A Progress of Sentiments

Reflections on Hume’s Treatise

Annette C. Baier

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780674713864, 9780674713857
• eBook ISBN: 9780674252165
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Annette Baier's aim is to make sense of David Hume's Treatise as a whole. Hume's family motto, which appears on his bookplate, was "True to the End." Baier argues that it is not until the end of the Treatise that we get his full story about "truth and falsehood, reason and folly." By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work.Baier finds Hume's Treatise on Human Nature to be a carefully crafted literary and philosophical work which itself displays a philosophical progress of sentiments. His starting place is an overly abstract intellectualism that deliberately thrusts passions and social concerns into the background. In the three interrelated books of the Treatise, his "self-understander" proceeds through partial successes and dramatic failures to emerge with new-found optimism, expecting that the "exact knowledge" the morally self-conscious anatomist of human nature can acquire will itself improve and correct our vision of morality. Baier describes how, by turning philosophy toward human nature instead of toward God and the universe, Hume initiated a new philosophy, a broader discipline of reflection that can embrace Charles Darwin and Michel Foucault as well as William James and Sigmund Freud. Hume belongs both to our present and to our past.

1

Philosophy in This Careless Manner

For my part, my only hope is, that I may contribute a little to the advancement of knowledge, by giving in some particulars a different turn to the speculations of philosophers, and pointing out to them more distinctly those subjects, where alone they can expect assurance and conviction. (T. 273)

In this chapter I shall attend in fairly close detail to the section of the Treatise from which the quotation above is taken, that is, Hume’s conclusion to its first book. This section is of very great importance for understanding what precedes it, as well as what follows it. It both brings the line of thought in Book One to its preordained conclusion, and moves us on to the themes of Book Two. In its pages, Hume enacts for us the turn he wants us to imitate, a turn from a one-sided reliance on intellect and its methods of proceeding to an attempt to use, in our philosophy, all the capacities of the human mind: memory, passion and sentiment as well as a chastened intellect. That is what Hume attempts from Book Two onwards—not only are passions his topic there, but his approach to them is to be guided by experience-informed passion, and he recommends that his readers indulge their sentiments when they join him in his pursuit of philosophy “in this careless manner” (T. 273). The new approach is to be careless in the older sense, carefree rather than negligent. (The O.E.D. gives us the biblical reference of Judges 18.7, “They dwell careless after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure.”) The new philosopher is to dwell careless after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure after casting off the anxieties and tyranny of obsessive theorizing. Hume and his followers are to be carefree and liberated from all compulsions, including the compulsion to pursue the theoretical details of their own philosophy: “If the reader finds himself in the same easy disposition, let him follow me in my future speculations. If not, let him follow his inclination, and wait the returns of application and good humour” (ibid.). Hume has had to wait long enough to find readers who will apply themselves in following him from Book One to Book Two,¹ or relating both those books to Book Three. My aim is to follow Hume, and to see how his speculations beyond Book One relate to those within it, and to see in what particulars his philosophical turn is different, before and after the conclusion of Book One.

The carefree philosophy whose inauguration Hume announces at the end of Book One is to provide assurance and conviction for those converted ex-rationalists who will follow him in his turn away from intellect’s “cold and general speculation,” into his new investigation of the whole mind by the whole mind. If this philosophy is successful, its adherents will have that “power to take or leave it” (T. 314) which Wittgenstein, two centuries later, saw to be the highest achievement of any philosophical enterprise, the gaining of the ability to stop doing philosophy. If Hume’s philosophy of reflection-assisted passions succeeds in its aims, its followers will have easy compliance with Hume’s injunction, “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man” (E. 9).² In this chapter I shall not discuss Hume’s eventual verdict on the success of his enterprise within the Treatise, or the justice of that verdict, but simply look in detail at the inauguration of the program, the section of the Treatise where a turn is announced and effected. This is the most dramatic moment in Hume’s Treatise, which itself enacts the “total alteration in philosophy” which is its intended enduring effect.

