term Treatise will normally be employed, and references to Book I will be to the Fontana/Collins edition of D. G. C. NacNabb, 1962. However, the number of the Part and Section will also be given for the benefit of readers using a different text.

  2. Treatise, I, Intro., p. 39.

  3. Ibid., p. 41.

  4. Hume had scant knowledge of science and of the actual methods of Newton. See James Noxon, Hume's Philosophical Development: A Study of His Methods, Oxford, 1972, Parts II and III; Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, Edinburgh and Chicago, 1978, ch. 7; Peter Jones, Hume's Sentiments, Edinburgh, 1982, pp. 11-19.

  5. Treatise I, Intro., pp. 43-44.

  6. Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed., Toronto, 1952, p. 113.

  7. Treatise I, Intro., p. 42.

  8. E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, Oxford, 1954, p. 3.

  9. Treatise I, Intro., p. 42.

  10. De la recherche de la vérité, vol. I, p. xiii, quoted by John Passmore in Hume's Intentions, London, 1968, p.5.

  11. Quoted by Mossner, op. cit., p. 73, from a letter of Hume of 1734. It would appear that Hume had neglected to read the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, both thoroughly “empirical” works in any normal (i.e. non-Humean) sense of the word “empirical.”

  12. See the chapter in Modern Philosophy, eds. Gilson and Langan, New York, 1963, pp. 250-273; “Hume shares with the romantics a desire to break out of intellectualist limits and to give the world of feeling and action its due. … This doctrine has two aims. For one, it strives to restore the unity of man split by Descartes into body and mind, intellect and will, judgment and sentiment, etc. To say that we feel the truth of things, and that that feeling is educated in us by the whole weight of all our past experience, is to reintegrate man into a living unit so permeated by the reality received in every impression that he can no longer account for his decisions and actions in terms of clear and distinct ideas followed by necessary judgments. Secondly, this explanation of human comportment gives full importance to individual education and to the influence of particular environment” (pp. 263-264).

  13. See Passmore, op. cit., ch. II, “The Critic of Formal Logic.”

  14. Quoted by Passmore, op. cit., p. 12, from Descartes' introduction to The Principles of Philosophy.

  15. Passmore, op. cit., p. 7, quoting from Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xiv.

  16. Hume's Abstract of a Treatise on Human Nature as reproduced in the Fontana/Collins edition of the Treatise, book I, ed. D. G. C. MacNabb, p. 338, henceforward referred to as Abstract.

  17. N. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume, London, 1941, p. 13.

  18. Quoted by Kemp Smith, ibid., p. 11, from the Treatise, Book II, iii, 3.

  19. See especially C. V. Salmon, “The Central Problem of David Hume's Philosophy,” published in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Edmund Husserl, Halle, 1929, 299-449; Richard T. Murphy, Hume and Husserl, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.

  20. A statement of Husserl quoted by Murphy, op. cit., p. 12.

  21. Salmon, op. cit., p. 299.

  22. Ibid., p. 300.

  23. Ibid., p. 302.

  24. Treatise, Book I, iv, 7, p. 320.

  25. Salmon, op., cit., p. 301.

  26. Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, Chicago, 1984. The special value of this work is that it shows the interconnection between Hume's understanding of philosophy and his understanding of history.

  27. Donald W. Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, Chicago, 1984, ch. 12.

  28. Editor's Introduction to the Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Eugene Freeman, La Salle, Illinois, The Open Court Library of Philosophy, 2nd ed., 1966, p. vii.

  29. Passmore, op. cit., p. 2.

  30. “… The Treatise as a whole is devoted to the positive task of constructing a theory of mind. In the first Enquiry, however, the negative task of purging common life of the destructive and alienating influences of false philosophy is primary and is militantly pursued. …” Livingston, op. cit., p. 32.

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