Of Hume and Bondage

By SIMON BLACKBURN

Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of
academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume
was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel a psychologist or
cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that
plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has
declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many
disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public.

Hume crafts a straightforward and entirely plausible account of what it is for things to matter
to us as they do.

Yet among philosophers it is not uncommon to find Hume patronized as a slightly dim,
inaccurate or nave analytical philosopher who gamely tried to elucidate the meanings of
terms but generally failed hopelessly to do so. In fact, Immanuel Kant, a German near-
contemporary of Hume, who is often billed as his opponent, had cause to defend him against
a similar complaint more than two centuries ago. One cannot without feeling a certain pain,
Kant wrote in 1783, behold how utterly and completely his opponents, Reid, Oswald,
Beattie and finally Priestley missed the point of his problem and constantly misjudged his
hints for improvement constantly taking for granted just what he doubted, and conversely,
proving with vehemence and, more often than not, with great insolence exactly what it had
never entered his mind to doubt. Plus a change.

The most visible example of this is the rumpus surrounding the famous passage in which
Hume declares that reason by itself is inert, and has no other office than to serve and obey the
passions. The mountains of commentary this has excited include accusations that Hume is a
skeptic about practical reasoning (whatever that might mean); that he is a nihilist who cannot
have any values; that in his eyes nothing matters; that he is too stupid to realize that learning
that a glass contains benzene instead of gin might extinguish your desire to drink from it; that
he constantly forgets his own theory; and indeed, in the words of one contemporary writer
the frothing and foaming and insolence here reach a crescendo that philosophers like
Hume only avoid being radically defective specimens of humanity by constantly forgetting
and then contradicting their own views. It is melancholy to see ones colleagues going so far
astray for it is surely sensible enough to say that practical reasoning works by mobilizing
considerations that engage our desires and wishes, passions and concerns. Those facts that do
not concern us indeed remain inert; but far from implying that nothing matters Hume crafts a
straightforward and entirely plausible account of what it is for things to matter to us as they
do.

So why the panic? Plato taught philosophers to regard themselves as the special guardians of
reason: mandarins whose cozy acquaintance with the forms, or with logic, or with rationality
entitles them to special authority in the deliberations of mankind. Take away the role and you
destroy a whole professorial raison dtre. And reasons have become the Holy Grail of
contemporary philosophy. They beam down at us, or at least beam down at the illuminati
among us. They are the highest court of appeal, what William James called the giver of
moral holidays, inescapable, inexorable and independent of us, free from the trail of the
human serpent. Worldly pains are one thing, but the pain of irrationality well, even the
threat of that is a fearful thing, a Medusa or gorgons head to turn your opponents to stone.

Leif Parsons

I think there is something in the water that makes this self-image so seductive at present a
cultural need prompting philosophers to separate themselves as far as possible from the
unwashed skeptics, nihilists, relativists or ironists of postmodernism, of which the best
known American spokesman was the late Richard Rorty. These are the people who have
infiltrated many humanities departments for a generation and who, curiously enough given
their usual political colors anticipated todays politicians in being unable to talk of facts or
data let alone reasons without sneering quote marks. To be fair, however, while the
postmodernists used the quotes because they obsessed over the idea that reality is capable of
many different interpretations, the politicians and pundits tend to use them because they
cannot bear the thought that reality might get in the way of their god-given right to simple
certainties, simple visions and simple nostrums. Its a different motivation, and Fox News
may be relieved to hear that it is not really the heir of Jacques Derrida.

Perhaps the cultural situation of the West is sufficiently insecure, like that of Athens after the
war with Sparta, for us to need the same defenses against the skeptical quote marks that were
provided by Socrates and Plato.They taught us that we can respond to an eternal independent
beacon, the heavenly structures of reason itself. The idea that down in our foundations there
lie grubby creatures like desires, or passions, or needs, or culture, is like some nightmarish
madwoman in the attic, and induces the same kind of reaction that met Darwin when he too
drew attention to our proximity to animals rather than to angels. Surely we, the creatures of
reason, are not in bondage to the horrible contingencies that go with being an animal? From
their professorial eyries the mandarins fight back, reassuring each other that the Holy Grail is
there to be seen, spilling into tomes and journals and conferences, e-mails, blogs and tweets,
the torrents of what Wittgenstein nicely called the slightly hysterical style of university talk.

So does Hume actually give comfort to the postmodernists? Are Foucault and Derrida his true
heirs? Certainly not, although he is well seen as a pragmatist: an ancestor of James, Dewey,
Wittgenstein or even the less apocalyptic parts of Nietzsche or Richard Rorty. But it never
occurred to Hume to doubt that there are standards of both reasoning and conduct. He has no
inhibitions about condemning aspects of our minds that he regards as useless or pernicious:
gullibility, enthusiasm, stupidity, and the whole train of monkish virtues. And in doing so
he thinks he can stand foursquare with uncorrupted human nature, the party of mankind. This
is where the authority of our moral standards rests, and the base is firm enough. Nor is it
anything esoteric or surprising, since we all know when life is going well or badly, and when
we hear the words people use about us, we all know whether they express admiration or
aversion, praise or blame.

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The pragmatist slogan that meaning is use directs us to look at the actual functioning of
language. We then come at the nature of our thinking by understanding the ways we express
ourselves. Meaning is important, as analytical philosophy always held. But it is a house with
many mansions. It is not monolithically and myopically concerned with recording the passing
show, as if all we can do is make public whichever aspect of reality has just beamed upon us.
We are agents in our world, constantly doing things so much so that perception, like
reason, is itself an adaptation whose function is not to pick out the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, but only to foreground what is salient in the service of our goals and
needs. Meaning, therefore, needs to look two ways: back to the environment within which
our mental lives are situated, but also forward to the changes in that environment that our
desires and goals determine. Fortunately these ideas have percolated widely into areas outside
philosophy: it is widely understood, for instance, that animal signals are more like injunctions
telling other animals what to do, than simple registrations of elements in the environment.

Hume was able to use his pragmatism and his pluralism about the many functions of the mind
to avoid metaphysics. About that he was famously a pyromaniac, advocating that we commit
to the flames most of what has passed as philosophy from Parmenides to Berkeley. But
people need philosophy: we need defenses against the corrosive drips of skepticism. This
need surely motivates the apostles of reason to persevere at metaphysics, exploring the world
of being and becoming, delineating the true and ultimate nature of reality, finding what is
truly there behind the superficial appearances of things. And combined with this image of
what we should be doing there comes the inability to read or appreciate anyone who is doing
something entirely different. So the stark, $64,000 question in much contemporary
interpretation of Hume is whether he was a realist or not about values and causes, or even
persons and ordinary things questions that should actually be nowhere on the agenda,
since it imports precisely the way of looking at things that Hume commits to the flames.

Humes road is subtle, and too few philosophers dare take it. Yet the whirligig of time may
bring in its revenges, as a new generation of pragmatists look at much contemporary writing
with the same horror as Hume directed at Spinoza, Nietzsche at Kant, or Russell at Hegel.
Meanwhile one soldiers on, hoping, as Hume himself did, for the downfall of some of the
prevailing systems of superstition.

Simon Blackburn retired this year from the Bertrand Russell Chair of philosophy at the
University of Cambridge. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught for 20
years at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of many books, including Think,
Ruling Passions, Lust, and Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed.