Introduction
Empiricism Made Easy
Opening his 1742 essay, ‘Of Essay-Writing’, David Hume distinguishes between the ‘learned ’ and the ‘conversible’ spheres of intellect:
The elegant Part of Mankind, who are not immers’d in the animal Life, but employ themselves in the Operations of the Mind, may be divided into the learned and conversible. The Learned are such as have chosen for their Portion the higher and more difficult Operations of the Mind, which require Leisure and Solitude, and cannot be brought to Perfection, without long Preparation and severe Labour. The conversible World join to a sociable Disposition, and a Taste of Pleasure, an Inclination to the easier and more gentle Exercises of the Understanding.1
This division, decried by Hume as ‘the great Defect of the last Age’, was one that he laboured to overcome, styling himself as ‘a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation.’ 2 Hume’s courteous and diplomatic ‘Ambassador’ would later shape the more confident authorial persona of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), both of which seek to effect a dialogue between the abstruse but ‘accurate and abstract’ philosophy epitomized by Aristotle and the ‘easy and humane’ arts of rhetoric, sentiment and taste practised by Cicero.3 Since ‘nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race’, Hume surmises, the truest philosophy will also be that which proves to be most useful, involving a fruitful exchange between the exacting methods of the ‘anatomist’ and the figurative skills of the ‘painter.’4
1 David Hume, ‘Of Essay-Writing’, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary 1741–77, ed. Eugene F. Miller (1985), p. 533.
2 Hume, Essays pp. 534–5.
3 Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (1975), p. 9.
4 Hume, Enquiries pp. 9–10. Hume had been far less confident about reconciling these roles while working on the Treatise of Human Nature. Responding to Francis Hutcheson’s claim that the third book of the Treatise ‘wants a certain Warmth in the Cause of Virtue’, Hume argues that ‘[o]ne may consider it [i.e. the mind] either as an Anatomist or as a Painter; either to discover its most secret Springs & Principles or to describe the Grace & beauty of its Actions. I imagine it impossible to conjoin these two Views.’ (‘To Frances Hutcheson’, 17 September 1739, letter 13 of The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, vol. 1 [1932], p. 32). See also Susan Manning, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, eds. H.B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson, vol. 4 (1997), p. 588: Manning notes that ‘[t]he opposition of the “anatomist” and the “painter”, and the possibility of bringing them together in writing, constantly unites the concerns of philosophy and literary criticism in the eighteenth century.’ For a thorough analysis of the painter/anatomist analogy in the context of Hume’s relation to Hutcheson and his followers, see M.A. Stewart, ‘Two Species of Philosophy: The Historical
Hume presents his attempt to reconcile the most valuable elements of Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions as a corrective to his earlier Treatise of Human Nature (1739–41), in which his youthful dedication to Aristotelian abstruseness had made for a distinctly un-easy manner and a tone that veered between breezy overconfidence, irony, and melancholy.5 From a modern perspective, it is tempting to read Hume’s attempts to assert a measure of control over his speculative activities as an episode in the struggle between literature and philosophy—a contest, as Mark Edmundson observes, that was already ancient in Plato’s time.6 Drawing disciplinary boundaries, however, can be a hazardous undertaking, and nowhere more so than in the crucible of the Enlightenment, where both poetry and philosophy are apt to swing between the didactic and the pragmatic. Accordingly, in thinking about the tensions between Hume’s ‘painter’ and ‘anatomist’, it is useful to keep another distinction in play, one that Stanley Fish borrows from Richard Lanham. Lanham distinguishes between two intellectual postures, which, he claims, have characterized Western thought throughout its history: those represented by the species ‘homo rhetoricus’ (rhetorical man) and ‘ homo seriosus ’ (serious man). In Lanham’s words, while homo seriosus ‘possesses a central self, an irreducible identity’, homo rhetoricus ‘is an actor; his reality public, dramatic’, whose lowest common denominator in life ‘is a social situation.’7
Fish and Lanham’s distinction is about as sweeping as they come, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Nietzsche’s characterization of the ‘man of reason’ and the ‘man of intuition.’8 Nonetheless, it usefully describes a tension that exists within the work of Hume, one that cuts across the fledgling disciplinary boundaries of modern philosophy, rhetoric, and literature.9 Moreover, it addresses an issue that many intellectual historians tend to overlook: the point at which questions of intellectual substance and debate are determined by matters of literary form and style. Consequently, while the contributions of scholars such as Israel and Rasmussen have proved invaluable to our understanding of ‘radical’ and ‘pragmatic’ currents in Enlightenment thought, they leave unexamined the question of the extent to which intellectual positions depend, in addition to their conceptual frameworks, upon the rhetorical techniques and literary strategies of the texts through which they
Significance of the First Enquiry’, Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry, ed. Peter Millican (2002), pp. 67–95. I return to this issue in Chapter 4.
5 See the ‘Advertisement’ to the first Enquiry, which claims that in the latter volume, ‘some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected.’ (p. 2).
6 Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (1995), p. 1.