The turn itself occurs at T. 269 when Hume joins the diners and backgammon players. It is both preceded and followed by a quite intricate series of dialectical moves and countermoves.³

He begins with two striking images of his state of mind, after his preceding attempts in Part IV to give intellectual analyses of the way intellect works, in particular analyses of its use of the concepts of external object and personal identity. He is, he says, like a sailor on a barren rock, about to set out in a leaky weatherbeaten vessel to encompass the globe, but pausing to consider the wretched condition of his craft, and aware of the dangers of “that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity” (T. 264). Apprehension sets in. The second image takes up one feature of the first, namely that the sailor is alone, setting out on a solo voyage, without assistance from any fellows. So the philosophical voyager speaks of “that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate” (ibid.). This philosophically induced solitude has, I think, two levels. First is the fact that most of Part IV has been a solo attempt of a single thinker, distrustful of education and testimony, and confined to the ideas he can get for himself. Despite many references to other persons, and occasional rhetorical appeals to the reader to confirm the first-person singular findings, no appeals were made at any point to any pooling of data or to any really cooperative procedures for error detection or error correction. The porter who appeared when the protagonist was thinking about how to synthesize broken appearances into the concept of a lasting object was not asked for visual data to supplement the auditory fragments he had, from his solitary experience. Hume had indeed, throughout Part IV of Book One, sailed a one-person ship, albeit in an ocean where other manned ships were clearly visible.

But, given his near Cartesian solitude, he had not reached typically Cartesian conclusions about the seaworthiness of his singly manned and singly maintained vessel. “I have expos’d myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians” (ibid.). Solitary intellects do tend to expect other solitary intellects to agree with them, but Hume’s single-handed excursion had turned up discoveries both about the lay of the land and the nature of the vessel which invited “dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction.” His discoveries set him against established intellectualist findings. Yet it is an anomaly for a Cartesian solitary intellect to care about the “approbation of others” (T. 265), and the protagonist finds this incoherence in his solitary defiance. Can he afford to disdain the opinions of others? Why should his findings about intellect be thought correct, and the pretensions of other solitary intellect-users be thought mistaken? How can he, or any of his intellectualist opponents, even expect to recognize error, were it present in their own thinking? The incoherence of setting oneself up in arrogant monstrous isolation, denouncing the errors of others, yet without any protection against one’s own errors, drives the protagonist to seek some common ground, some position in which, against the background of the infirmities that all share, he may recognize “those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself.” “Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth?” (T. 265).

This question of why departure from the established course of thinking should be thought a safe route to truth provides the opportunity for the “monster” to find some affinities, if not in doctrine at least in capacities, with those who will not join him. The solitary stance is given up, for a humbler position of some solidarity with fallible fellow persons. Whether or not they agree with him, they all are guided by the same principles, by experience, habit and the same general customs of belief formation. All have their ideas enlivened into beliefs by the same sorts of causes. “The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (ibid.). The imagination⁴ varies the vivacity of ideas, and in its regular workings increases the vivacity of those ideas that are the conclusions of causal inferences, and supplies us with the ideas of the continuously and independently existing things that we take to be around us. It may also be responsible for the vivacity of that idea of self, as identical enduring person, owner of one’s own passing perceptions, since vivacity is the only credential that has so far been found for that idea. In this passage at T. 265–266, that particular belief is not mentioned. The anxieties that soon appear are restricted to belief in causation and belief in the continued existence of external objects. The question of the continuing identity of the one who begins the conclusion with brave ambition that quickly turns to diffidence and fear, goes through many moods in the course of a few pages, and ends in a hopeful and carefree frame of mind, cannot be really addressed until that very fluctuation of moods and sentiments has been studied in Book Two, until “our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination” (T. 261). At the very nadir of the despair, the cry arises, “Where am I, or what?” (T. 269) as if the very difference between personal identity and the identity of external objects⁵ is slipping away, but the findings of the preceding sceptical section, “Of personal identity,” are not explicitly brought to bear on the “Conclusion of this book.”

What occasions instability in the attempted reunion with mankind in common servitude to habit and imagination is the contradiction which is found within that joint authority. It is an unsatisfactory master, since “ ’tis this principle, which makes us reason from causes and effects; and ’tis the same principle, which convinces us of the continu’d existence of external objects, when absent from the senses. But tho’ these operations be equally natural and necessary in the human mind, yet in some circumstances they are directly contrary, nor is it possible for us to reason justly and regularly from causes and effects, and at the same time believe the continu’d existence of matter” (T. 266). Hume here adverts to his demonstration, in the section “Of the modern philosophy,” that if causal analysis shows secondary qualities to be mere effects on the observers of primary qualities, it also seems to destroy the primary qualities. “When we reason from cause and effect, we conclude, that neither colour, sound, taste, nor smell have a continu’d and independent existence. When we exclude these sensible qualities, there remains nothing in the universe, which has such an existence” (T. 231). The latter conclusion followed from resolving all primary qualities into ones dependent on solidity, and resolving solidity into impenetrability. But what is it which cannot penetrate what? “Two non-entities cannot exclude each other from their places . . . Now I ask, what idea do we form of those bodies or objects, to which we suppose solidity to belong? To say, that we conceive them merely as solid, is to run on in infinitum” (T. 229).

This disappearance into non-entity of all the supposed defining qualities of lasting objects is occasioned by certain philosophical uses of causal analysis, which themselves require the supposition of more regularity than we have in fact witnessed. The “broken appearances” within our limited experience have to be supplemented by the hypothesis of unperceived perceptions, and of external continuously existing objects as “homes” for these postulated possibilities of perception. Hearing the door opening, without seeing its movement, could otherwise count as a breach of a regularity. “These observations are contrary, unless I suppose that the door still remains, and that it was open’d without my perceiving it” (T. 196–197). Unless we postulate enduring objects, “these phaenomena of the porter and letter . . . are contradictions to common experience, and may be regarded as objections to those maxims, which we form concerning the connexions of causes and effects” (T. 196). Thus belief in causal regularities is saved by the postulation of external objects, yet destroys its saviour. Imagination’s workings, as examined in Part IV of Book One, alternately support and subvert one another.

This realization, that in seeing oneself (like one’s opponents) as a slave to the imagination, one must see oneself as a fellow victim of an internally incoherent master, makes this position unstable, and prepares us for the next. Just as the first position, the “rock” of isolation, was rent by the contradiction between arrogant self-sufficiency and that “weakness” whereby “I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others” (T. 264–265), so the second position, the common ground of reliance on imagination’s workings, also turns out to be no secure ground, but the site of mutually conflicting principles, undermining each other.

One response would be to hop from side to side, as the shifts in ground demand, to rely on causal inference to expected phenomena for predictive purposes, and switch to material object realism when need arises. But “in case we . . . successively assent to both, as is usual among philosophers, with what confidence can we afterwards usurp that glorious title, when we thus knowingly embrace a manifest contradiction?” (T. 266). We would embrace only half a contradiction at a time, but even if we were successful in that delicate bigamous dance, we would scarcely, Hume claims, deserve the title “philosopher.” This is an interesting claim, in the light of Hume’s endorsement, later in the “Conclusion,” of a policy of letting contrary moods succeed one another. A “careless” attitude to apparent contradiction in attitudes is eventually to be presented as the true philosophy. Can opposed moods decently share time in the soul, while opposed purely intellectual beliefs cannot?

