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Hume's Socratism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2015

Thomas Merrill
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Abstract

Hume's famous “Conclusion” to Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature has been an enduring source of interest and controversy to scholars, with some going so far as to argue that the Treatise is inconsistent. Yet in the opening pages of the book Hume makes an odd, rarely noticed allusion to Socrates that helps explain the “Conclusion.” This article argues that the “Conclusion” is Hume's version of calling philosophy down from the heavens, establishing it in the cities, and compelling to inquire into morality and human affairs. Recognizing Hume's Socratic allusion focuses our attention on the centrality of moral and political topics to his mature thought and sheds light on the character of his skepticism. Far from being a confession of despair, Hume's skeptical crisis is an argument for a new conception of philosophy that takes self-knowledge as the indispensable condition of philosophizing about anything.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , Winter 2015 , pp. 23 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2015 

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References

1 Garrett, Don, “Hume's Conclusions in ‘Conclusion of this Book,’” in The Blackwell Guide to Hume's “Treatise,” ed. Traiger, Saul (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006)Google Scholar, 151. The recent debate between those who characterize Hume as a “skeptical realist” and the more traditional interpretation of him as more straightforwardly skeptical shows that the character of Hume's skepticism is still controversial. See The New Hume Debate, ed. Read, Rupert and Richman, Kenneth A. (London: Routledge, 2000).Google Scholar

2 Fogelin, Robert, Hume's Skeptical Crisis: A Textual Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Parenthetical references in the text marked T are to Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar and include numbers of the book, part, section, and paragraph unless otherwise noted. References marked E are the page numbers of Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985)Google Scholar.

4 Barry Stroud, who does notice it, garbles its meaning by taking Hume to claim that he will be the Newton of the human sciences, applying the methods of modern natural science to human beings (, Stroud, Hume [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978]Google ScholarPubMed, 5). But Socrates was known for having founded his “science of human nature” in response to the failure of, and in part a critique of, the natural science of his predecessors. Hume is distinguishing himself from the natural scientists, not identifying with them. Readers who notice it and offer insightful remarks about its meaning include Danford, John, David Hume and the Problem of Reason: Recovering the Human Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 33–34Google Scholar, 77 and Livingston, Donald, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 145–46Google Scholar.

5 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. King, J. E. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)Google ScholarPubMed, 435.

6 The Spectator #10, March 12, 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, Donald F. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965)Google Scholar, 44.

7 Insightful discussions of Hume's turn from a variety of points of view include: Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. ch. 1–2Google Scholar and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium; Whelan, Frederick, Order and Artifice in Hume's Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 60–67Google Scholar, 304–29; Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason; Baier, Annette, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, ch. 1; and Fogelin, Hume's Skeptical Crisis. Also helpful is Wulf, Steven, “The Skeptical Life in Hume's Political Thought,” Polity 33, no. 1 (2000): 77–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The view that Hume was a scientist more than a skeptic whose legacy was carried on by logical positivists and contemporary philosophers of mind has been a common one. See Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1946)Google Scholar, 31; Stroud, Hume, 3, 5; and Rosenberg, Alexander, “Hume and the Philosophy of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hume, ed. Norton, David Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 65. “Like the empiricists who followed him,” Rosenberg writes, “Hume held that the methods of the social sciences must be fundamentally the same as those of natural science” (84). More recently, Rosenberg writes that Hume's key contribution is to help us avoid the mistake of thinking that “there is any more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers” (Rosenberg, An Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions [New York: Norton, 2011], xiiiGoogle Scholar). Similarly, Russell Hardin argues that Hume's greatness lies in his throughgoing naturalism and refusal to tell us “what our substantive moral views should be” (Hardin, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]Google Scholar, 8).

9 See Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason, and Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Scott Yenor's articles extend Danford's and Livingston's analyses in helpful ways: “Between Rationalism and Postmodernism: Hume's Political Science of ‘Our Mixed Kind of Life,’” Political Research Quarterly 55, no. 2 (June 2002): 329–50Google Scholar, and “Revealed Religion and the Politics of Humanity in Hume's Philosophy of Common Life,” Polity 38, no. 3 (2006): 395–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, chap. 12, and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, chaps. 12–14. For discussion, see Yenor, “Beyond Rationalism and Postmodernism,” 331n7.

