Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican. Oxford World’s Classics; (Oxford: 2007).
I have avoided reading Hume (1711-76) until recently. I have belonged to that tribe which much preferred to read anything in a foreign language, than one of the two systematic treatises of philosophy, by David Hume, who is probably the classic and definitive type of the English language philosopher.
It is well known, that Ludwig Wittgenstein refused to read Hume. But we know about this Enlightenment era philosopher from hearsay; we already know about his atheism, his extreme scepticism, and above all his complacent pompous trust in the type of society he lived in. And Hume’s lack of ambition for gaining possession of any ultimate truth, any strenuously attained secret of life, is off putting, to a younger man, as I was once was.
It is preferable to read any kind of fantastic speculation, than to find yourself looking in the mirror, to see your own mind in a totally average, rational state of mind; to see a dismissive and realistic man looking back at you, like your father, shaking his head, so to speak.
But I have been slowly more accepting of this type of the English philosopher, and read Hume’s mature work of philosophy, precisely because I have become more English with time, and to some extent, I have turned into one of his peers. The religious turn of my life, and my confidence in theology, and a kind of national emergency, has made me less bothered about his subtle atheism, and more accepting of his brand.
What we know most about Hume, even without having read him, is that he was the forerunner of Kant; and that his doubts about God moved Kant to write his major works. And we do find, that Hume’s inspiration seems to have been to refute and destroy the scholastic and theological strain in prior philosophy. Kant is certainly a philosopher everyone should read, and read so as to find metaphysical depth; Kant gave rise to dozens of major philosophical investigations; Hume only gave rise to Kant.
Hume appears to have written only two works of formal metaphysics. The first when he was a young man, which he called A Treatise of Human Nature; and when around a decade later, he began work on a revised and shorter version, in which his metaphysics has not changed significantly, except that it is expressed in a more pleasing and readable way. I’m not intrested in the first Treatise, which I find both boring and also badly written; but the second, which he called ‘An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding’, is something one can read, and take an interest in.
The first chapter in that book, is concerned with the question of whether, philosophy can socially useful, or interesting enough, to justify a book; typically, Hume already presupposes a certain kind of reader, and certain kind of generally modern British people, the culture of London in the 1700s. It is a well ordered country, with a class of educated people, who are familiar with Rome, and think of themselves as a modern Roman citizen in a universal civilisation.
Hume appears on the surface to not take philosophy too seriously, except insofar as it represents an opposition to organised religion. That seems to be one of a couple of reasons which made him write his book. But he was also motivated to be famous, and he did expect his books to be received and read widely.
The failure of the first, the Treatise (1739), published when he was twenty-eight years old, disappointed him, and he refined and changed his ideas only modestly, in the second work, the Enquiry (1748). As I have said, what characterises the second book is the fluency of its prose, especially when I compare it with the laborious style of Heidegger or Kant, or the more or less tacit focus of its attack, scholasticism.
Hume’s principle idea, was to insist that ‘human understanding’ cannot grasp the first cause, or the essential unity of any thing which happens in the world. Since he was a determinist, he seems to have believed that there was a way in which all things are joined into a single process; and yet, he says, mere human beings cannot know what it is. I would point out that this modesty about ‘the human’ understanding, whether Hume knew this or not, is a consequence of the Chrsitian religious view of existence. Locke had also written his major work, An Essay on Human Understanding, but had made it clear, that human understanding is to be contrasted with divine understanding. It makes me wonder if Hume, who claimed to dislike Christianity, if he had been slightly more intelligent, might have taken the opportunity to study the understanding in itself; but again, he was a man of his time and a certain sort of rather artificial society.
And, so, accepting that philosophy should only concern itself with ‘human’ understanding, he set out his view of it as follows: the human mind sees only ideas of things, and not the things in themselves. Anything which can be known, is known only as an idea in the mind. Since the human mind can only ever have an acquaintance with ideas, then we can never know the thing in itself. And, if we were to attempt to know more than ideas, then we would need to combine several ideas in to a perfect synthesis, to represent everything, but this is beyond human capacity. We only know ideas, and not what we might conveniently call the world, itself.
There are two sorts of ideas, namely sense impressions which the mind experiences intensely, and something almost the same, but less intensely, namely memories, and concepts, which are both things which are brought to mind but which are not present in time while we know them. But as for the world in itself, that is never something the understanding can deal with.
And therefore, our understanding deals only with discrete ideas. And these are all of them gained from experience, and never from any pre-existing ideas with which we are born. In fact, there seems to be nothing at all that we know, which has not been gained by experience.
Therefore, we are not entitled to claim to know anything about the general nature of the world or existence, which cannot be shown to have originally been found in direct experience, either in the experience of ourselves, or the experience of others who are trustworthy members of our society. And, we are not justified in imputing to the nature of things, or to the first cause, namely God, any qualities which are not evident in our experience. This is somethnign Hume is keen to belabour and to spell out in many ways: it is right for us to guess that there is a cause for any effect. if the ground is wet outside, we can legitimately claim that it might have been raining. And, if we observe the world, we might conclude legimately, that there is a first cause of it which gave rise to it, or sustains it. But the nature of that first cause, can only be guessed at, based on the effects, and the type of world we find. For instance, we cannot say that there is such a thing as justice guiding and building or life or world, as its cause, until we have seen evidence of that justice does universally prevail; and if there were to be many instances of injustice in the world at large, then it would be improper to assume that justice or a guiding hand of right, is at the cause or nature of the world.
We have no experience of any First Cause, and so it is improper to claim that there is one. In various ways, Hume elaborates on this theme. The Enquiry is a short work, and beyond these basic principles, as I have just outlined them, it does not contain a great deal more; but it is as it was said by Locke in his Enquiry, in the Preface to the Reader, the same point must be made over and over again, but in different ways, so as to suit the abilities and tastes of various readers, and to ensure the point has been made and proven.
It could be put like this, that we expect a unity, and feel that there must be a purpose to life, as an underlying cause for whatever we experience. But our ideas, derived from experience, do not contain any unified cause; and how we combine our ideas is limited to mere contiguity, and above all, the notion of cause and effect. So, forming a notion of the great first cause is not within our means.
We are not born with any knowledge, and cannot make recourse to prior knowledge. So, all our knowledge is derived from habitual contact with the way things are. That time flows in one direction is something we know from experience alone; and the apparent laws of nature are also only true because we have grown accustomed to them. They could at some time, stop working as they do.
And, I think there is one final large suggestion, of some importance; he says that what we know is not known as a certainty, but rather as a matter of belief. When we are certain of anything, we feel, rather than know that it is certain.
Hume has observed ‘human understanding’ rather from the outside, as an object. He has observed himself as an Englishman customarily acts and thinks, and described this. This is not entirely dissimilar to the approach taken by the later Wittgenstein, who was always asking how we actually live, how we really think in normal life, and how all of this can be expressed and agreed upon; you could say, that Wittgenstein and the modern school of philosophy in English continued to attempt to do the same thing; and that this is why Wittgenstein refused to read him: they were irritatingly too close to each other.
I want to bring in my own response to Hume, for I do not find his method or observation sympathetic, and have read him with some enjoyment, to my surprise. My way of approach is not like his or like Wittgenstein’s. Here is why: I think that Hume has failed to take himself into account. He studied the world, and he studied ‘man’; but he did not study himself.
His primary position seems to be, that we have no justification for assuming, that there is a unity, which we ought to be able to know, but do not. Men are only able to know about individual single ideas, from experience delivered by their limited sense. And, secondly, that there certainly cannot be a personality or conscious Creator of the world, since there is no evidence in the ideas presented to us by experience, of such a thing.
I begin from a similar start point, but observe that there is a unity in existence, namely consciousness itself. Consciousness is prior to ‘human understanding’, or the ‘human’; we can say, that we chose to become human, after we have already become conscious. I think Leibniz had already made this point: the human life and its consciousness and intellect, is a single and self-contained unity, from which nothing is excluded; it is a totality.
And second, Hume insists that there is no empirical evidence for a conscious or Godlike agent, underlying and structuring the world in itself. If we treat all the world as a set of effects caused by the First Cause, then the effects do not indicate an intelligent First Cause. However, there certainly is a personality and an intellect in the effects accompanying all things, namely, my own, or our own. If we look at ourselves, we find an intellect always working, and it is possible to consider this an effect of an intelligent first cause.
For reasons which I think are personal to him, and to his era, Hume disdained to notice these facts, which are delivered by immediate experience. I cannot exactly claim to have invented them myself, either. Immediately after Hume’s book reached Germany, Kant began thinking along the same lines as I. Or, at least, my objections belong to the spirit if not the letter of the works of Kant, and those who came after him. That is, I know more than Hume, because of what Hume himself gave rise to, in the men who came after, about whom I know, and about whom he did not know.
I don’t think there is any question, but that Hume wrote his Treatise not entirely for dispassionate reasons of knowledge alone. His text makes abusive gestures to the Catholic Church and to the ‘schoolmen’ throughout; it concludes with two sections specifically aimed at refuting ideas of immortality, and revealed religion, as well as against miracles. He intended, that is to say, to hold a conversation with the established European church.
In the appendix to the work as published by Oxford World’s Classics, there are several other shorter works which take up the same themes and in the same spirit; and it was clearly a fixed idea with Hume, that philosophy and religion share the same ground, and must do battle. Nonetheless, although Hume and I have religious and epistemic differences, there are philosophical points in his book which have some value, which I will rehearse again; then I will make a detour through what I consider to be a refutation of Hume, and then a novel defence of religion; before making some concluding remarks.
I think that studies of the history of philosophy usually fixate on Hume’s theory of ideas, and how they are two-fold: ideas, he said, are either memories, or they are direct immediate experience. A historical study of Hume ought then proceed to discuss his theory of learning and composing knowledge, which he said is possible when the mind sets about connecting ideas together. And that these connections are made by habit; after becoming accustomed to a specific cause being regularly followed by an effect, for instance, our minds grow to associate one thing with another, and then we have some knowledge about it. This theory is meant to deny that there is any pre-existing knowledge, or any functions of the mind or understanding, with which human beings are born. So, contrary to Socrates, for instance, Hume would say that there are no pre-existing ideas, and that all knowledge derives from experience, and that it is only by custom that we possess; and that we have a strong feeling that something is true, rather than false, which is what certainty is.
Socrates, to give an example of the theory of knowledge with which Hume takes issue, held that everyone learns for himself, and rather remembers pre-existing knowledge. Socrates said, that neither teachers nor experience can teach a man anything, but that they can only help him to discover what he already knows, as if knowledge were outside life and time, and the mind has the task of finding that knowledge in the timeless.
For, if anyone is going to learn, then he must want to learn; and that means, he is seeking for something; but it is impossible to seek for what you do not know about in advance. Hence, you already know what you are looking for; you just need to remember it clearly.
The job of the teacher or experience, is therefore more or less just to prompt people to start looking, and according to Socrates, the teacher has the job of making the student enjoy the search, and do it for himself. In rough outline, this is one of the arguments for the pre-existing ideas. Ideas do seem to exist in the eternal world, despite the atheistic claims of Hume and the like. For instance, how do we recognise a tree, unless there is a concept of it in our mind which is prior to the tree's appearance before us? You have first to have a notion of trees, before you can spot them. And if we say that people learn to have the concept of 'tree', then the question is: how can you learn an idea? Do ideas seem to be the kind of thing we can learn? The answer is not clear.
The Enquiry has twelve sections; it proceeds from a general discussion of the utility of philosophy in section one; he says that it has a social purpose, since it provides ‘accuracy’ of thought, and brings society nearer to perfection. And learning is a pleasure in itself. Philosophy can also do away with prejudice and superstition, and in this way, it does provide an antagonist to ‘religion’. Philosophy can bring to light, the secret principles of the understanding and the mind, just as Newton had brought to light to the principles of the heavens.
We have already said, that Hume considers ideas, the things the mind works with, are of two kinds; but that they both derive only from experience or ‘impressions’. Any idea derived from anything else he dismisses as fake, in section two. And next, he explains that ideas seem to him to be combined in only three possible ways: by their resemblance, their contiguity or nearness, and their relationship of cause to effect.
