A Treatise Of Human Nature

"Hume is widely held to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and I suspect features as such on Five Books . He wrote his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature , while in his mid-twenties, which is mind-boggling given its brilliance. For very good reasons people typically focus on Books I and II of the Treatise, but Book III, Of Morals , contributes something that Williams lacks: an account of collective action and, therefore, of institutions. Hume effectively does that in ways that, I suspect, were hard fully to comprehend until game theory had developed and advanced to levels bringing people like Roger Myerson a Nobel Prize. In doing this, Hume talks about how some collective problems and opportunities are addressed with conventions. Some are obvious: all drive on the right (or left). Others, less obvious, blunt incentives to free ride on others’ efforts, and so help cooperation. He sets out how some such conventions are rooted in habits, while others develop into habits and even become social norms. If we then internalise the value of the social norms, they develop some moral force even when their original functional purpose has fallen out of view. These are stylised stories or, as people call them these days, vindicatory genealogies (not the subversive genealogies Nietzsche was fond of). A great example is the institution of promising and keeping promises, which Hume analyses in Book III . But to the extent that all that’s been picked up by scholars in our lifetimes, it’s been mostly by social scientists who can make Hume seem as though he’s purely a rationalist, whereas he’s nothing of the kind. “Hume talks about how some collective problems and opportunities are addressed with conventions” Anyway, we become attached to some of these norms, which can be useful if it helps us stick to our considered longer-term objectives. Ultimately, they are mechanisms for channeling our passions and redirecting our interests. So, he has interests and values intermingling, but we can also reflect on these norms—artificial virtues, as Hume calls them—and see whether they withstand reflection, and he wants to argue that many of them do. What’s unique and useful about this is that Hume, even more than Williams, manages to bring power, interests, and values into a coherent story; one that is explanatory but can also be normative. But he does a lot more than high theory. He wrote many essays about topics ranging from the balance of power (which is explicitly about power and international relations) to money and trade (including how the jealousy of trade drives states into mistakes). And yet what eventually made him famous in his own lifetime was something that’s barely read these days, his History of England in many volumes. It’s a narrative history but also a political science, even philosophical, history of English governance. Hume is stupendously interesting. There are few questions where he doesn’t have something important to say. And yet, the main schools of international relations scholarship I mentioned earlier follow Hobbes , Kant, and Hugo Grotius (the early international lawyer), with Hume not featuring much at all. I think he ought to, and that we need him right now. Mainly the state (princes, as he calls them), but with observations on relations among them. He talks about how the institutions of government itself are based on conventions to help address problems facing really large groups of people, and about how we learn to give government allegiance except when it is horrible or abject. In his hands, legitimacy is a matter of opinion, but he doesn’t say enough about the things that get weighed in forming an opinion on whether a particular system of government is legitimate. Williams says more about legitimation than Hume. He was evasive about his relationship with Hume. He started off his career pretty Humean but in a late interview commented that he found Hume, who was a jovial man, too optimistic. In a deeper sense, though, in my view William remained indebted to Hume. But in any case, he needed Hume, and I think he filled some gaps left by Hume concerning legitimation itself which involves offering justifications and, I would add, making compromises. I think there is, and it comes back to the point about commercial society. Hume talks about international law and—I can’t remember the exact words—says something to the effect that relations among princes reflect the same kind of interests and forces that underpin domestic governments and law but tend to be much weaker because they depend on each other much less. I’m confident Hume would have been open to the idea that that was a contingent fact about the world in which he lived, and that the more interdependent and the more integrated states become, the more their leaders (but not necessarily all of the public) internalise norms that help underpin, constrain, shape degrees of cooperation. What’s nice about this in Hume is that it’s historically contingent, with norms related to what goes on in the world. Expanding commerce will draw on existing norms and, over time, maybe change some of those norms as well. You might need new inter-national conventions because you face new problems, but that generates tensions because, for most of us, order and cooperation at home are more vital. “Hume thinks that institutions and norms frameingpractices that have grown up spontaneously are more likely to endure” Some people love and others hate the mushrooming of international organisations and international treaties since the Second World War and, in particular, since the end of the Cold War . Some of this has been a process of norms and institutions following the emergence of things in the world that people had shared interests in shaping or constraining or doing something about. Also, however, some of it has been people pushing treaties and organisations to further their own agendas about global integration. There’s a sense in Hume that he thinks that institutions and norms helping to frame practices that have grown up spontaneously are more likely to endure. But, unlike some followers of Hayek (but perhaps not Hayek himself), Hume does not rule out design at all. In fact, he talks about the assumptions that should be made when devising a constitution, which I suspect we will come back to later when we discuss an ancient Chinese writer."