7 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), pp. 482–3.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (2010), p. 773: Nietzsche describes the man of reason as ‘fearful of intuition’, ‘unartistic’, and ‘guided by concepts and abstractions’ in his efforts to be ‘as free as possible of pain’, while the man of intuition is ‘unreasonable’, ‘filled with scorn for abstraction’, and gaining through his intuition ‘a constant stream of brightness’.
9 Other commentators have drawn similar comparisons. In The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (1994), p. 160, Adam Potkay suggests that Hume ‘may indeed be read as the type of Lanham’s homo rhetoricus: pragmatic, shy of absolute convictions, and opposed to any type of zealousness’. See also Leo Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (1989), p. 25: Damrosch contrasts Hume’s ‘homo rhetoricus’, with Samuel Johnson’s ‘homo seriosus’.
are expounded.10 Hume’s writing is crucial to this issue because of the fundamentally rhetorical way in which he first triggers and then responds to a crisis within empiricism. Having assumed the guise of an Aristotelian/Newtonian homo seriosus so that he can demonstrate the inescapability of philosophical scepticism, Hume switches roles, taking on the persona of a Ciceronian homo rhetoricus and exchanging the dominions of learning for those of conversation. Hume does this not to nullify scepticism, but to alter the context in which it is understood and evaluated. As he observed, a truly ‘Academic’ scepticism is sceptical even of its own doubts, since ‘[t]he reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life, or eradicate any affection. The air is too fine to breathe in, where it is above the winds and clouds of the atmosphere.’11 Overcoming scepticism meant, in a sense, not overcoming it; it meant changing the metaphors that governed philosophical thinking. In the Treatise, Hume’s reaction to sceptical paralysis had been to vacillate between the sociability of urban life, in which he is ‘absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life’, and the study, where he ‘cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me.’12 In his essays and in the Enquiries, however, Hume exchanges evasion for transformation: in these works, the complexion of philosophy fundamentally alters, becoming not literature, exactly, but an ‘easier’ and more ‘sociable’ mode of discourse.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Exploring some of the consequences of this transformation, both for Hume and for those writing in his wake, forms one of the three principal tasks of this book. At this point I should note that, while Hume’s shadow is the longest cast by any
10 See Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), p. 16: Israel’s conception of ‘Radical Enlightenment’, defined as ‘a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality, individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state’ (p. vii) is fundamentally political rather than epistemological in construction, and consequently of limited use here. Nonetheless, Israel locates Hume squarely in the camp of the reactionary, Moderate Enlightenment, noting that his scepticism became a ‘useful philosophical resource against egalitarian and democratic ideas’. Similarly political in its approach is Dennis C. Rasmussen’s account of Hume and Smith’s ‘nonfoundationalist form of liberalism’ in The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (2013). Liberalism, he claims, ‘emphasized the importance of context in the formulation of moral standards’, ‘stressed the limits and fallibility of human understanding’, and ‘saw people as inherently social and sought to unite them in commerce’ (p. 4). While this account is broadly in line with the picture presented here, Rasmussen, like Israel, does not focus on the significance of ‘social empiricism’ and its wider implications for the relationship between literature and philosophy as forms of writing.
11 David Hume, ‘The Sceptic’, Essays, p. 172.
12 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, ed. P.H. Nidditch (1978), pp. 269–70.
writer over the concerns of this study, it is not my purpose to present a complete and comprehensive account of his career and thought. In pursuing its argument, the current study has been obliged to cut its coat according to its cloth. For example, Hume’s work on politics and religion, while of unquestionable significance for intellectual history, falls outside the interests of the present volume, and so readers who bring to it an expectation of finding a full narrative of Hume’s intellectual development are bound to be disappointed. Instead, I have tried to highlight and explore the vital importance of one leading aspect of Hume’s thought (the socialization of reason) for the development of the familiar essay.
Focusing upon this feature of Hume’s thinking is justified both by its significance and by the surprising extent to which it has been overlooked. Since Norman Kemp Smith’s depiction of a non-sceptical, realist Hume, much of the debate over his philosophical legacy has concentrated upon the contested idea of ‘naturalism.’13 Comparatively less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which the naturalized, social epistemologies of Hume and Reid instigate a pragmatic turn in eighteenth-century empiricism. I argue that this turn is associated with a persistent tension in eighteenth-century thought between Newtonian and Ciceronian models of rationality: in other words, between an objective, plenary system of knowledge and an accumulation of essayistic insights into virtue and the practicalities of living a good life. Accordingly, in this study I will characterize the Humean strategy as one that effects a transition from a model of thought based upon objectivity (i.e. upon an epistemological binary of subject/object) to one that is based upon an epistemologically radical idea of intersubjectivity. By downgrading ‘correspondence’ theories of truth and meaning, which tend to treat experience as a form of mental representation, Hume moves away from the Lockean picture of a punctual subjectivity constituted by a manifold of atomized experiences (ideas and impressions) and underwritten by a providential rationality. In its place, he revives an older model of ‘experience’ as based in trial and experiment.14 As the definitions of ‘experience’, ‘empiricism’, and their cognate terms in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary reveal, this latter notion, which prioritizes practice rather than phenomena, was still current at the time; in turn, it is associated with a heightened awareness of the role of communicative action in knowledge formation. Once epistemological relations are reformulated in terms of social relationships, the most pressing questions that arise relate not to objective truths but to the status of the norms and bonds that regulate the community of knowledge. This ultimately produces a concern with what might be considered as the social a priori of knowledge: rational accommodation, trust, and testimony. Consequently, the line between trusting persons and trusting the ‘testimony’ of sense begins to blur.