In section four he explains that scepticism about all knowledge is the correct attitude toward it, since all knowledge concerns matters of fact; but that a statement of fact can be denied, and the denial can still be true. That is, there is no inherent truth about a statement relating to facts; rather, only experience can prove whether such statements are true or not. Everything falls under this condition, including matters which appear to be ‘laws of nature’; and generally, any law of nature is a matter of belief, and not an absolute truth. Every combination of ideas which depends on cause and effect, is contingent on our experience; it has its ground in our experience of it in specific instances, and it cannot be considered a universal and as it were eternal ideal fact.
“When again it is asked, What is the foundation of all our reasonings and conclusions concerning that relation [of cause and effect]? it may be replied in one word, EXPERIENCE.” (p. 23).
So, in section five, Hume examines the world as we are forced to know it. He says that we live as if the world were unified and lawful, but only because we chose to do so. Nevertheless, it is pieced together by cause and effect thinking, which itself is only based on our most up-to-date experiences, and there is no deeper ground to it. We do not see the world in itself, as a whole, or, we do not see what it is that indubitably makes a cause precede any effect. This is because the human understanding is only capable of dealing in ideas, and not the thing in itself. So, when we assert that something is absolutely true of any fact, this is nothing more than a firm conviction, or a feeling, or a belief. He then provides us with a general law of the human understanding: that belief accompanies certain causes and effects, and does not accompany others. That is, what we consider to be knowledge, due to the combination of ideas, depends on belief.
In section six he asserts, that neither freedom of the will, nor chance, exist. That is, we are not justified by any experience, in believing in freedom of the will. This because, our experience shows us that among objects, every cause always seems to produce the same effects, and hence, the world appears to be determined. In the next section he says that we have no understanding of how human decisions can relate to the physical body, and therefore, that the human will is an illusion which does not exist. For, power or force, and decision do not seem to have any medium in which they can operate. Nobody has ever seen ‘force’ or ‘energy’, and they seem to be convenient ways of speaking about the world, and may be part of the thing in itself, but are not facts. And since our ideas derive from sensations, and we have no sensation of energy, then it is not a part of knowledge we can simply accept. The same applies to the human ‘will’, or choice of action.
Hume separates the body from the mind, and discusses how the action of the body as a result of a decision, must pass through a sequence of causes and effects which we cannot understand. And because he has already said that the world is predictable, then there is no reason not to believe, that humans are also entirely predictable in their activity, and that their choices are predetermined for them by circumstances. His intention here, is to deny both the activity of a Supreme Being, and also the activity of a soul which can chose to do good or evil. Our bodies follow the same laws as everything else, innert or living.
“But are we not equally ignorant of the manner or force by which a mind, even the supreme mind, operates either on itself or on a body?” (53).
Section eight reaffirms this principle in general terms, proving that human beings follow laws of action. He denies that a man can prove his freedom of will. The world is an ‘immense machine’ of which we are simply one small part (72). I think that at this point, the moral component, and perhaps the inspiration for the whole book, finally comes to expression, as it moves into what we might call ethical and religious considerations. Men are no different from animals, in that they are creatures of habit, and custom:
“Though the instinct be different, yet still it is an instinct, which teaches a man to avoid the fire; as much as that, which teaches a bird, with such exactness, the art of incubation, and the whole economy and order of its nursery” (78).
A man has no choice but to avoid fire. Indeed, section nine is concerned with questions about animals, instinct, and the minor differences between the two. Section ten denies that miracles are possible, since by definition they are impossible, and even if one were to occur, it is the rational man’s responsibility to continue to deny that it happened. The final two sections deal with an afterlife, and how Hume prefers the atheist philosophy. The afterlife is denied, since we have no grounds to believe that the human soul is in anyway the creation of a conscious plan by the Creator. He explains this position, by saying that we are not justified in presuming an intelligent agent or plan for the world or humans, on any basis other than our experiences, and we do not have experiences which justify inferring such a conscious creator with any intentions for us.
