Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy

Though this book is a continuation of his 1984 Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, Donald Livingston imports enough of his earlier work into the successor to render it independently understandable. While part 1 of the successor is an exegetical reconstruction of Hume’s metaphilosophy, part 2 applies this reconstruction to topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This application is intended to explore the continuing vitality of Hume’s metaphilosophy while increasing our understanding of its implications. Livingston fits nearly everything that Hume wrote into an ambitious synthesis characterized by Hume’s bringing of reasoning into due alignment with ‘common life.’ Superimposed onto this division, but not coextensive with it, is another between discussions of Hume’s views on the philosopher as sage (chaps. 1-7) and as patriot (chaps. 8-15). In the latter role the philosopher enacts the benevolence of a public-spirited participant in a community’s well-being or misfortunes. I find the chapters on the philosopher as patriot to be less problematic and more valuable than those on the sage, wherein Livingston extols the wisdom of a self-knowledge defined by a transcendent realization of how philosophers do not transcend common folk’s practical reasoning.

In the seven chapters on sage self-knowledge there are both synchronic and diachronic treatments of the metaphilosophy. The former consists of a revelation, dialectically attained, of the integral role that common life plays in “true philosophy” (chap. 2). The diachronic treatment, comprising both an anthropology of philosophy (chap. 3) and a history of the Western tradition of philosophy from the Ancients through the Moderns (chaps. 4-7), has as a central theme the troubled interaction of philosophy and religion, both of which are capable of true and false permutations. In accordance with Hume’s skepticism, the epithets ‘true’ and ‘false’ signify truth or falsity to the natures of philosophy and religion, not veridicality or erroneousness. In the eight chapters on active benevolence there are brilliant speculations on the rationale behind Hume’s sympathy for the American colonists in their contention with George III and a daring projection of that rationale forward in history onto the problem case of the secession of the Confederate states from the United States. Livingston finds that Hume would have sympathized with the secessionists as he had with the secession from the British Empire.

We should not allow the brilliance of this book to prevent us from giving it its due critical scrutiny. It is a serious attempt to synthesize all of Hume’s writings according to a single tenet about the limitations of philosophy. In presenting my own misgivings I will confine myself to questions of exegesis and ignore those concerning the soundness of the views that Livingston attributes to Hume.

Livingston’s Hume sees it as fundamentally falsifying, with respect to philosophy, custom, liberty, and whatnot, to identify a defining aspect of such concepts and then adjust practice according to a supposedly corrected understanding. True philosophy and religion, as well as custom itself, are properly understood as activities learned through participation.  Capability cannot be developed by deferring practice until after a preliminary analysis of a hypostasized concept.

Livingston rejects as anachronistic the prevailing view of Hume as an empiricist and therefore focuses on the skeptical extravaganza at the end of book 1 of the Treatise as providing the key to Hume’s metaphilosophy. One wonders why Livingston’s rather Hegelian picture of Hume is less liable to anachronism, but a reorientation treating Hume foremost as a skeptic does recommend itself in that Hume actually said that he was a skeptic. This reorientation promises to give a significantly different picture of Hume than many exegetes have drawn. Perhaps modern readers have exaggerated the meaning-empiricism in Hume’s attempts to trace the source of key ideas in source impressions, and perhaps Hume’s Pyrrhonistic meltdown in the Treatise is  central to the book and Hume’s thought.

What that meltdown shows Livingston is that for Hume philosophy is self-defeatingly false to its own nature when it vaunts its own independence from common life and elevates its own autonomy at the expense of that of ‘custom.’ And it is true that Hume depicts common life as invincible when brought into conflict with Pyrrhonian skepticism. Livingston’s reading gains plausibility insofar as due regard for common forms of life is analogous to the policy of the Pyrrhonists to conform to the ways of the society in which they lived.

An apparent problem for this reading is that ‘custom’ has more than one meaning in Hume’s texts. Livingston’s synthesizing impulse leads him to play down the difference between the custom of social practice and that employed in Hume’s epistemology, wherein custom is the source of involuntary psychological responses, namely certain beliefs that are indispensable to life. The custom that accounts for our beliefs in causal connection, the existence of objects independently of our perceptions, and the causal uniformity of the future with the past is ineluctable in a way that is not the case with a social custom like deferential behavior towards the clergy. Livingston plays down the difference between the two customs because he wants social customs to have some of the authority of beliefs that are integral to human nature. The mistake of conflating the two appears in a summarizing passage like the following: “Hume pictured the vulgar and the philosophers as possessing different but complementary forms of wisdom, the former possessing the wisdom of common life, namely, knowledge through participation, and the latter possessing the wisdom of speculation, or knowledge through reflection. The wisdom of common life is thoroughly social and can be known only through conversation.” But of course the customary connection beneath causal knowledge does not require conversation, and Adam did not need Eve’s society to be impressed with the helpfully predictable causal regularities exhibited by the world. So when Livingston goes on to say that “Critical reflection may be carried out within the domain of custom but cannot go beyond it” (244-5), he needs at the least to show very different sorts of reliance of practical reasoning on custom for the cases of ineluctable beliefs and for those of conventional behavior like the practice of saying grace before dinner.