13 See Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines (2005).
14 See also John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (1982), p. 45: Sitter claims that between the Treatise and Enquiries Hume’s theory of knowledge underwent ‘an important change of focus away from the supposed atoms of experience to an experiencing mind, actively grasping its world’.
For Hume, the intersubjective, trusting intellect is the communicative intellect; reason itself is based upon communication. The background to this assumption is a peculiarly Scottish insistence that society, conceived as a set of interdependent institutions and behaviours, precedes rationality—a conviction that, in turn, directs Enlightenment debate towards the pragmatic aspects of language. As will be seen, Hume’s account of promises and Thomas Reid’s interest in the illocutionary dimension of language contribute to the development of a performative conception of the speech-act situation—indeed, Reid’s linguistic theory challenges the whole epistemological enterprise, replacing it with a hermeneutics of perception that ultimately rests upon trust. Hume’s conventionalist account of meaning, meanwhile, feeds into broader developments in eighteenth-century linguistics, culminating in the gradual detachment of language from the idea of mental ‘contents’ and a reappraisal of the relationship between language, thought, and reality. As Nicholas Phillipson observes, ‘[f]or Hume, the story of making judgements was a story about human beings’ encounters with common life and . . . that was a matter of language.’15 Against the Lockean idea that reference is achieved via the use of arbitrary signs, Hume argues that reference is always underdetermined by the referent: language, like reason, is fundamentally conventional. It is this claim that would ultimately encourage attempts by Tooke, Burke, Bentham, and Dugald Stewart to engineer a shift from meaning as ‘aggregative’ to meaning as contextual or ‘propositional’. Foregrounding questions of performance in turn refocuses philosophical attention upon issues of style and manner. Thanks to Hume, literary form itself becomes a philosophical issue. As Michael Prince observes, it was a ‘given for Enlightenment authors . . . that style is substance, that political, theological, and philosophical polemics are carried out as much by how one writes as by what one writes.’16 This brings me to the second of this study’s main claims, which is that the protean and polyphonic genre of the ‘familiar’ essay comes to be seen by some philosophical writers as an important tool for creating and sustaining intersubjective consensus. For Hume and many subsequent writers, the familiar essay, with its amenability to tentative, unmethodical improvisation and friendly conversation, offers a kind of literary embodiment for reason, based on custom, habit, and sentiment.17 And yet, at the same time, its somatic character and lack of determinate form means that the essay is more liable than other genres (such as the novel) to be pulled in contrary directions in the struggle between learning and conversation, between the epistemological models of Newton and Cicero. Adapting Adorno’s account of the essay as ‘the critical form par excellence’, I discuss the tensions between the ‘closed’, systematic, or apodictic essay and more ‘open’, familiar or performative forms. I also explore
15 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Polites, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture’, Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (1987), p. 237.
16 Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (1996), p. 136.
17 Hume published the Essays, Moral and Political in 1741–2. In addition, the first Enquiry originally appeared under the title Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
the causes and consequences of the genre’s division into its formal (academic) and experimental (familiar) varieties during this period.18
Answering this question will involve examining Enlightenment and Romantic perceptions of the familiar essay as a self-consciously amphibious genre, one that is neither ‘pure’ literature nor philosophy, but which incorporates elements of both. It might be considered that the familiar essay’s tendency to present its subject (and its author’s subjectivity) as something that is performed rather than established or given indicates that the genre fully flourishes only with the advent of Romanticism. Indeed, it could be argued that what distinguishes the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt from those of precursors such as Hume and Johnson is not so much their philosophical ‘content’ as the fact that they make engagement with philosophical problems dependent upon questions of feeling, personality, and manner. In the book’s third main line of inquiry, however, I argue that these Romantic-performative strategies are ones that are shared with essayists across the ‘long’ eighteenth century. What distinguishes the Neoclassical from the Romantic essayist is not performativity per se but what is at stake in the performance of essaying. For the former, the overriding priority is to maintain social norms by policing public discourse; accordingly, the language game engaged by the familiar essay necessitates that certain normative structures are presupposed. In Hume, for instance, such structures are determined by custom and reinforced by the exhibition of courteous manners; in Johnson, they form part of an objective moral order and so are less vulnerable to changes in ‘acceptable’ social habits. In both cases, however, it is assumed that the reader cannot fully appreciate the performance of the author without already sharing a great deal of their ‘common’ background of beliefs. In other words, what is epistemologically at stake for the Neoclassical familiar essayist is the status of a truth whose verifiability is fundamentally (for Hume) or practically (for Johnson) a practical and intersubjective affair.
This Ciceronian and social conception of literary truth contrasts with that of later essayists such as Lamb and Hazlitt. The gesture of the Romantic familiar essay is based upon a very different form of cultural logic. In philosophical Romanticism, the unification of style and substance is underwritten by an ideal presence, whether this is figured (as it is, for instance, in Hazlitt) in terms of the formative power of imagination, or (alternatively, in the case of Lamb) in relation to a borderline, twilight territory of enchanted consciousness. The philosophical preconditions of this strategy had already been established in Germany during the closing years of the eighteenth century. In the pages of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Athenaeum, transcendental logic was deployed to underwrite the epistemological conditions for staking performances of individual power, insight, or whimsicality upon the prerogative of the author’s imagination. According to this logic, the ‘truth’ in relation to which the Romantic familiar essay situates itself is underwritten by
18 T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique 32 (1984), p. 166. As I discuss in Chapter 4, the essay is a genre that tends to resist all attempts at classification. See also Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (2016), p. 33: Siskin identifies the essay as the main competitor genre to ‘system’ in Enlightenment epistemology until the two forms begin to merge around the end of the eighteenth century.
the idea of a transcendentally postulated but unattainable unification of form and content. While neither Lamb nor Hazlitt explicitly endorses this Romantic logic, it remains embedded in their writing tacitly as a proleptic ideal, one that confers upon their essayistic performances, at least potentially, the autotelic status of ‘Literature’. For Hume and Johnson, however, such a consummation was inconceivable: literary language did not aspire to transcend everyday human experience; rather, it confirmed the unity and integrity of shared norms through the practical performance of social virtues and manners. Consequently, as will be seen, the Neoclassical familiar essay operates without the support of the ideal imaginative presence posited by the Romantics, staking its normative and epistemic status instead upon the less secure footing of the intersubjective fictions of belief that Hume had uncovered at the foundations of knowledge.
HUME AND THE ‘DISEASE OF THE LEARNED’
This discovery had initially dismayed Hume. The belletristic confidence with which his essays reinforce the social stability of truth belies an early uneasiness. Indeed, it is possible to see in his idea of an easeful and essayistic empiricism, based upon virtues of character and sociability, the determination of a mature writer to overcome the philosophical awkwardness of the vacillating performances of the Treatise . The rhetorical dissonances of the latter work are foreshadowed by Hume’s earlier, less formal writings, in particular the 1734 letter to Dr Arbuthnot, described by Kemp Smith as ‘the most important of all Hume’s extant letters.’19 Written a few months before settling in France prior to completing the Treatise, the unsent letter establishes the template for much of Hume’s later work by deploying narrative and rhetorical techniques in order to exert control over philosophical problems that threaten to unsettle or even overwhelm the thinker. In doing so, it reveals Hume’s early dissatisfaction with the apodictic aspirations of philosophy and his tentative efforts to construct an alternative: an empiricism based upon intersubjectivity, trust, and style.
The letter begins by recounting Hume’s youthful impatience with the disputes of philosophers and critics. Having decided that ancient moral philosophy suffered from the ‘Inconvenience’ of being ‘entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience’, the young Hume became convinced that all that was needed in reasoning was ‘to throw off all Prejudices.’20 This conviction drove him ‘to seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht’, until at around the age of eighteen, ‘there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of
19 Kemp Smith, David Hume, p. 14. Recent studies have cast doubt on whether Arbuthnot was the intended recipient. See John P. Wright, ‘Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to Physician’, Hume Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): pp. 125–41. Wright suggests that Hume was instead writing to George Cheyne, author of The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (1733). However, even Wright admits that the evidence for this is ‘not definitive’ (p. 125).
20 David Hume, ‘To [Dr George Cheyne]’, [March or April 1734], letter 3 of Letters, vol. 1, p. 16.
Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy
Thought, which transported me beyond Measure [. . .].’21 Hume’s elation, however, lasts only a few months. By the beginning of September 1729, as he recalls, ‘all my Ardor seem’d in a moment to be extinguisht’, to be replaced by a ‘Coldness’ which ‘remain’d for nine Months.’22 This nine-month period of lassitude marks the onset of a malady of reflection, of overthinking, the main symptom of which is a ‘Desertion of the Spirit’ so severe that it is accompanied by physical symptoms:23
At last about Aprile 1730, when I was 19 Years of Age, a Symptom, which I had notic’d a little from the beginning, increased considrably . . . a Ptyalism or Watryness in the mouth. Upon my mentioning it to my Physician, he laught at me, & told me I was now a Brother, for that I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned. Of this he found great Difficulty to preswade me, finding in myself nothing of that lowness of Spirit, which those, who labor under that Distemper so much complain of Tho I was sorry to find myself engag’d with so tedious a Distemper yet the Knowledge of it, set me very much at ease, by satisfying me that my former Coldness, proceeded not from any Defect of Temper or Genius, but from a Disease, to which any one may be subject . . . I have notic’d in the Writings of the French Mysticks that, when they give a History of the Situation of their Souls, they mention a Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit, which frequently returns . . . . I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty parralel, & that their rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflection, & that warmth or Enthusiasm which is inseperable from them.24
More explicitly than in the Treatise, intense philosophical thought is here depicted as a form of illness, the ‘Disease of the Learned’. Hume writes to Arbuthnot as a patient seeking medical advice, one who assumes that, since the condition of the mind and that of the body have ‘a very near Connexion together’, philosophical and physical pathologies are closely related.25 However, one peculiar characteristic of Hume’s distemper is its reflexivity, whereby the very act of reflecting upon his condition prolongs and exacerbates it. On one level, the letter recognizes this, acknowledging that reflective thought will always be a form of cognitive hypochondria, compulsively registering the symptoms of a disease of which it is itself the cause. On another level, however, this very realization itself perpetuates Hume’s malady by extending the pathology of reflection. For Hume, the act of understanding his own distemper wounds where it heals, leaving him in a predicament parallel to that of the ‘French Mysticks’, whose ‘rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflection’. Admitting that both philosophy and mysticism are prone to the effects of excessive ‘Enthusiasm’, Hume attempts to outmanoeuvre reflection with a gesture that he would deploy repeatedly throughout his career. With an insouciant wave of the hand, he changes the subject, deploying caesura as a remedy for reflection. Apologizing for his prolixity, he
21 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 13. Kemp Smith interprets this as a declaration of independence from Locke and Berkeley. He also sees it as indicating that the ‘new Scene of Thought’ Hume had uncovered by extending Frances Hutcheson’s affective theories of moral judgement ‘to our beliefs regarding matters of fact and existence’ marks a ‘crisis’ in his thought (David Hume, p. 20).
