26 - Literature and philosophy

Summary

He who would at the present time write, or even dispute, about art, should have some idea of what philosophy has achieved and continues to achieve in our day.

(Goethe, Maxims and Reflections)

Philosophical writing was uniquely accessible in the eighteenth century: in 1711 Joseph Addison declared himself ‘ambitious to have it said … that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’ (Spectator, I, p. 44, no. 10). The philosophers of the mid-century followed him in their mutual confidence in themselves and their readers; philosophy did not become an irreversibly specialist profession until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. For the bulk of the eighteenth century language had not divaricated into the specialized and mutually exclusive (if not incomprehensible) jargons which characterize the different disciplines in the modern age: scientists (natural philosophers), epistemological and ethical philosophers, theologians and literary critics all in an important sense described human experience in similar ways, and their language was, in the full contemporary sense of the word, a literary one. In his posthumously published autobiographical sketch, David Hume wrote ‘a passion for literature … has been the ruling passion of my life’ (‘My Own Life’, in Dialogues, pp. 233 ff.)

But this communicable synthesis did not come automatically or without effort; Hume engaged throughout his writing career with the problems of marrying expression and embodiment, form and content, which are central to the philosophy, literature and criticism of the period as a whole.