The Philosophy of David Hume
Introduction
David Hume could almost be considered a post-modern
philosopher rather than a modern philosopher due to the skepticism
that is one of the signs of our current age. Another reason is
because it has taken so long for Hume to come into his own, for his
skepticism seemed to extreme for his era, which was optimistic
about the growth of knowledge and the human capacity to solve
scientific and social problems. “About a year before his death,
Hume remarked to his publisher: “as to any suitable returns or
approbation from the public, for the care, accuracy, labor,
disinterestedness, and courage of my compositions, they are yet to
come. Though, I own to you, I see many symptoms that they are
approaching. But it will happen to me as to many other writers:
Though I have reached a considerable age, I shall not live to see
any justice done to me” (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding, Second Edition, [Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1977, 1993] p. vii. Hereafter
referred to as Hume). Hume has had to wait a long time. Even
during the 20th century philosophers were slow to warm up to him.
Just as we saw with Berkeley, people were quick to not only think
they understood him, but then to dismiss him as a skeptic and
atheist. Even his friend and one of the most esteemed British
philosophers of that time, Frances Hutcheson, told the town
council of Edinburgh that he did not think it was a good idea to
give Hume a position as a teacher. Hume did have those who
recognized his genius, such as Kant who said that reading Hume
awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber” and as a result Kant was
to write some of the most influential philosophy of all time. As it
sometimes happens, people seem to think reading Kant was
enough and didn’t bother with Hume. So who was this man and
what did his philosophy teach?
Hume is often seen as the third of three major British philosophers
starting with John Locke and continuing with George Berkeley.
And while it is true that he builds on their work and was deeply
influenced by them, he does not just continue their work but he
makes fundamental changes in it. Hume said about his own
philosophy: “My principles … would produce almost a total
alteration in philosophy: and you know, revolutions of this kind are
not easily brought about” (Hume, p. viii). While perhaps not a
modest statement it is nevertheless considered true by many
philosophers today. At the very least, Hume is now considered to
be one of the two greatest philosophers of the 18th century, along
with Kant. Therefore it is important to study Hume not only to
understand the history of philosophy, “but for a study of some of
the most formidable arguments and positions in philosophy”
(Hume, p. viii). So formidable that many people who align
themselves with skepticism still think that Hume has not yet been
refuted.
We don’t know a great deal about Hume’s early life and education,
but he was born on April 26th, 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland and he
died in 1776, when he was 65. He spent a few years studying at the
University of Edinburgh, but he left before he received a degree.
While his family hoped he would study Law, Hume showed much
more interest in the ancient classics. He spent three years in France
in the 1730’s, during which time he started to write his first works
which he subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.” None of
his philosophical works would achieve much critical success, let
alone popular success during his life. Besides his writing, he
worked many different jobs, as a teacher and tutor, as a secretary to
a general, and as a librarian. He wrote on many subjects and while
his philosophy was not popular his political writings were,
especially in France. He also wrote the six-volume History of
England. In the last decade of his life he had a famous dispute with
the French philosopher Rousseau, which is usually blamed on
Rousseau’s illness and paranoia.
Hume was raised as a Calvinist but early on he showed signs of
moving away from orthodoxy. He never was excommunicated as
he expected, but he was continually attacked by the religious
leaders of the day and it was their opposition that prevented him
from becoming a University Professor.
Hume’s Philosophy
Hume’s most famous book on philosophy is a small book called
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He worked on this
book all of his adult life, personally editing all ten editions of this
book, each time trying to make it clearer and better. He first
published his ideas in an early work referred to as the Treatise on
Human Nature, but later left off his grand attempt to write about a
science of human nature that would be profound as Newton’s laws
concerning motion. But both his earliest work and his last edition
both have as their main purpose the attempt to destroy what he
called “dogmatic rationalism.” “A view that pervades nearly all
Hume’s philosophical writings is that both ancient and modern
philosophers have ben guilty of optimistic and exaggerated claims
for the power of human reason” (Hume, p. xiii). What did he mean
by dogmatic reason? Hume seems to have felt that all the attempts
to prove the existence of God and to understand and articulate final
and absolute truths were doomed to failure. He was very aware of
the limitations of the human mind and thus when Kant read him
and said that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers it
was the dogma of reason that he was talking about and thus it led
to Kant’s important book: Critique of Pure Reason.
