Hume and the Enlightenment
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Hume and the Enlightenment

Craig Taylor, Stephen Buckle, Craig Taylor, Stephen Buckle

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Hume and the Enlightenment

Craig Taylor, Stephen Buckle, Craig Taylor, Stephen Buckle

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While Hume remains one of the most central figures in modern philosophy his place within Enlightenment thinking is much less clearly defined. Taking recent work on Hume as a starting point, this volume of original essays aims to re-examine and clarify Hume's influence on the thought and values of the Enlightenment.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317323402

1 HUME AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Stephen Buckle
David Hume was one of the outstanding thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in general surveys of the period, is uncontroversially recognized as such.1 Moreover, he enjoyed this status at the time: not only in England and his native Scotland, but also across the Channel in France, and so in what is typically regarded as the Enlightenment’s heartland. Thus, after his diplomatic posting to Paris in 1763 (and so after the success in France of his History of England), he quickly became a friend of major intellectual figures of the French scene, d’Alembert in particular, and something of a favourite exhibit in the Parisian salons: le bon David. In this light, he seems to be quintessentially a figure of the European Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, to think of Hume as an Enlightenment figure is to run into obstacles. These obstacles come from both ends, so to speak: they derive both from common understandings of Hume’s philosophy, and from equally common conceptions of the Enlightenment. It will be helpful, then, to begin by surveying some of the more familiar of these obstacles.

Hume or Enlightenment?

