Last lecture, we treated Renee Descartes.

And at the beginning of that lecture, I

pointed out that Descartes is the beginning of what is sometimes called the
rationalist strain of modern philosophy.
In this lecture, we're going to illustrate the empiricist strain in modern philosophy
through David Hume.
Now empiricism, like rationalism, doesn't have a clear definition, there are
variations, these are generalizations of tendencies. But roughly we can say that
empiricism is the view that all knowledge begins with a senses and is limited to the
senses.
That is, it's the claim that we are not warranted in going beyond our senses to claim
to know anything else.
Hume is considered the greatest thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was an
18th century thinker born in 1711. He died in 1776.
He was very close friends, in fact, with Edmund Burke and even more so with Adam
Smith, whom you may know as the father of classical economics, especially with his
book, The Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith actually published a summary of Hume's thought in Hume's lifetime
and they cooperated together. Hume also exerted a considerable influence on the
American founders. He's quoted several times in the Federalist Papers and the
American founders held him in pretty high regard.
Even though his ideas on politics were quite a bit different than the ideas you find
in John Locke. He was probably most known in America for his writings in history
and especially his essays in morality and taste that were well known because he was
a master stylist, just a remarkable grasp of the language and he really is a delight
to read.
But Hume's most influential writings today are in the area of philosophy.
It's hard to overstate Hume's influence on contemporary 20th century philosophy,
especially in the analytic tradition in England and America. So many of the lines of
inquiry that Hume opens up are taken up by those philosophers and continued.
And we'll look at some of those in this lecture.
Now Hume has lots of different writings but the first book he wrote was in 1739.
Hume was only 29 years old and he wrote this fat book called A Treatise of Human
Nature and he claims that it fell dead born from the press, which means no one
bought it. And in some ways Hume spent the rest of his life attempting to defend
the book, to re-explain things, to take them further and justify what he'd done
there.
And he probably died thinking that this was not really his best work. But as it turns
out, history has a way of turning things differently than we expect them to go.
And The Treatise of Human Nature I think really is Hume's most influential and
best remembered book, at least in the area of philosophy.
And so we're going to read excerpts from that book and I've included excerpts for
you to read in the study guide along with questions from those excerpts. The book
is divided into three sections, three parts.
The first part is on the understanding, the second part is of the passions, and the
third part is of morals. And we'll just deal with a few of those parts. But let's start
with the introduction first.
I've mentioned this pattern that we saw first in Bacon and then in Descartes.
Hume begins this way. This is easy for one of judgment and learning to perceive the
weak foundation, even of those systems which have obtained the greatest credit
and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning.
Principles taken upon trust, consequences, lamely deduced from them, want of
coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are everywhere to be
met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers and seem to have drawn
disgrace upon philosophy itself.
That is, the past of philosophy is in very bad shape.
So Hume tells us that he's going to change that. How is he going to change it?
He tells us in the introduction to 7th that all the sciences have a relation greater
or less to human nature.
Let's hear him say it a little further.
To some possible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these
sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extended force of human
understanding and could explain the nature of the ideas we employ and of the
operations we perform in our reasonings, the epistemological turn.
So critique of the past, turn to our understanding.
What is the scope? What are the limits of our powers of reasoning?
Once we get clear on that, we can have a foundation for knowing all the other
sciences.
Here again, he tells us, here then is the only expedient from which we can hope for
success in our philosophical researches to leave the tedious lingering method which
we have hitherto followed and instead of taking now and then a castle or village on
the frontier to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences to
human nature itself, which being once masters of, we may everywhere else hope for
an easy victory. So once again, this is a treatise of human nature.We've got to
understand human nature first before we can understand anything else about
reality.
Again, as a science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so
the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on
experience and observation.
There's the development of the arguments, the past, the current condition of the
sciences and philosophy is very poor, an offer for a new foundation laid in
epistemology and how we know. And now Hume tells us that foundation for knowing
has to be in what he calls experience and observation.What does he mean by
experience and observation?
This word experience in the usage that Hume has in mind, it largely refers to
experiment. Experiment refers to experiment in the way that Bacon uses it as
approaching reason with a kind of parsimonious care and excluding anything that we
are not justified fully in claiming, so it almost refers to experiments and the
observations we make following those experiments.