Hume attacked dogmatic reason in two ways. First he tried “to
show that beliefs about particular entities could not be validated
because we lack experience and thus ideas or concepts of such
entities” (Hume, p. xiv). Notice right here how he connects our
ideas with experiences. We get our ideas from our concrete
experiences, our sensations and perceptions. This brings him into
line with empiricism. Where “the rubber meets the road” is in our
concrete lived experience. “Every simple idea has a simple
impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a
correspondent idea. All our simple ideas in their first appearance
are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to
them, and which they exactly represent. Complex ideas, on the
other hand, need not resemble impressions. We can imagine a
winged horse without having ever seen one, but the ingredients of
this complex idea are all derived from impressions. The proof that
impressions come first is derived from experience; for example, a
man born blind has no idea of colors” (Russell, pp 660-661). I
think one way of seeing how this works is looking at all of the
strange creatures in a movie like Star Wars. No matter how
creative the artists are they still have to use ingredients that come
from our experience. What is unusual is how they are put together,
but not the individual pieces.
Hume’s second attack on reason came from his attempt to
demonstrate that “even where we possess these ideas or concepts
[about ultimate truth], our beliefs about such things are not based
on reason or the understanding, but on feeling, imagination or
Hume’s catchall term, “custom” (Hume, p. xiv). I think even today
we see that many public policies on all sorts of things, but
especially moral issues, are not based on careful reasoning, but
rather on “custom” or belief systems. That does not mean that they
are inherently wrong, but it does mean that what we take for
reasonable positions are very often not rational, but emotional,
responses to what we feel is right or simply the acceptance of what
we have been taught is proper.
Hume was aware that if he was too successful at combating
dogmatic reason he would lead the way to a profound skepticism
that would not only undermine metaphysics, (which was fine with
him), but also all practical knowledge and scientific enquiry, which
was not fine with him. What was he to do? In An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding Hume implied that the proper
remedy for [this] is a moderate or mitigated form of skepticism, a
middle path between dogmatism on the one hand and excessive
skepticism on the other. A true philosopher must “avoid all distant
and high enquires” and limit enquiries to “such subjects as are best
adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.” He must
be skeptical of the pretenses of reason without adopting a
“skepticism as is entirely subversive of all speculation, and even
action” (Hume, pp. xiv-xv). Unfortunately this tells us what to do
but not how to do it! This is one of the main problems of
speculative philosophy that people have been struggling with for
thousands of years. People have been trying to figure out how
Hume thought this “moderate skepticism” could be facilitated ever
since he published his ideas. In fact, Hume was dismissed in part
because it was not clear once the smoke settled how we could
know anything at all! In fact we can’t even hold as true our most
mundane everyday beliefs such as the fact that the sun will rise
tomorrow. Did I say fact? How do we know the sun will rise? We
don’t really. All we know is that it always has come up each
morning and so there is no real reason to assume it won’t. Hume’s
conclusion stated that we could live our lives in a practical way
based on probabilities, but not on exact knowledge.
Earlier I mentioned that Berkeley had problems with the use of
words. It sometimes seems that when we have a word for
something we believe it means something, that is, it signifies
something. But Berkeley said that this was not true and Hume
would agree. He said this was the problem with reason; it was
dependent on words and abstractions. Hume said ideas were
tautological, “that is, they are redundant, repetitive, merely verbal
truths that provide no new information about the world, only
information about the meaning of words” (Palmer, p. 181). This
was a stab at the rationalists who believe in a priori truths, that is a
truth that can be known independently from observation. This
usually refers to math and logic and things such as that and it is
often connected with the concept of innate ideas. Plato taught that
we could understand the world because the structure of our thought
corresponded to the structure of the cosmos. But Hume did not
believe this. He thought we could only know truths from
observations, which is of course, classic empiricism.