If we begin from the Humean side of the issue, three obstacles stand out. The first is very general, the fruit of a philosophical outlook: it is the conviction amongst philosophers that philosophy is fundamentally ahistorical, concerned with the eternally true. From this point of view, to situate a philosopher in particular circumstances is to accept that the philosophy is dead; and, if it is dead, it is not worthy of study. So, from this point of view, the fact that Hume lived in the period known as the Enlightenment is no doubt of considerable interest to historians; but in so far as Hume’s philosophy lives and breathes it belongs to no epoch. Hume, it will be said, bequeathed to us problems that we still struggle to resolve – problems concerning induction, causation, the nature of the self and so on – and what makes him a suitable subject of study is precisely that these problems are unresolved, not that they were thought up in any particular historical context. So, the conclusion must run, Hume is indeed a figure from the period now known as the Enlightenment; but, from a philosophical point of view, this is a fact of no significance – no more than that he was a Scotsman who enjoyed his French claret.
A second obstacle is not unrelated, in that it also assumes that Hume bequeathed to us certain problems that remain issues for us. The problem here arises from the fact that it is this cluster of discrete problems, rather than an overall philosophy, that is Hume’s legacy to us. If, for example, we open any typical introduction to Hume, we see chapters on an array of topics familiar to all philosophers: empiricism, causation, perception and the external world, personal identity, the foundation of morals, miracles and natural religion.2 Now if these topics sum up Hume’s relevance, then the Enlightenment bearings of his philosophy seem, at best, uncertain. The last three, on morals and religion, seem like typical Enlightenment topics – and, indeed, his conclusions concerning them can be regarded as typical Enlightenment conclusions. But the others seem more like obstacles to Enlightenment views than anything else: the Enlightenment is thought of as the Age of Reason, and as such seems opposed to empiricism; and Hume’s famously sceptical arguments about causation, belief in an external world, and personal identity all seem to speak the disengagement so characteristic of the sceptic – and so opposed to the Enlightenment’s ideal of the philosopher as social critic and reformer. Moreover, given that this latter list of topics represents Hume’s pure philosophy, it seems that his relationship to the Enlightenment is inversely related to the degree of purity of his philosophical principles. So, to invoke a familiar picture, he can be classed as an Enlightenment thinker when he is slumming it – dabbling in applied topics – but not when he is at his most genuinely philosophical.
If these were not enough, a third obstacle can be found in the common view of the history of early modern philosophy, first developed by nineteenth-century Kantian historians of philosophy, but most sharply expressed by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy: that Hume was the last in the line of the British Empiricists – in fact, the empiricist who destroyed empiricism – and so represents a historical dead end.3 A less radical – if perhaps more patronizing – version of this view is that entrenched in the still-dominant Kantian paradigm of the history of modern philosophy: that Hume represents the high point of empiricism in the sense of forging the problems that Kant then resolved. On this version, his philosophical role was to awaken Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber’4 – but with that (unintended) achievement, his positive contribution to the history of philosophy came to an end. The baton passed to Kant, who went on to forge some of the Enlightenment’s most distinctive doctrines – and Hume simply fell away, back into philosophy’s, and society’s, past. Whatever is to be said for this view, it will be noted that it is quite at odds with the other two: unlike them, it supposes that Hume’s philosophy is dead rather than alive. But all three seem to lead to the conclusion that Hume’s philosophy bears no significant relationship to the movement of ideas we think of as the Enlightenment.
At least, that is so if, in Habermas’s words, the Enlightenment is not a mere historical curio, but an ongoing project of modern human society.5 This brings us to our second set of obstacles. Is the Enlightenment to be understood as the eighteenth-century flowering of intellectual culture, the so-called Age of Reason which reached its apogee in the France of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists? Or is it to be understood on the broader Habermasian model, as the inauguration of a new epoch in human intellectual history, the full realization of which is still in progress? If the latter, then Hume belongs unproblematically. It does not matter, from this point of view, whether he is cast as hero or villain in this movement of ideas – he undeniably belongs to it, as his central place in the contemporary philosophy curriculum is enough to show. If the former, then things are more complicated: Hume both belongs and does not. On the one hand, it is very hard to leave him out of the intellectual flowering of the eighteenth century: the only recourse here is the indefensible path of treating the Enlightenment as purely a French phenomenon. Plainly it was not, whatever the success of the Frenchmen in dramatizing their own significance, or, indeed, of historians of the French Revolution in conferring it on them after the fact. The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon; and, as Voltaire was himself well aware, its roots were as British as they were French.6 On the other hand, if the Enlightenment is understood as the Age of Reason, Hume presents a very uncertain figure, given his determination to cut reason down to size: his famous dictum, ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (T 2.3.3.4/414–15), makes a very poor application for membership of the Age of Reason. As a slogan, it makes a far better fit with the succeeding age, the Age of Romanticism, often classed by intellectual historians as the period of the Counter-Enlightenment.7
This difficulty in making Hume fit should not surprise, since it brings out an ambiguity built into the historians’ picture of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason: that it glues together both a historical and an intellectual component, as if simply co-extensive. The trouble of fitting Hume is enough to show that they are not. The period known, to later generations, as the Enlightenment can be thought of as an ‘age of reason’, but only if we understand that crucial term, ‘reason’, very broadly. If we conceive of the meaning of the term more narrowly, as implying a connection with the philosophical rationalism which the Romantics repudiated, then problems rapidly multiply. The trouble arises because the French Enlightenment, although heavily indebted to the rationalism of the Cartesians, was equally dependent on other canonical figures of a thoroughly anti-rationalist bent. The obvious marker of this is the widespread influence of radical materialist views. In Cartesian philosophy, the intellect is identified with the immortal soul, so the short route to materialist conclusions was to offer a reductive explanation of the intellect in terms of sensory – that is, bodily – processes. For these thinkers, then, the rational intellect is thereby effectively dissolved. This is the route taken by, for example, the most notorious of the materialists, La Mettrie, in his Man the Machine.8 It is plain that, from this angle, materialism and anti-rationalism are two sides of the same coin; so, in so far as the radical materialists are thought of as quintessential figures of the French Enlightenment – which of course they are – then the Age of Reason’s intellectual landscape is anti-rationalist no less than it is rationalist.
This would be obvious were it not for the seriously complicating fact that these anti-rationalists appealed, no less than the rationalists, to the ideal of reason! Why did they do so?: Because that ideal was itself ambiguous. It meant not only a belief in the ruling power of reason, but also, more simply, the belief in thinking for oneself. This is indicated by the almost routine opposition, amongst most canonical Enlightenment figures, of ‘reason’ to tradition. It is fully evident in Kant’s conception of enlightenment as an individual intellectual odyssey, in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ He there declares the motto of enlightenment to be ‘Sapere aude!’ (dare to be wise): a slogan which he then glosses as ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’9 Kant is himself best thought of as a minimal rationalist – and of course there is no point in relying on your own understanding if it is nothing but a slave of passion – but it is revealing nonetheless that he does not tie the process of enlightenment to any rationalist thesis about reason’s status. The essay itself was published in the Berlin Monthly, a periodical addressed to the wider world of the republic of letters, so he clearly did not expect that its message was relevant only to those who had adopted his own philosophical position. So why is it that ‘reason’ was ambiguous in this way, signifying either philosophical rationalism, or intellectual autonomy, or even both?
The answer is to be found in Descartes. His philosophy was both high rationalism and, in its famous method of doubt, the very model of anti-traditional intellectual autonomy. By his example, he inspired not only the Cartesians, who embraced his conclusions, but even their enemies, who adopted (or at least claimed to adopt) his methods, despite rejecting his conclusions. The focus, in modern philosophy departments, on the Meditations on First Philosophy somewhat dilutes this ideological edge to Descartes’s enterprise, since there he speaks mainly of rejecting the opinions he absorbed in childhood, before having attained his own age of reason. The wider social and political potential of the message is clearer in the earlier Discourse on Method, for there Descartes rejects the value of the education he received at the hands of the Jesuits, and also offers a concluding defence of having written in the vernacular in which the anti-traditional message is made explicit: ‘if I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than Latin, which is that of my teachers, it is because I hope that those who use only their unalloyed natural reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who swear only by the books of the ancients’.10 Thus, having already opened the Discourse with an affirmation of the value of everyone’s good sense,11 Descartes’s concluding remarks mean the work is bookended with appeals to the fundamental importance of the exercise of one’s own intellectual autonomy. Kant’s motto thus has deep French roots; and, given Descartes’s profound influence on the world of French philosophy and science, it is no surprise that French critics of the ancien regime should have appealed to his example even as they rejected his conclusions.

English and French Enlightenments

If the French Enlightenment radicals did not follow Descartes to his dualist conclusions, from where did they find inspiration of a doctrinal kind? Here the answer may surprise: they found it in the British empirical tradition, above all in the works of Francis Bacon and John Locke. This fact can be gleaned from French sources which offer brief historical sketches of the rise of enlightened views: most notably, Voltaire’s youthful work, the Letters on England, and the later historical sketches for which it seemed to provide the template, including Condillac’s Introduction to his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), and d’Alembert’s Preface to the Encyclopédie (1751).12 The same two figures are even inspirations to Kant: the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) acknowledges the achievement of ‘the famous Locke’; and the second edition (1787) has, for a motto, an extract from Bacon’s Great Instauration.13 By the time Heinrich Heine penned his short history of German intellectual life, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, written for a French audience in 1835, Locke’s canonization was complete: Locke was the Frenchmen’s ‘master’, his Essay concerning Human Understanding their ‘gospel’.14 The surprising conclusion is, then, that, when the Enlightenment philosophers appealed to Reason, what they had in mind, of a doctrinal kind, was more often the British-originated empirical philosophy of Locke and his fellows than it was the French rationalism stemming from Descartes. Small wonder then that that appeal has so often been misunderstood!
If we append to this insight another, one way of fitting Hume more firmly into the intellectual world of the Enlightenment presents itself. The second insight lies in considering Hume’s intellectual output. As is obvious to all, he not only wrote difficult philosophical works, but also polite essays and even a major history – but this has been seen by philosophers as something of an embarrassment, as evidence that Hume gave up philosophy, no doubt because of his self-confessed ‘love of literary fame’. The embarrassment is misguided, the fruit of almost complete misapprehension of Hume’s sense of his intellectual (and literary) vocation. The explanation for Hume’s corpus seems readily resolved: all we have to do is ask who amongst his predecessors produced such a corpus, such that Hume might be seen as emulating a great example? The answer is: Francis Bacon. This means that, quite apart from the well-known fact of Hume’s intellectual debts to Locke, his entire corpus can be illuminated by reference to the accepted originator of the empirical philosophical tradition on which the French Enlightenment most profoundly depended. Bringing Bacon into view also has another benefit, because it offers insight into both Hume’s sense of his philosophical project and of an under-appreciated intellectual debt. Bacon had recommended that the methods of natural philosophy could be applied to human life, and that society would be improved by the development of such a science of human nature. This thought gained firm roots in English intellectual life, its optimistic tale even being echoed by Isaac Newton in the ‘Queries’ appended to the second edition of his Opticks.15 But the person who first attempted to realize this ideal was a former secretary to Bacon, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes even described his early work, The Elements of Law, as ‘a treatise of human nature’.16 So, when a well-read eighteenth-century reader opened an anonymously-authored work of the same title, and saw in its Introduction praise of Bacon as the original source from which this new work flowed, our reader would have had no trouble seeing the work as aiming to contribute to the new spirit of enlightenment as embodied in the Baconian tradition. If our reader turned out to be Dr Johnson, he could then even have concluded that the work was not merely Baconian, but positively Hobbesian.17
This is not the place to argue a detailed case for Hume’s Hobbesian debts, nor should it be supposed that by proposing this view I am denying the more common view of him as having descended intellectually from Locke and Berkeley. I will say, though, that the debts to Berkeley are misunderstood, and more limited than usually supposed: in particular, while he saw Berkeley’s critique of Locke to be successful, it led him no...

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