"Hume, who is himself an Enlightenment thinker, is also the go-to guy when it comes to exploring reason’s limitations. He is Spinoza’s most trenchant critic. First of all, pure logic, of the kind to which Spinoza had tried to restrict himself in his proofs, can’t tell us anything about the nature of the world. Pure logic reduces to tautologies, no more interesting, ultimately, then knowing that all bachelors are unmarried. Pure logic can’t get us out of the conceptual sphere into what Hume called matters of fact and existence. For that we need to use experience. But to use experience in a way that gets us beyond merely knowing what one is personally experiencing at this very moment, we need to rely on our knowledge of the regularity of experience. If I’m now experiencing a fire in my grate, then I know that if I draw closer I will experience increasing heat, and that if I keep going further toward the fire I’ll experience intense pain. But how can we justify this most necessary belief in the regularity of experience? It’s not itself tautological; if I negate it I won’t come up with a contradiction. Nor can I justify it on the basis of experience, since all such reasoning itself presumes the regularity of experience. So if what reason demands is that we rely only on beliefs that reason can justify, then reason has argued itself into paralysis. “So if what reason demands is that we rely only on beliefs that reason can justify, then reason has argued itself into paralysis.” And then Hume attacks another presumption of the Spinozist project, namely that reason can, all by itself, turn us into large-souled human beings who will enthusiastically act in the interests of others. Just because I see a demonstration of how I ought to act doesn’t ensure that I will thereby be moved to action. Reason in itself, argued Hume, is perfectly inert. Some passion must be applied to get us to want to do what we know we ought to do."

"The next book from the European tradition that I selected is David Hume ’s A Treatise of Human Nature, published in instalments between 1738-1740 . It was hard deciding which book from the European tradition to pick second, but Hume gives such a radically different view of the world from Plato that I think he provides a great contrast. And, again, this book is remarkably readable. In the Treatise we get a conception of knowledge as fundamentally based on what our senses tell us. We go from Plato warning us that trusting your senses is like being someone trapped in a cave taking shadows for reality, to Hume who says there’s nothing to know except those sensory impressions. Hume then sets about giving us an account of how everything that would count as real knowledge can be seen to come from immediate sensory ‘impressions,’ or from ‘ideas,’ which for Hume are just faint copies of impressions. Notice that, for Plato, the Greek term that we render as ‘idea’ refers to what’s ultimately real, while particular physical things are imperfect copies of these ideas, and our sensory experiences are like shadows of the physical things. Hume inverts this. For Hume, the experience you have of, say, a chair, that sensory impression, is the most vivid thing you have any access to; your ideas are just faint copies of that. He attempts to explain how all knowledge can come out of these vivid impressions and their faint copies in our ideas. There are certainly much pithier and catchier formulations of Hume’s views in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals . But the thing I like in the Treatise is that you find in this one book a comprehensive picture of how everything fits together: the epistemology (the theory of how you know things), the account of human motivations, and the theory of ethics are all rolled in together, and you are led to see how these are part of a coherent whole. Part of what’s interesting about both Plato and Hume is that, despite being very different philosophers, they both give you a comprehensive worldview in which all the pieces interlock. That’s a very exciting thing to understand when you finally appreciate it in either thinker. That’s one of the fascinating things about Hume. He challenges us and says: ‘When I introspect, all I see are particular impressions and ideas. I don’t introspect and see a self that has those impressions or ideas.’ He has a challenging account of general issues of identity. I love to go with students through things Hume discusses, such as: ‘Under what conditions do we say that a river is the same river even though it may change course, or say a building is the same building even though it may have been hit by lightning, burnt down, and rebuilt.’ We treat it like it’s the same river or the same building despite these changes, or a sound may go on for a while, stop, and then recur, but we treat it like the same sound. Hume points out that we have these conventions about when we identify something as the same, but it’s not because we can identify some kind of underlying reality that is constant among those things; we just group experiences in certain ways. Hume says, well, why not think about the self in the same way? It’s a very powerful critique of the strong view of the self that you get in people like René Descartes, who is Hume’s immediate target, but then also going back to Plato himself, who thinks that you have an immaterial soul which is your self, and one that can be reincarnated across multiple lives. We see intimations in Hume of the view that was explicitly formulated later in the logical positivists of the 20th century: that metaphysical claims are not so much false as utterly meaningless. I’ll often ask my students, “What would your ‘idea’ of God be according to Hume?” Since ideas, according to Hume, are just faint copies of impressions, if you tried to form an idea of God, all you could have was an idea that you constructed out of pieces of sensory experiences. But the classic conception of God—which we find in Descartes and Aquinas, for example—is a being that, although it may manifest itself in sensory things like a burning bush, transcends any of those sensory experiences. So I think there’s actually a hint in Hume that you couldn’t even form a coherent idea of God , because God is not supposed to be something you can experience through the senses. A Humean might have to say that the statement ‘God exists’ is like Lewis Carroll’s ‘the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’. It’s not false; it’s simply meaningless. I think it is helpful here to remind ourselves that, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Hume introduces what has become known as ‘Hume’s fork’: the notion that there is a sharp distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and that relations of ideas can never establish a matter of fact. For example, I know just by thinking that a cube has six sides, because that is part of the idea of a cube, but I don’t know whether there are actually any cubes in the world without using my senses to look and see. If Hume is right, the ontological argument, which is supposed to be just based on the idea of what God is, can’t work, because it’s attempting to establish a matter of fact about the universe based merely on ideas. I don’t think Hume came up with this particular empiricist theory in order to defeat religion; he was just led from his understanding of how modern science works to a position that traced all knowledge to sensory impressions. However, the consequence is that it is then going to be hard to believe in either the soul or God as these concepts are understood in the Abrahamic traditions."