PHILOSOPHY 224
HUMAN NATURE AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY
HUME
HUME’S TREATISE
• Hume (1711-1776) is
arguably the most important
philosopher to write in
English.
• Like his fellow moderns,
Hume did not confine
himself to philosophy but
wrote influentially on a wide
range of topics.
• The Treatise was the most
important of the
philosophical works that he
produced. It’s aim is to
address the question of
human nature with the aim
of producing a “compleat
system of the sciences”
(100).
A COMPLEAT SYSTEM
• Why does Hume believe that such a system (faith in the
possibility of which marks Hume as a Modern
philosopher) can be produced via an account of
human nature?
• As he notes at the beginning of our selection, all of the
human sciences (fields of human knowledge) refer,
directly or indirectly to human activity or human ends.
• Using a martial metaphor (100), he insists that only by
pursuing the question of human nature do we get to the
center of the possibilities of human knowing, and thus
the ground necessary for establishing all of the various
specific forms of that knowing.
EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATION
• Hume’s approach to this (and any other question)
assumes that the only method appropriate to this
important topic is direct, 'experimental' observation, the
heart of which is Hume’s empiricism (more on this in a
bit).
• What are we to make of this insistence on the
fundamental importance of experience and
observation?
• First of all, it’s a decidedly anti-metaphysical approach. In
contrast to those accounts of human nature we’ve
characterized as ‘religious,’ Hume insists that we can’t begin
by assuming anything about the ultimate structure of reality of
our place in it, but must rather start with what we are given:
experience, as we experience it.
• Any conclusions we make must be appropriate generalizations
from this immediate data (100-101).
IMPRESSIONS AND IDEAS
• Hume uses the term “perception” to refer to all mental
contents.
• Perceptions are the basic material of experience. All
knowledge has its basis in these perceptions. This is Hume’s
empiricism at its most basic.
• As Hume goes on to insist, all perceptions of the mind
are either impressions or ideas.
• The only difference between them is their force and vivacity.
• Impressions are direct, forceful perceptions (think sense data);
Ideas are representations or consolidations of impressions.
• Both impressions and ideas can be further distinguished
into simple and complex.
• Simple impressions or ideas are those that cannot be
decomposed (red, color), while complex instances of either
can be decomposed (apple, Apple).
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE
• On the basis of this elaborated empiricist account
of consciousness, Hume articulates what he
characterizes as the first principle of the science of
human nature he is developing:
• “…all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d
from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them
and which they exactly represent” (103).
• It’s immediate implication is to provide the basis for
the rejection of the notion of innate ideas (ideas
present from birth, part of the fabric/structure of
consciousness), but it has important implications for
an account of human nature.
PUTTING THE PRINCIPLE TO WORK:
SUBSTANCE
• Hume begins to develop the implications of this first principle
by directing it to a key philosophical concept: substance.
• This concept has a complicated history. In Hume’s time, it was
generally understood in one of two ways: that which is the
bearer of predicates (substance as subject), and as that
which remains the same through change (substance as
underlyingness).
• In either version, our understanding of substance is not something we
get from experience: it is a requirement of thinking, or an innate idea.
• Hume denies all of this, insisting that substance is not a
metaphysical element, or innate idea, but just a name we
give to collections of impressions or ideas to hold them in mind
(essentially, it’s the reification of the complexity of a complex
idea) (104).
WHAT ABOUT THE SOUL?
• The soul is commonly understood as a kind of
substance (and has been so since Aristotle).
• As Hume makes clear, his empiricist treatment
of substance has similar consequences for the
soul.
• Consciousness is composed of impressions and
ideas. For Hume, there is nothing more than this
to consciousness.
• All talk of an innate, inborn human nature, of a
special substance which makes us what we are,
is nonsense (105).
SO, WHAT ARE WE?
• According to Hume’s Principle, any idea of the
self must have it’s origin in a corresponding
impression, “But self or person is not any one
impression, but that to which our several
impressions and ideas are supposed to have a
reference” (106-7).
• As a result, we are forced to conclude that the
idea of the self or person is a fiction.
• All that we find, insists Hume, when we try to
'catch sight' of ourselves, are individual
impressions or ideas (107).
A BUNDLE OF PERCEPTIONS
• On this view, human beings are,
“…nothing but a bundle or collection of
different perceptions, which succeed
each other with…rapidity, and are in a
perpetual flux and movement” (107).
• Hume uses an interesting metaphor: the
mind as a kind of theater.
• However we need to avoid an easy
confusion: the mind is not a place—it is just
the movie.