We get our abstractions from noticing similarities. So we call one
animal a cat because it resembles other cats and not dogs. But this
is only a superficial way of organizing matters, because in reality,
every cat is unique. The word “cat” as an abstraction allows us to
talk about cats as if they are one thing when actually they are all
different. And yet one must wonder if this is all there is to it?
Suppose we have seen the color red and we have an idea, therefore,
of that color. Then we see a pink flower and we have an idea of
that color. Wouldn’t it then be possible to imagine a color in
between red and pink that we had never actually seen? This seems
to be something that other philosophers have pointed out that
Hume missed. Perhaps all of our ideas are not exactly related to
simple impressions. But in general they are. We first would have to
have seen certain colors to be able to imagine any color at all.
Hume believed that there were three types of propositions,
analytic, synthetic, and nonsense. Hume wrote: “When we run over
libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?
If we take in our hand any volume - of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance - let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract
reasoning concerning quantity or number [i.e. analytical truths]?
No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter
of fact and existence [i.e. synthetic truths]? No. Commit then to the
flames, for it can contain nothing by sophistry and illusion’”
(Palmer, p. 183). Analytic knowledge is like having five apples. If
someone then explains to you that what you have is three + two =
five you have some words, but you don’t have new knowledge.
You already had five apples and knew you did. So analytic
knowledge does not count for much with Hume, which is saying a
lot because the rationalists put so much emphasis on it. What
Hume wants is synthetic knowledge, that is, knowledge that
corresponds with experience. If you have an idea in your head such
as “this rock is heavy” that is because you have had experience of
rocks that are heavy. Your idea corresponds to a real impression.
But if you have an idea in your head like “angel” or “God,” what
does that idea correspond to? According to Hume, it corresponds
to nothing. Therefore it is nonsense in the true meaning of the
word because it is not related to the senses. In other words, if an
idea can be “traced back to sense data it passes the empirical
criterion of meaning” (Palmer, p. 184). This is why Hume’s
philosophy is considered atheistic - there is no place for God in his
thought. But how does this work with other philosophical ideas
such as the “world.” Hume was aware that Berkeley had already
taken away one of the main beliefs about the world, that it
somehow existed out there as a material substance independent of
human reasoning. So now he undermines reason even more by
denying causality.
If you take two billiard balls and say that the first ball hits the
second ball, and therefore the second ball moves, most of us would
say that this makes sense and is therefore traceable to a physical
impression and so it is true. But Hume asked us to think about this
again. He asked us what we really saw? Yes, we saw the first ball
strike the second ball, and yes, we saw the second ball move. But,
did we see the necessary connection between them? No, because
that is an inference. “So ‘causality’ proved to have the same status
as ‘material substance and ‘God.’ This embarrassment has farreaching consequences. It means that whenever we say that one
thing A causes another B, we are really only reporting our
expectation that A will be followed by B in the future. This is a
psychological fact about us and not a fact about the world. But if
we try to show the rational grounding of our expectation, we
cannot do so. Even if A was followed by B innumerable times in
the past, that does not justify our claim to know that it will do so
again in the future” (Palmer, p. 188). With this idea Hume really
threw a wrench into the system and it is the reason why scholars
can’t really move past him until they try to solve the dilemma that
he set up.
Essentially this comes down to questioning the laws of nature. It is
already radical to question God, but now nature as well? Yes! How
can we know that the laws of nature that have worked in the past
will continue to work in the future? According to Hume we can’t.
Now if this seems like a stunning assertion about the world and
how can we understand it, it has more personal impact when we try
to understand what we mean when we talk about ourselves having
a “self.” Hume would ask us what our idea of “self” corresponds
to? What experience of a self do we have? And if you closely
analyze what you call your “self” you will see that there is not this
“simple, indubitable, absolutely certain, eternal soul that Descartes
had claimed it to be” (Palmer, pp. 188-189). Rather, “Hume found,
according to his method, that there is no such idea as self. The socalled self proves to be a bundle or collection of different
perceptions [such as heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred,
pain or pleasure] which succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement” (Palmer, p. 189).