11 For recent readings of Hume as a commercial republican or classical liberal, see Whelan, Frederick, Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004)Google Scholar; McArthur, Neil, Hume's Political Theory: Law, Liberty, and the Constitution of Liberty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sabl, Andrew, Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the “History of England” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).Google Scholar

12 On Hume's indebtedness to Addison and the project of politeness, see Phillipson, Nicholas, “Propriety, Property, and Prudence: David Hume and the Defense of the Revolution,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Skinner, Quentin and Phillipson, Nicholas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 302–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 On the background and general outlook of commercial republicanism, see Lerner, Ralph, The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Rahe, Paul, Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. 2: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For a helpful recent discussion of commerce in Hume, see McArthur, Hume's Political Theory, chap. 1.

14 Andrew Sabl's remark nicely captures this moment of Hume's argument: Hume “did look into the abyss; it looked back. One of them blinked and it wasn't Hume” (Sabl, Hume's Politics, 247).

15 Livingston underestimates these political-rhetorical dimensions of Hume's text and so overlooks the irony in Hume's praise of the “honest gentlemen” or the “vulgar.” See, e.g., Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 22. This is not to deny that Hume makes a serious point about the character of philosophy in suggesting that philosophers learn from common life, only that Hume ever fully identifies with common life.

16 See Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli.

17 Whelan gives a nice description of the skeptical, moderate spirit Hume aims to encourage and exemplify in Order and Artifice in Hume's Political Philosophy, chap. 5. See also Wulf, “The Skeptical Life in Hume's Political Thought,” and Yenor, “Between Rationalism and Postmodernism.”

18 Hume uses the term “essaying” to describe the philosopher's activity of weighing all the circumstances (E 507). Perhaps then we should see the Essays as a whole as an extended exercise in training for philosophy.

19 Annette Baier suggests that one of the discoveries Hume makes in his philosophical crisis is that human beings are unavoidably normative: “any mode of life, whether or not philosophical or intellectual, commits us to turning some habits into normative rules. Once we are fully self-conscious, any attempt to be free of all norms will reveal our possibly once hidden commitment to some norms or other” (Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 17; cf. 99–100). Baier's remark is correct insofar as Hume's postcrisis philosophy begins by recognizing the primacy of moral and political opinion. But Hume treats that primacy as a problem requiring investigation, not an answer, and there is no guarantee that what we find will confirm the character or existence of the morality we think we are looking for. When Hume finally states what he thinks the virtues are after his long analysis of the moral sense in Book III, they turn out to be natural abilities and not something we can be held responsible for in the traditional sense (T 3.3.4).

20 See Livingston's remark: “unlike Descartes Hume does not, methodologically, view the customs and prejudices of common life as barriers to understanding. Rather he views them as the only instruments through which we can understand the real, however darkly and obscurely” (Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 31).

21 As Livingston points out: “Philosophical reflection . . . must work, paradoxically, both within and without the world of common life” (Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 31).

22 I offer the beginning of such an interpretation in Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

23 Danford provides helpful discussion of Hume's relation to his early modern predecessors along these lines in David Hume and the Problem of Reason, ch. 2–4. See also Yenor's discussion of Descartes and Locke in “Beyond Rationalism and Postmodernism,” 333.

24 The source of the epigraph is Lucan, Pharsalia 9. 544. Paul Russell provides the full text of the speech from which the epigraph is taken and argues persuasively that in Hume's milieu the quotation carries connotations of freethinking and opposition to tyranny. See Russell, The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 7 and appendix.

25 Hume also reasserts his claim about the fundamental character of his “science of human nature,” first made in the introduction, in T 1.4.7: “Human nature is the only science of man” (emphasis added; T 1.4.7.14; cf. T Intro. 6, 4). Compare Leo Strauss's remark about Socrates: “we have learned from Socrates that the political things, or the human things, are the key to the understanding of all things” (Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 19Google ScholarPubMed).

26 Baier makes a similar observation: “Hume was initiating not the science (in our sense) of psychology, either introspective or experimental, but a broader discipline of reflection on human nature, in which Charles Darwin and Michel Foucault, as much as William James and Sigmund Freud, can be seen to belong” (A Progress of Sentiments, 25). See also Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason, 192–93.

27 Hardin is thus correct to emphasize Hume's empiricism and naturalism, but he misses Hume's claim that he is already entangled in moral opinions and therefore must seek their foundations. For Hume, but not for Hardin, we cannot avoid the question of “what our substantive moral views should be.” See David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist, 8, together with T 1.4.7.12.

28 The example Hume chooses to illustrate the “love of truth,” the passion, he says, motivating the whole Treatise, is a man standing outside of a city contemplating it (T 2.3.10). And when he discusses the “anatomist of human nature” in the last paragraph of the book, he is referring to his own investigation of morality and politics in Book III (T 3.3.6.6).

29 See, for example, Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason, 85; and Yenor, “Between Rationalism and Postmodernism,” 347–49.