22 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 13. 23 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 17.
24 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 14–17. 25 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 16.
Empiricism
9 adds that ‘’tis a Symptom of this Distemper to delight in complaining & talking of itself.’ 26 As Jerome Christensen observes, this rhetorical technique fits with Hume’s general habit of exploiting epistemological paradox ‘as just another articulation, a productive inconsistency’ to be mastered through exercising style as a form of social activity.27
Viewed this way, the importance of the letter emerges in a different light. Its fundamental significance is not, as Kemp Smith claims, that it marks the point at which Hume stumbles upon a new, Hutchesonian solution to a philosophical problem, or even, as M.A. Stewart suggests, that it commemorates a ‘religious crisis’, an attempt ‘to place his early self-appraisal and philosophical reflection within a conventional theistic framework which it cost [Hume] some pains to abandon.’ 28 Hume’s letter indicates his dissatisfaction not so much with a certain philosophical method as with philosophy itself : its narrative is one of how a young thinker arrives at a way of deflating philosophical reflection altogether. In this context, Hume’s philosophical shrug is highly significant. Both the conversion to the ‘new Scene of Thought’ and the illness that follow it are functioning parts of a narrative constructed not to relate Hume’s discovery of a new system of philosophy (whether ‘sentimental’, ‘naturalistic’, or otherwise), but to demonstrate, through a performance of Enlightened indifference, the limitations of the philosophical attitude itself. In this respect, the letter to Arbuthnot shares with Hume’s later work a tendency to engage rhetorically with problems that, though initially presented as philosophical, ultimately give way to questions of living. This is nowhere more evident than in the concluding section of Book I of the Treatise, which, as John Sitter notes, re-enacts many of the ‘dilemmas and solutions’ of the letter to Arbuthnot.29 More specifically, as Donald Siebert argues, the Arbuthnot letter and the Treatise enact a ‘movement from ecstatic discovery to bewilderment and anxiety, and then to salvation through common life.’30 In both pieces of writing, Hume’s disorienting drama of changing moods confounds philosophical analysis and highlights his emerging reliance upon narrative, biographical, and performative means of providing his reader with philosophical reassurance in the face of scepticism.
At the heart of this strategy is a picture of the philosopher as a public communicator rather than a private thinker. In a 1944 article, Ernest Mossner registers, without further comment, the Arbuthnot letter’s ‘Humian reserve’ and lack of ‘Rousseauistic exhibitionism.’31 And yet, this very circumspection is bound up with
26 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 18.
27 Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (1987), p. 14.
28 M.A. Stewart, ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711–1752’, Impressions of Hume, eds. Marina Frasca-Spada and Peter J.E. Kail (2005), pp. 30–1.
29 Sitter, Loneliness, pp. 32.
30 Donald T. Siebert, ‘ “Ardor of Youth”: The Manner of Hume’s Treatise’, The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Ginsberg (1987), p. 181. Siebert elaborates on Hume’s need in the Treatise to have a happy ending based on naturalism: ‘Windows must be flung open, light and air must be let in to drive away the fumes of philosophical enthusiasm’ (p. 183).
31 Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734: The Biographical Significance’, Huntington Library Quarterly 7 (1944), p. 135.
Hume’s prioritization of the public over the private offices of intellect. In contrast to Rousseau, Hume considers individual transparency and sincerity to be themselves dependent upon social conventions. Since thought is rooted in communication, the mind must negotiate the pragmatics and courtesies of social intercourse if it is to engage in meaningful conversation. Egotism and emotional exhibitionism disrupt this fragile intellectual economy by undermining the tacit agreements that make conversation possible. In this respect, the fact that Hume is set ‘very much at ease’ by the news that his illness makes him a ‘Brother’ of the physician is particularly revealing, in that it demonstrates how important it is to the young, solipsistic Hume that his malady confers membership of a community—in this case, a community of intellectuals. In future, Hume would set his own readers at ease by using the conversational and familiar form of the essay to cultivate mutuality. Here, the dialogical, collaborative, extra-disciplinary framework of the letter facilitates the act of thinking ‘aloud’ as intersubjective performance, halting Hume’s slide into the paradoxes of reflection. It is hardly surprising, then, that the letter to Arbuthnot appears never to have been sent. By the end, Hume’s act of writing has transformed itself from being the symptom of a disease into its own remedy:
Being sensible that all my Philosophy wou’d never make me contented in my present Situation, I began to rouze up myself . . . . I found, that as there are two things very bad for this Distemper, Study & Idleness, so there are two things very good, Business & Diversion . . . . For this reason I resolved to seek out a more active Life, & tho’ I cou’d not quit my Pretensions in Learning, but with my last Breath, to lay them aside for some time, in order the more effectually to resume them.32
By ‘rouzing himself up’, Hume exchanges a philosophical paradigm of reflection and contemplation for one of ‘Business and Diversion’, a resolution echoed in the determination expressed by the author of the Treatise ‘never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy.’33 Though in both instances this determination turns out to be short-lived, Hume’s proto-pragmatic turn towards essay writing, history, and the ‘easy’ or ‘active’ philosophy, eschews certainty in order to cultivate intersubjective consensus through the rhetorical power of a polite, sociable, and accomplished style.
EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT
This conversion to an empiricism of ‘ease’ was for a long time concealed by Hume’s reputation as a sceptic, which made it difficult to assess his influence and legacy. And yet, Hume’s influence upon late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought appears obscure only from the perspective of a kind of philosophical positivism for which scepticism signals the negation of cognition, rather than a method for rethinking basic paradigms. Leslie Stephen’s failure to detect Hume’s influence on late eighteenth-century British thinkers, for instance, indicates not that the
32 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 17. 33 Hume, Treatise, p. 269.
intellectual culture of this period had resigned itself to a Hobson’s choice between common sense and ‘languid scepticism’, but rather that the terms of Stephen’s own inquiry were unable to register the nature of Hume’s legacy as anything other than an absence.34 In reality, Hume’s move towards an ‘easy’ philosophy signals a new attitude towards reflective thought and a fundamental shift away from traditional epistemology, involving a corresponding change in vocabulary.
This change was assisted in part by an ambiguity within the eighteenth-century understanding of ‘experience’. The challenge of Hume’s scepticism lies in the way in which it presses representationalism, and with it the ‘correspondence’ model of truth and meaning, to its limit. One of the main reasons why his unravelling of corpuscularian empiricism did not simply produce a ‘languid’ scepticism is that the contemporary idea of ‘experience’ remained broad enough to accommodate notions of activity as well as receptivity. Indeed, until the eighteenth century, the words ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ are so closely related that they could be used synonymously to mean the act of practical, tentative trial. John Bender notes that, while the English term ‘experience’ and the French ‘expérience’ are distinct (in that only the latter is fully synonymous with ‘experiment’), experience and experiment ‘intertwine so richly, as in Hume’s discussions of judgement and probability in his Treatise of Human Nature, that they become elements in one conceptual domain.’35 Johnson’s Dictionary testifies to this continued intimacy, defining the noun ‘experience’ as ‘1. Practice; frequent trial’ and ‘2. Knowledge gained by trial and practice.’36 The philosophy of ideas, however—and especially the widespread influence of associationist and other forms of psychological language—was busily reordering experience along more phenomenalistic lines of conceptualization. As Bender argues, this development was simply an extension of one branch of the Baconian model of knowledge, according to which knowledge occurs ‘when general principles were determined through controlled analysis of particulars as they emerged from the planned and specialised form of experience called the experiment.’37 As the ‘experimental’ senses of experience recede during the eighteenth century, they are replaced by a set of connotations clustered around a Lockean, psychologized rendering of Bacon’s epistemology. What emerges from this is the idea of a predominantly receptive subject whose ‘experience’ is a form of knowledge based in observation— that is, in the words of the OED, the state of ‘being consciously affected by an event’.
Seen from this perspective, Hume’s intervention is pivotal, since his sceptical critique of reason and receptivity as the basis of a unified and coherent subject arrives precisely at the point where phenomenalism is beginning to reshape everyday conceptions of what ‘experience’ is. The Treatise not only questions any epistemology conceived as a Cartesian ‘First Philosophy’, it also challenges its reader to think of experience as foundationless: as Hume puts it, ‘[a]fter the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it; and feel nothing
34 Stephen, History, vol. 1, p. 2.
35 John Bender, ‘Novel Knowledge: Judgement, Experience, Experiment’, Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, eds. Yota Batsaki, et al. (2012), p. 135.
36 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., vol. 1 (1777).
37 Bender, ‘Novel Knowledge’, p. 136.
Introduction:
Empiricism Made Easy
but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me.’38 Rather than searching for new foundations, Hume and his ‘essayistic’ successors reach for an alternative vocabulary in which the object/subject dyad is replaced by the language of intersubjectivity. This approach construes knowledge and subjectivity as relational rather than punctual, held together by trust between persons rather than tethered to metaphysical grounds. As Sitter argues, ‘as he gravitates towards the ideal of a more sociable prose, Hume moves as well toward a less passive and solitary description of mind.’39 By supplanting private and psychological data with public and communicative action as the basis of ‘experience’, Hume’s naturalized, social epistemology signals a pragmatic turn in eighteenth-century empiricism, what Nicholas Capaldi refers to as anglophone philosophy’s own ‘Copernican revolution’. Consequently, rather than centring his analysis in the perspective of a punctual subjectivity, Hume treats persons ‘fundamentally as agents, as doers, immersed in both a physical world and a social world along with other agents.’40
THE SOCIAL A PRIORI
An alternative way of phrasing this claim is to state that ‘human life’ considered ‘in the common course of the world’ becomes for Hume the social a priori of thought, since without it, knowledge and subjectivity would be impossible. As I argue in Chapter 1, Hume’s conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism is the product of a general tension within Enlightenment thought between the competing value systems associated respectively with modern Newtonian science and classical ideas of virtue and eudaimonia. J.G.A. Pocock has demonstrated how this conflict had its roots in two competing discourses in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenthcentury British thought: on one hand, a jurisprudential, ‘rights’-based language, driven by a growing commercial culture, which defined the individual in relation to his relationship to things, and, on the other, an ancient, civic conception of the citizen that defined him according to his virtues and actions.41 Hume’s work reflects this contradiction in Enlightenment thought in a number of ways, but of particular interest here is his adoption of ancient ethical models of virtue in order to counteract the alienating effects (abstraction, individuation, specialization) of an increasingly reified philosophical culture. Cicero’s works are critical in this regard, for while they originally contributed to Hume’s adolescent ‘distemper’, they effectively heal the very wound they inflict by providing the philosopher with a route away from
38 Hume, Treatise, p. 265. 39 Sitter, Loneliness, p. 45.
40 Nicholas Capaldi, Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy (1989), pp. 22–3.
41 See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1985), p. 48: as Pocock observes, this conflict was triggered in large part by the advent of public debt and the commercialization of government and military agencies, leading to fears of increased corruption, which ‘was a problem in virtue, not in right, which could never be solved by asserting a right of resistance’. Consequently, political thought ‘moves decisively, though never irrevocably, out of the law-centered paradigm and into the paradigm of virtue and corruption’.
the dangerously self-absorbed vita contemplativa and towards the vita activa . Ciceronian, ‘Academic’ scepticism establishes a template for the way in which Hume’s promotion of epoché, or suspension of belief, attempts to harmonize the apparently conflicting desiderata of rationality on one hand and utility and sentiment on the other.
At the same time, the cultivation of manners in Hume’s work forms a bridge between literary works as consumable things and as enactments of virtue. In this way, the author’s performance attempts to overcome the contradiction between commercialization and virtue through a form of what Pocock calls ‘commercial humanism’, according to which ‘a right to things became a way to the practice of virtue, so long as virtue could be defined as the practice and refinement of manners.’42 Adam Smith’s work takes this thought further. In the figure of the ‘impartial spectator’, Smith extends Hume’s socialized intellect by basing agency upon a thoroughly social and dialogical concept of the moral imagination—one whose normative basis approximates the aesthetic standards outlined in Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Smith’s socially civil and multi-layered conception of virtue predicates intersubjective norms upon an unintended and spontaneous natural order. Thus, Smith foregrounds the importance of subjectivity as performance, an idea that his Theory of Moral Sentiments enacts through its own rhetorical manoeuvres.
Viewed this way, the work of Hume and Smith inhabits the same broad current as that of common-sense thinkers such as Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Indeed, the philosophical differences between Hume and Reid can ultimately be reduced to a disagreement between naturalists over how to understand the relationship between knowledge and virtue, or between the pursuit of philosophical certainty and the continuance of the groundless everyday beliefs necessary for leading an intelligent life. Cutting across this disagreement is a shared belief that society underpins rationality, which in turn enables Hume, Smith, Reid, and Stewart to be receptive to the idea that what Habermas calls the ‘lifeworld’ discourse of the public sphere has a constitutive role to play in establishing and maintaining rational norms. Within this lifeworld, the philosophical language of Locke is translated into the thick vocabulary of social norms and values, whereby the political metaphors of psychological ‘correspondence’ and ‘association’ are rendered as forms of social activity. It is the abandonment of this sphere by systems of instrumental rationality and specialized scientific endeavour that many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers attempt to halt or even reverse.43
Accordingly, Hume’s intercourse of ‘sentiments’, Reid’s ‘prescience’, and Stewart’s ‘stamina’ of intellect mark the end of an epistemological paradigm constructed around punctual subjectivity, and the emergence of a form of natural transcendentalism according to which social conversation, association, and correspondence become the natural preconditions of meaningful thought. In this respect, as Manfred Kuehn
42 Pocock, Virtue, p. 50.
43 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, vol. 1 (1984), p. xlii: It is partly because of this divided legacy in Enlightenment thought, Habermas maintains, that any theory of rationality must incorporate a ‘concept of society that connects the “lifeworld” and “system” paradigms in more than a rhetorical fashion’.
Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy
has argued, Scottish naturalism offers a prototype for Kant’s ‘critique of all preceding philosophy’ by providing an a priori basis for the foundations of knowledge in experience.44 However, as Kant recognized, by positing principles of experience that were themselves beyond justification, it also threatened to undermine philosophy itself. Underlying Kant’s disdainful image in the Prolegomena of common-sense philosophy’s vulgar appeal to the ‘multitude’ is his concern that Scottish naturalism threatens to de-reify and socialize epistemic norms by locating the transcendental, a priori conditions of coherent experience in communities rather than in psychological faculties. In this way, socialized empiricism brings to an end an idea of knowledge (and epistemology) as centred in individual consciousness. The ‘naturalist of pure reason’ returns reason to earth by clipping the wings of philosophy itself.45
TRUST AND TESTIMONY
As Hume comes to realize, the relations of mutuality presupposed by intersubjective knowledge themselves depend, above all, upon networks of trust. Despite his sceptical treatment of testimony in the Treatise and (more controversially) in the essay ‘Of Miracles’ in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume increasingly views both testimony and trust as essential to the fabric of social virtues and habits necessary for the cultivation of reason. In doing so, he places increasing epistemological weight upon presupposed (and therefore invisible) relationships of truthfulness between certain individuals who could be identified by the disinterestedness and moderation of their verbal performances. These qualities constituted what Steven Shapin terms the ‘epistemological decorum’ of a mitigated scepticism that distinguished the independent gentleman as a reliable truth-teller, i.e. a testifier free from necessity and constraint.46 In this way, Hume’s Academic scepticism presents the metaphysical foundations of ‘experimental’ philosophy as themselves dependent upon intersubjective relationships in which, in Shapin’s words, ‘[m]anners, mores, and mundane ontology were implicated together in a moral economy of truth.’47
In Chapter 2, I argue that trust and testimony acquire a significance in the work of Hume and his contemporaries that belies the relatively scant (and in Hume’s case, wary) attention they pay to the subject. As Annette Baier, Martin Hollis, Guido Möllering, and John Hardwig have maintained, philosophy’s suspicion of trust is rooted in the fact that, since the latter is fundamentally non-rational and social, it is antithetical to the Cartesian picture of a lucid, private rationality. In Möllering’s words, one of the defining aspects of trust is that it ‘rests on the fiction of a reality in which social uncertainty and vulnerability are unproblematic’ that is
44 Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy (1987), p. 34.
45 Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, eds. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (2002), p. 107.
46 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1996), p. xxix.
47 Shapin, Social History, p. xxx.
15 itself ‘produced intersubjectively through interaction with others and through institutionalized practices.’48 These fictions become for Hume the social presuppositions of knowledge, since, in Möllering’s words, ‘a fiction of reality tends to be maintained and may even become “real” in the sense of a social fact.’ 49 Having unsettled the empirical foundations of impressions and ideas, Hume proceeds to replace an ideal and dyadic correspondence between mind and world with a social and triangular correspondence between two or more individuals and the world. This in turn highlights the importance of virtue and character. Truth itself, Hume realizes, depends upon social norms, and thus upon morality: if, as Annette Baier maintains, the narrative of the Treatise is that of the triumph of sentiment over reason, then trust is for Hume the social sentiment sine qua non.50
By enshrining trust as epistemologically basic, the Humean picture of communicative intelligence emerges as the antitype of the Rousseauian model, which attempts to ground trust upon transparency, perfect sympathy, and reason. Indeed, the conflict between instrumental reason and trust that continues to exercise philosophers and economists today has its roots in the work of Hume, Rousseau, and other thinkers from this period. As Martin Hollis observes, the problems with Rousseau’s conception of social reason would be exposed by the ways in which Jacobin demands for truthfulness, candour, and transparency undermined the very conditions of trust upon which, as Hume perceived, the performance of reason depends. This paradox in turn highlights the fact that ‘the progress of reason destroys ties which free people need’, which, for Hollis, demonstrates the need for a non-instrumental conception of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good— in other words, a conception of trust within reason.51 It is this notion, I argue, that Hume, Reid, and Stewart pioneer.
COMMUNICATION
The rhetoric of intersubjectivity in Hume and Smith underscores the ways in which the proto-pragmatic turn in empiricism is also, in a broad sense, a linguistic turn. Shapin has demonstrated how, for much of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the social intellect was the communicative intellect: truth in scientific and philosophical discourse ‘flowed along the same personal channels as civil conversation.’52 In Chapter 3, I explore the impact that the drawing together of empirical knowledge and communication has upon theories of language in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I argue that Hume’s Academic scepticism regarding ‘correspondence’ in both knowledge and reference spurs a reappraisal of the relationship between language, thought, and reality. In turn, this
48 Guido Möllering, Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (2006), p. 112.
49 Möllering, Trust, p. 114.
50 See Annette C. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (1991), p. 20: according to Baier, Hume offers ‘natural sentiment not as a mere distraction but as the replacer of reason. Reason must be worked through, taken to the end of its tether, before sentiment can take over the guiding role.’
51 Martin Hollis, Trust within Reason (1998), p. 14.
52 Shapin, Social History, p. 410.