Now, look what he tells us.
To know astonishing reflection, to consider that the application of experimental
philosophy to moral subjects should come after that to natural at the distance of
about a whole century, since we find in fact that there was about the same interval
that twix the origins of these sciences and that reckoning from Thales to Socrates.
In other words, Thales started natural philosophy, Socrates turned to human
philosophy, and then a new philosophy had to start and look what he says.
The same space of time is nearly equal to that but twixt my Lord Bacon and some
late philosophers in England who have begun to put the science of man on a new
footing.
That is, as Thales is to Socrates, so Bacon is to Hume.
So Thales starts a natural philosophy, Socrates turns a demole philosophy, Bacon
gives us the new natural philosophy, the new modern science, and Hume says that I
am the, I'm like the Socrates who is now going to bring that new science to a study
of human nature.
He has a footnote here in which he refers to those new philosophers, and the first
one is John Locke. And it's important to understand that John Locke is generally
regarded as the founder of empiricism because of his essay concerning human
understanding, which is a large two-volume work all on epistemology, and that
launches a whole series of thinking that really culminates in Hume. Hume has
admiration for Locke, but he takes Locke further.Okay, so we've said that we're
dealing with epistemology here, and that's where Hume begins things.The first task
is to understand the basics of Hume's epistemology, which he lays forth in the first
part of his treatise of human nature. And once we understand that epistemology,
we can apply it to some other subjects and see how it works very powerfully in
unexpected ways.
We are maybe a little shocked to discover, given the premises that he's laid out,
though they make sense later.So we'll look at the basic parts of that epistemology,
and then we'll look at his application of that epistemology to a few subjects,
especially to the self.And then we'll see what that epistemology leads to at the end
of the first part, which is really a crisis.Hume, like Descartes, at the end of the
first meditation, in the beginning of the second meditation, reaches a kind of
skeptical crisis. And we'll see how Hume deals with that crisis. And then finally, we
will turn to Hume's treatment of morality.So here we go.
Epistemology, there are just two basic parts that you have to get a grasp of in
Hume's epistemology.The first is how we interact with the world, how we acquire
information, if you will. Those are the principles of, we might say, of impressions
and ideas.And then secondly, how we associate those things, how we link them
together.
Those would be the principles of association.
Let's deal with the first first.
Hume tells us in his very first sentence of the book, all the perceptions of the
human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions
and ideas.Okay, let's just stop there.
Everything in our mind, Hume tells us is an impression or an idea.
What's the difference?
He tells us in the trees of human nature that the only difference between them is
how vivid they are. Those feelings feel really vivid and immediate, whereas ideas
seem less immediate and less vivid.
And Hume slowly builds up an argument to suggest to us that two things, that all
ideas originate in impressions, that he thinks he cannot find any ideas that don't,
that are not attached first to an impression of something.Moreover, he tells us
that all of our complex ideas and impressions should be reducible to some simple
impression.Now that could sound complicated, so let me try to illustrate with our
apple. You may remember our friend, the apple here. So you look at the apple and
this is how Hume will describe this apple in terms of impressions. He will say, you
have a complex impression of this apple.Why is it complex? It's complex because
you can analyze the experience. Remember Bacon's phrase, his description of his
new method of induction, analyze experience. Analyze means break it down into its
parts.
So Hume will ask, what do you really, what impressions do you really have of this
apple? You have redness, roundness, a certain size. If you take a bite out of it, it
will have a certain taste. I can knock on it, it makes a certain sound.Those are the
simple impressions. Those are the most basic experiences I have of this apple. So
my whole experience of this apple, as Hume describes it, is reducible to those simple
impressions.
That is the foundation of Hume's epistemology. You might wonder, why does he
think that? In a way, it's intuitively quite plausible.
Could you get an idea of an apple if you'd never had an experience of an apple? Try
and explain an apple to someone who's never had an experience of an apple. You
would do it by comparing it to some other piece of fruit that they had had an
experience of. You would have to keep doing comparisons.Just think about it for a
moment. Could you ever give a blind person an impression of color? How would you
get an impression of color? You have, in your minds, ideas of colors. You have the
spectrum, for example, red, orange, yellow, green, blue.You have those, but where
did you get them?