It would be impossible to deny, that this book is coherent and clear, and that Hume had a good prose style. The book is a classic statement of the empirical British school of philosophy; and if I am right, then a kind of intentional and aggressive anti-Christianity is part of the intent of ‘empiricism’. It is almost as if, Hume would not have written this book, and certainly would have written it differently, if he did not also want to combat Christianity.
As we have said, there were several major European responses to Hume, in Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Kierkegaard and Heidegger; so answers, which tend toward investigations into consciousness itself, are not unknown to us. But I want to make general observations of my own, while remaining aware of these developments.
The weakest part of this metaphysics, it seems to me, is the argument for determinism. I can’t see how a handful of experiences of cause and effect in nature, can justify the idea of the universe as a sort of big clockwork. It is not enough to allow, that this is merely a belief that some people have. Hume has not proven it sufficiently, and it is a big presumption to have made. But more fundamentally, Hume has either by choice or accident, ignored his own agency and consciousness in his account of life. We obviously do seem to have agency, and that is something gained by experience, and obviously immediately true. We also have a consciousness, which is different from the mind, and precedes and determines what our experiences will or will not be. There are, indeed, ways in which consciousness can alter experience, and in a passive and non-destructive way, consciousness may become indifferent to ideas, impressions, and experience, while still remaining itself, and still performing acts of understanding.
Furthermore, as already said, if we are looking for a personality inside creation, of a unique and dominating type, then there is one immediately at hand, namely our own. And if we treat this as an effect, or a creation, then we are justified in postulating or speculating about a greater mind which gave rise to it.
Consciousness and freedom consistently shape, and order life and experience. It is difficult, it is true, to pin down consciousness and to let it see itself. And we have not properly understood what observation of consciousness by consciousness itself, can achieve. But it is obvious, that in its total freedom, there is a distinction between the awareness which is primordial and grounding, which can as it were retreat into the desert of nothing and remain awake, on the one hand; and man and human life, and social engagement, which Hume considered to be ‘human’, on the other. So, Hume, it is plain, expresses the philosophical beliefs of an Englishman, who has chosen to lead a particular sort of life, in a society of peers, and so on.
In some way yet to be defined, the philosophy which we ought to be doing, at a grounding level, so as to discover universal principles, should not confine or collapse itself down, into ‘human understanding’. To speak of human understanding is to have already chosen a form of living, an empirical and sense-based type of knowledge, and to speak of that knowledge with similarly fated men, who have collapsed the wave function, so to speak, and become Englishmen. Such humans have a fate, a destiny, a place in history. But latent inside every man, is the primordial awareness without any content of a specific kind, which is the potential. In meditation, outside the world, a man prepares for life, and prepares to assume his role; and it does not concern me, that meditation is outside or beyond experience. It is simply indubitable, that before becoming a standard issue ‘man’, consciousness must decide to take on selfhood, and become somebody, individual. It precedes humanity.
I can imagine that Hume would disdain carrying out philosophical experiments into consciousness refinement, and withdrawal from the world, perhaps for moral reasons, and perhaps because it did not suit his taste. Yet, if we are looking for the deeper foundations of knowledge, and the rules underlying the world, it would be wrong not to take into account, the fact that it is possible for men to individually train their consciousness; and to deny that some of them claim to receive the Holy Spirit in grace, and so on. These things which are contrary to the spirit of empiricism, but nevertheless they seem to have some importance when it comes to philosophy, and the training of our understanding. But how important this kind of religious behaviour is, and what it achieves, must be discussed elsewhere.
If nothing else, at this moment, we can claim, that consciousness, which we know to exist immediately, is able to take itself out of the chain of causes and effects, because it is immaterial. And, it has for its object, the self in itself, and the supreme being, can be asserted to have consciousness, because we have immediate experience of it, in our own case. But, that our consciousness precedes the mind and experience, is all we need to say for now, and to indicate, that it is something which Hume did not discover or care to know about. Looking out at the world, and at our high knowledge from experience of the world, Hume missed out the thing which was lying most immediately all around him, the thing which was doing the philosophy; his own self and its freedom and awareness, which are the grounds for everything else.
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