At this point, before vacating the shifting ground of commonsense fallibilism, Hume adds an interesting note on what might have shored up that position. The rift between causal analysis and object synthesis might have been compensated “by any degree of solidity and satisfaction in the other parts of our reasoning” (T. 266). Which other parts? The part that fails to provide this hoped-for consolation is described as the attempt to know “the causes of every phaenomenon,” to discover not merely intermediate causes but “the original and ultimate principle. We wou’d not willingly stop before we are acquainted with the energy in the cause, by which it operates on its effect; that tie, which connects them together; and that efficacious quality, on which the tie depends” (ibid.). Our discovery that “this connexion, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves” cuts off all hope of finding any external source of efficacious energy. Hume here seems to treat the tracing back of causes as a different enterprise from that causal analysis that destroyed the concept of physical atom. How does it differ? Is it the fact that the moves in the attempt to trace the phenomena back to some original explanatory principle are not from cause to effect but from effects to causes?⁶ That, surely, was precisely what the modern philosophers did with secondary qualities, and what Hume himself continued to do with primary qualities, until they vanished into nothingness. Is it the fact that the necessity of the connection is the focus of attention in these “other parts” of our reasoning? Hume’s Book One, Part III treatment of causal inference and of necessity had seemed solid and satisfactory enough, at the end of Part III, despite the fact that no “ultimate principle,” internal or external, had been found.⁷ It does, however, seem here to be the search not just for prior causes for later effects but for “the ultimate principle” which “connects them together” which has proved unsatisfactory, at least to those who want it to lie “in the external object” rather than “merely in ourselves.” If we make this demand, then we will, in our discourse about necessity and causal necessitation, “contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning” (T. 267).

The most obvious case where this demand comes into play is in theological searches for the world’s cause, in “unusual and extraordinary” causal investigations, so it is our cosmological and theological reasonings that may appear least solid and satisfactory, once Part III’s conclusions about causal necessity are accepted. The religious world-explanation does collapse rather dramatically if we are convinced by Hume that the energy lies only in ourselves. It is as if Hume were here referring to parts of his own reasoning which he put not into the Treatise but into the Dialogues on Natural Religion, not published in his lifetime. The best sense I can make of this paragraph at T. 266–267 is that Hume is referring to some implications of his account of cause which he had not dared include in the Treatise, but put aside for the Dialogues. The Treatise section “Why a cause is always necessary?” is the only one which hints at these implications of Hume’s position. This interpretation is supported by the opening of the next paragraph, T. 267, when Hume says that in common life we are not sensible of these deficiencies in our ideas. He may have refrained from trying to make his contemporaries sensible of all the implications of his views, and been persuaded to let common life go on its normal religious way a little longer.⁸

The mutually destructive tendencies of the concepts of cause and physical object lead the protagonist to move to a higher level, to an attempt to distinguish between successful and troublesome workings of the human imagination responsible for these concepts. If we fall into incoherence when we use the imagination’s usual products in an unrestrained way, perhaps the proper policy is to put some proto-Kantian restraints into effect, to try to separate the reliable workings of the imagination from its troublesome workings. But how are we to draw the line? Which workings are productive of illusion and contradiction, and which are free of these defects? What has just been shown is, unfortunately, that it is precisely when we attempt to avoid the illusions of imagination, by seeing clearly what our concept of cause and of physical atom amount to, that we find contradictions cropping up. So perhaps our concepts are best left unclarified, and their implications not too punctiliously traced? Should we be content to be taken in by illusions? “The question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions” (T. 267).

A dangerous dilemma now presents itself, Hume says. Either we say that we should yield to all the illusions of the imagination, in which case we become totally undiscriminating and let ourselves be led into “such errors, absurdities, and obscurities, that we must at last become asham’d of our credulity,” or we continue to try to discriminate between the acceptable and the unacceptable inventions of the human imagination. One way to do that is to distinguish “the trivial suggestions of the fancy,” totally undisciplined flights of imagination, from its “general and more establish’d properties,” calling the latter “reason” or “understanding.” But to reject the imagination’s trivial suggestions, while accepting its regular or disciplined suggestions, “wou’d be most dangerous, and attended with the most fatal consequences” (T. 267).

These fatal consequences are not those already noted, the mutual subversion of the concepts of matter and cause. The concept of physical object, after all, depended on some “trivial” (T. 217) workings of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Philosophy in This Careless Manner
• 2 Other Relations: The Account of Association
• 3 Customary Transitions from Causes to Effects
• 4 Necessity, Nature, Norms
• 5 The Simple Supposition of Continued Existence
• 6 Persons and the Wheel of Their Passions
• 7 The Direction of Our Conduct
• 8 The Contemplation of Character
• 9 A Catalogue of Virtues
• 10 The Laws of Nature
• 11 The Shelter of Governors
• 12 Reason and Reflection
• Chronology
• Notes
• Index