You got them from some simple experience you once had of red, orange, yellow,
green, blue.So it should make sense to you then why Hume tells us that all ideas
come from impressions and all complex ideas are reducible to those simple, simple
impressions.So when we want to know about whether we're warranted in making
some claim about reality, Hume is always going to ask us, can you trace it back to a
simple impression? If you can't trace it back to a simple impression and you think
you're talking about some reality, Hume is going to say, it's not real. You're not
warranted in talking about it or identifying it if you can't trace it back to a simple
impression or give an account of it.Now the next step, as I mentioned, is first the
origin of all of our knowledge of the
world comes from simple impressions?
Secondly are what Hume calls the principles of association. I just mentioned that
this apple is reducible to roundness, redness, sweetness if I take a bite to those
simple impressions. And the question is, how do those impressions get combined to
make the thing I call an apple?Can I call this unification, this complex impression of
simple impressions? Am I justified in calling that an apple?This is a second great
innovation, if you will, in Hume's epistemology.
He tells us on page 117 of knowledge that there are different kinds of philosophical
relations, by philosophical relation, he means ways of associating things together,
like the simple impressions of the apple.But these may be divided into two classes,
into such as depend on the ideas which we compare together and such as may be
changed without any change in the ideas. He gives an example, just from the idea
of a triangle that we discover the relation of equality, which is three angles bare
to two right ones. And this relation is invariable as long as our idea remains the
same.Every time you have the idea of angles and a triangle, you necessarily have to
conceive of those relations as being necessary and absolute, invariable as the word
he uses.On the contrary, the relations of contiguity and distance, betwixt two
objects may be changed merely by an alteration of their place, without any change
in the objects themselves or their ideas. And the place depends on a hundred
different accidents which cannot be foreseen by the mind, just the same case with
identity and causation.Okay. So, what are these two classes that Hume is talking
about? These are tip, this distinction between these two classes, classes of relating
things is traditionally called Hume's fork, like a fork in the road.
There are two different ways which ideas can be related. And I've included a
handout with your study guide in which I set them up next to one another. In short,
Hume says on the one side of the fork are what he calls scientific relations.Now,
Hume is using science here in a very, in an idiosyncratic way.
By science, Hume means relations that are necessary and invariable. And he points
out that examples of those might be two plus two equals four, or the internal
relations of a triangle.The relations between ideas that no matter what kind of
changes we have in other respects, those will remain constant and necessary. And
so we can know those with certitude.On the other side of the fork are relations
that Hume refers to as customary relations. These are relations not of ideas, but
of what Hume calls matters of fact.Hume thinks that all our relations of
impressions, all our impressions are the basic facts that we have access to. That is,
what we call our experience of the world is an experience ultimately reducible to
those simple facts, redness, roundness, hardness, taste. And he will tell us that the
relating of those facts is always going to be variable and contingent and non-
necessary.Let's give an example here.
This apple could be green. It could be sour or sweet. It could be round. It could be
oval. It could change. There's nothing necessary in the simple relations involved in
this apple.Now typically, we think about science as knowledge about relations of
things in the world, that world of facts. But Hume, and this is where Hume really
starts to do some of his work, he says, okay, if simple impressions are the beginning
and if we're looking for necessary relations, can we ever find necessary relations
in the world of sense, the world of experience?What could ever warrant us to go
from one sense impression to another sense impression, or a one sense impression
to an idea and see a necessary relationship?Hume suggests that the only way we
could do it is by seeing a causal relationship. We would have to see that one simple
idea caused another simple idea. We have to see a causal relationship that was
necessary. Hume says, we can't have that knowledge.Let me illustrate with the
illustration that he uses, billiard balls. You've all seen billiard balls. It's part of a
game. You hit the ball with a pool queue and it cracks in another ball and moves it.
And we make predictions and calculations to play the game. We assume a causality
to play that game of billiards.But let's simplify it. Hume says, look at two billiard
balls. You think that there's a necessary relation that if one hits the other one, it
will cause it to move. But Hume asks us to consider, what do you really have simple
impressions of when you see that?
Think about it. You see one billiard ball prior to the other billiard ball, what he calls
priority in time. You have an impression of that. You have an impression then of the
billiard ball moving until it looks like it's touching the other billiard ball.This is what
he calls contiguity to become contiguous right next to each other. And then we see
the other billiard ball move away. Where there did you see cause? We didn't ever
see cause. We didn't see one billiard ball cause the other billiard ball to move. We
just saw priority and then they made contact and then the other move. That's all
we saw. That's all we had an impression of.So where did we get the idea of
causality?
That one ball caused the other ball to move.
Imagine your Adam and Eve in the garden and God drops a billiard table into the
garden of Eden and you see those two billiard balls.First of all, you'd be confused,
right? It would be your first impressions of those billiard balls. And you might look
at one. You're very new to the world. You might be afraid to touch it because if you
touch the billiard ball, maybe it will spring open and a bunny will jump out. Is that
impossible? Is it inconceivable? Is it a contradiction?No. You don't know anything
about the properties of the billiard ball till you touch the billiard ball. You lift it up.
Maybe you roll. Oh, that's interesting. It rolls. You roll the billiard ball. And then
it hits the other billiard ball and it moves. Do you know a cause at that point? You
might say, that's interesting. It just moved there. I'm going to try that again. So
you move it again. Maybe it works a second time. You do it a third time. Now the
second billiard ball breaks open and turns into a bunny.Is it impossible?
How do you know that the billiard ball will not break open into a bunny? You only
know what Hume says because of this third element, not priority in time simply, not
contiguity, but what he calls constant conjunction. It's because you've seen enough
billiard balls, contiguous and prior to billiard balls, causing a kind of effect that you
start to assume from your own mind, some property in your mind says, there's
something happening there.Hume calls that constant conjunction, but even that is
not enough for causality. You have to make one more assumption. The assumption is
that the future will be like the past. Can we prove that the future will be like the
past? I don't think so.Moreover, is it a contradiction to think that a future act
could be very different from a past act? Could it be that the billiard ball is
constructed in such a way that once it's knocked 100 times, it breaks open into a
bunny?Now I know that sounds absurd to you. You're probably thinking these silly
philosophers playing with these crazy ideas about billiard balls turning to
bunnies.I'm going to go get a drink. But I want you to stay with me for a moment
because what Hume is trying to do is illustrate for us.He's trying to get us to ask,
what is the justification for our belief that there are scientific laws that govern
our knowledge of reality? What Hume has suggested is, if the epistemology is true
about those simple impressions and associations, we don't have scientific knowledge
about reality. We have what Hume calls customary knowledge of reality. We have
probable knowledge of reality, but it is not scientific knowledge of reality. All our
experience of the world is based upon certain customary assumptions that we make.
Sometimes he refers to it as the imagination.Now Hume is not telling us, therefore
not to ever trust these things, rely on them. But he is warning us that we have no
reason to believe these things. We have other reasons to believe, but it's not
reason.Now you might be comfortable with Hume's undermining of claim, our belief
that there are scientific laws that we can know that govern reality. But let's see
how Hume applies this to some things that we take for granted. The self.Hume
applies his epistemology to the self and arrives at a very different conclusion than
Descartes. Recall that for Descartes, the self is the only thing I know for
certain.Cogito ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am. The only thing I know for certain is, I exist. What does
Hume do with that? Hume says, what is the I? You should see how Hume will ask
the question based on what I've said. What simple impression do you have of the
I? When I ask you, what is I? And ask it of yourself. What am I? What comes to
your mind?Hume will tell us that when we think about the self, we don't get any one
impression. We get a whole series of impressions.I am Nathan Schlieder, I am a
father and a husband. I am a professor. I grew up in Wisconsin. I moved to Ohio. I
teach at Hillsdale. I get a whole bunch of different simple impressions. And they're
impressions that have all changed over time so that I never once get a simple
impression of I.Hume writes, for my part, when I enter most intimately into what
I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. Of heat or
cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, I never can catch myself. At
any time, without a perception, and never can observe anything but the
perception.Wow, the self that we seem so confident that we know has dissolved
under Hume's epistemology. Thus, he writes, I'm a venture to affirm of the rest
of mankind that there are nothing but a bundle or collection of different
perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a
perpetual flux and movement.On the next page, he compares himself to a theater.
But then he tells us that's misleading because even the theater changes.