In other words, look deeply inside and see if you can find such a
thing as a self. According to Hume, you can’t. And what is very
interesting to me personally is that from a completely different
place Buddhist philosophy says the same thing. A Zen master will
say, “Show me your self” and you can’t do it. You can show
constantly changing thoughts, perceptions, emotions, sensations,
etc. but nothing that might be a self in any traditional
understanding of the word. Therefore the Buddhists teach as one of
their main truths “Anatman,” meaning no self. And since so much
of our misery and suffering comes from worrying about and doing
whatever we can to protect the self and provide for it and save it
from dying, it apparently comes as a huge relief to realize that the
whole thing is not true in the first place! Needless to say Buddhist
philosophers have found Hume much more interesting than
Western philosophers traditionally have.
Reflections on Hume
In one stroke Hume managed to wipe out hundreds of philosophers
and philosophies that relied on the human ability to know certain
things with surety. “David Hume had consistently and vigorously
followed the program of empiricism to its logical conclusion. The
results were disastrous for the philosophical enterprise. The sphere
of rationality was found to be very small indeed, reduced as it was
to verbal truths and descriptions of sense data; yet nearly
everything that interested people as philosophers or
nonphilosophers fell beyond those limits. Hume believed he had
shown that human life was incompatible with rationality and that
human endeavors always had to be extrarational, hence irrational.
(Rationally, I can never know that the loaf of bread that nourished
me yesterday will nourish me today, hence I can never be
rationally motivated to eat.) But Hume knew perfectly well that the
meager fruits of philosophy could not sustain the human being.
Even while writing his philosophical manuscript he knew that,
once he put down his pen, he too would revert to the normal,
illogical beliefs of humanity - namely beliefs in self, world, and
causality (if not God). He even suggested, maybe with tongue in
cheek, that perhaps we should abandon philosophy and take to
tending sheep instead” (Palmer, pp. 189-190). If you are not
attached to your thoughts and your mind then there is no real
concern. But because most of us do in fact take our thoughts
seriously and think we can trust how we think about the world
Hume’s philosophy and his deep skepticism were very unnerving.
The great Prussian philosopher Kant, for example, was very
disturbed by Hume’s work and spent many years working out a
response. And, no doubt about it, Hume is disturbing. It can really
shake us up to realize deeply how much we take for granted as
knowledge is really simply beliefs about how things are without
really understanding them. This is rational dogmatism, the belief
that we can understand and figure out not only the simplest things,
but also the greatest mysteries of the universe. Hume would say
that we should not only forget the great mysteries, we should even
be cautious about the most simple every day things. “He
represents, in a certain sense, a dead end; in his direction, it is
impossible to go further. To refute him has been ever since he
wrote, a favorite pastime among metaphysicians” Russell, p. 659).
Hume’s philosophy not only shows us the dogmatism of reason, it
also shows us that a philosophy based purely on empirical
observations ends up proving only that we can know nothing. He
starts out wanting us to be sensible and careful observers only to
show us that we can’t learn anything at all. In the process Hume
proves to be personally inconsistent, because after proving our
inability to really know anything, he goes on to talk as if he knew
all sorts of things. In other words, if Spinoza was special because
he was able to live his philosophy, Hume stands out for not being
able to live his! But who could?
Some would argue that Hume has yet to be successfully refuted. In
my mind, Western philosophy has gotten stuck in the mud and it
needs to be towed out. But it can’t tow itself out. It needs to call a
tow truck, and the tow truck will come from the East. I would
suggest that if a refutation were to be successful, it would come
from the East rather than the West because the East has been
dealing with this much longer. The East would start by going back
to the question of the self. It would agree with Hume that no self
could be found. But rather than stop there it would ask the further
question, what part of us sees this? That is, what part of our minds
can understand that we cannot understand? Normally we are so
taken by what we see that we forget that we are seeing. The magic
is not what we see; it is the seeing itself!