But this ought to be a little bit disconcerting to you if you apply the thought
experiment with some seriousness. I can never capture myself in a simple impression
and therefore, just like if I have no impression of a color, I have no idea what a
color is, I have no idea what myself is. It's a bundle of perceptions that I have
somehow in my imagination put together, but I can't say it's anything more than
that. If this is disconcerting to you, then you'll be comforted to know that Hume
found it disconcerting as well.In the last section of the first part, Hume tells us
this, the intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human
reason has so wrought upon me and heated my brain that I am ready to reject all
belief and reasoning and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely
than another.Or am I? Or what? From what causes do I derive my existence? And
to what condition shall I return? Whose favor shall I core? Whose anger must I
dread? What being surround me? And on whom have I any influence? Or who have
any influence on me?I am confounded with all these questions and begin to fancy
myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, enviring with the deepest
darkness and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.Wow. What
Hume tells us is that his use of reason as he inherits it from bacon and then from
lok and he follows it out and he just follows it consistently, has led him to the most
extreme corrosive skepticism.I used his application of that to the self to illustrate
the point. My self is dissolved. I know nothing. This is Hume's crisis of skepticism.
How does he get out of it? There's no Cartesian Archimedian point for Hume. He
takes a very different path. Let's hear what he says.
Unfortunately, it happens that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds,
nature herself suffices to that purpose and cures me of this philosophical
melancholy and delirium. And by the way, I just want to pause there.Hume is the
greatest representative of the Scottish Enlightenment, but notice that following
some of the Enlightenment and assumptions, he has undermined the Enlightenment.
But it's closely connected to the origins of modern philosophy. It involves the kind
of confidence and the powers of reason as against tradition and religion and these
other things that tell us about reality. These are some of the features of especially
the French Enlightenment.Hume applies those powers and sees that the
Enlightenment actually cuts out its own foundations. So he's in some respects an
anti-Enlightenment thinker.This confidence and reason leads him to not happiness,
but melancholy, delirium. But he says nature comes to the rescue either by relaxing
this bent of mind or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which
obliterate all these Camaras.I dine. I play a game of backgammon. I converse and
then marry with my friends and went after three or four hours amusement. I would
return to these speculations. They appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that
I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.Okay. What happens? his
nature comes to the rescue. He just forgets about all those philosophical
speculations.Now this raises a question for Hume. Should I follow the path of
reason when it makes me melancholy and lost or should I follow the path of all the
illusions and false beliefs I have about reality that my reason exposed?It's a
dilemma. How do I live? And Hume decides ultimately that you just kind of live very
pragmatically. You follow reason when you want to, but not too far. You use reason
to get rid of some of those illusions you have that are bad for you. Your monkish
superstition and ignorance, but you don't follow it too far and you stay close to
custom and to imagination and to very ordinary beliefs about reality.I think you can
see why Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, which was written a
little bit after Hume's death, has some strong kind of resonances with the
epistemology that we see in Hume and Hume's prescription for his philosophical
delirium.I want to make one final statement before we're finished about Hume's
view of morality. I've included this in the reading.Hume, because of his account of
reason as merely a faculty for making associations between things, tells us that
reason can never be a source of moral knowledge.Our reason is only an associating
faculty. It's never the source of an original impression. Moreover, Hume tells us
that reason can never motivate human action. Here's a famous quote that Hume
gives us. He says, initially, people think in the past that reason should govern
passion, but they have it wrong.
Hume writes, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Any moral judgments we
make originate not in reason but in passion. How far is he willing to take this?On
the opposite page, he writes, to not contrary to reason, to prefer the destruction
of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.In other words, there's no reason
I can give to you, moral reason that would tell you not to scratch your finger, even
if you knew it would destroy the whole world. Our moral actions are rooted in
passions, not in reason.Now I should be clear about this. Although Hume thinks that
all of our morality originates in our passions, he is not an egoist. He doesn't think
that all moral decisions must originate in selfish desires for pleasure. He's not a
hedonist. Because Hume thinks that we do have certain quasi-moral passions.These
are moral sentiments that give us an interest in seeing and a pleasure in seeing
certain kinds of what we would regard as disinterested moral actions. He is one of
the prime members of what is known as the School of Moral Sentiments.And Adam
Smith will follow Hume in this with a whole book called The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. But that is beyond this lecture. Thank you.