There seems to be some arbitrariness in what Livingston’s Hume deems to be philosophy  deviating illegitimately from common life. He deems it in accordance with custom to be a ‘philosophical theist,’ a believer, that is, in a general but not a particular providence. It takes some explaining to show why a minimalist theism is more agreeable to customary life than the common belief that God listens to and responds to prayers. Livingston’s Hume is open-minded about fideism and revealed religion but is not himself a fideist. But why? If like Livingston one declines to see irony in Hume’s posture towards religion, then there are at least as many statements in the writings suggesting fideism as minimalist theism. The answer is that philosophical theism is more agreeable to the causal laws experienced in common life (147-53). But, putting aside Hume’s repeated exposure of the lack of warrant for theistic conclusions from causal regularities, this emphasis on causal laws exhibits the intersection of common life and empiricism, and Livingston’s Hume is not an empiricist. He is a skeptic, from whom one might have expected fideism to be more natural than belief in a more or less aloof deity suggested but not validated by experience. The reasons for the true philosopher’s being a philosophical theist is that common life features plenty of causally lawful phenomena and that law supposedly entails a purposeful lawmaker, “For the idea of law is, in the end, tied to the idea of intentionality” (66). But if natural law entails a lawmaker, then so much more would moral laws entail God’s will, yet even Livingston’s Hume does not subscribe to the ethical orientation of transgression, repentance, retribution, atonement, and redemption. How did Hume transcend the customary moral orientation of his society? Presumably Livingston’s Hume found that the prevalent retributive orientation for morality was false religion. Its foundationalist error was perhaps to warp natural moral sentiment to conform to a contrived principle outside of the common life. The obvious candidate for this falsifying refinement would be the will of a putative god existing outside of nature in eternity, giving Christianity a delusion that it had attained a “view from nowhere” (21, 25). This explanation, though consonant with the philosophy of common life, is not one that Livingston offers.

Livingston offers his interpretation of Hume’s metaphilosophy as superior to the interpretation of Hume as an empiricist. There is possibly not a great schism between viewing Hume’s critical reasoning as based on common life and on experience. Hume might accuse us of a dispute of words. Which approach has greater explanatory power for the texts? When Hume says that we must “glean up our experiments” from common life, the supposition was surely that uncommon life is likely to provide abnormal data (Treatise, introd. ¶ 10). Livingston disapproves of seeing Hume as an empiricist because, with respect to epistemology, that interpretation has led to misattributions to Hume of a foundationalist principle when his point is actually antifoundationalist. This principle, that ideas derive from impressions, Hume wields to show how it leads to skeptical breakdown and, for the true philosophers, to an accommodation with custom. The “new microscope or species of optics” with which ideas are made determinate by reference to their genealogy in impressions (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 7 ¶ 4) is “itself a barbarism of refinement” (245). Nothing in the texts, however, indicates that Hume regarded his microscope as a false refinement. In the Abstract (¶ 7) he quotes himself from the Treatise (1.2.3 ¶ 1) in saying that “no discovery cou’d have been made more happily for deciding all controversies concerning ideas” and concludes that “it were to be wished, that this rigorous method were more practised in all philosophical debates.”[1] We can correct the emphasis placed on the microscope to get a more nuanced empiricist interpretation of Hume’s philosophy that is at least equal to Livingston’s alternative in explanatory power. It is not exegetically awkward to describe in empiricist terms Hume’s rejection of the prevalent religionism. It is awkward to do so by showing how in Hume’s view commonly held religious beliefs and practices were really  deviations from custom that common people did not notice. Hume does not tend to criticize religionists and rationalists in the language of custom and common life. Characteristically he criticizes them by reference to experience and observation. Livingston accounts, as he must, for how Hume can revise a belief arising from customary practice, but often as he works through the details he falls into the language of experience and observation of causal regularities, with good reason. The issue is whether the overall purport of Hume’s philosophy is a skeptical point about dependence on custom or a constructive attempt to build a naturalistic account of human nature. Such an issue cannot be settled conclusively, but it must be significant that the subtitle of the Treatise describes the work as an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.

Livingston’s book is the product of a courageously independent mind. Livingston intends to provoke and challenge. He disapproves of modernity and postmodernity, blaming them on the Enlightenment, and he believes that Hume has provided him with his critical vocabulary. His conclusion that Hume would have been a sympathizer with the secessionist states in the 1860s is convincing as far as it goes, but one feels compelled to fault the discussion for excluding as irrelevant the issue of slavery. It will take more than a couple of breathless endnotes to convince readers that slavery was a red herring or that Hume would have regarded it as such. Though Hume certainly entertained the racist hypothesis, he also certainly deplored slavery as disgusting, corrupting, and economically unsound. Given that Livingston chose the problem case of the American Civil War, he should say whether he finds that Hume would have accepted the institution of slavery out of deference to a customary, inherited way of life while deploring the moral effects of consolidating a federation into a union (356-7). Alternatively he could show how a philosophy giving epistemic authority to common life and tradition might allow Hume to deplore the slave-holding states’ way of life. I believe that an abolitionist argument could be constructed from the materials of common life, but in the process we might find ourselves employing the empiricist language of observation and experience. The easiest way to build a Humean abolitionist argument with reference to the language in Hume’s works would dispense with invocations of tradition and custom and straightforwardly talk about sentiments of disapprobation, sympathetic responses to suffering, and reactions against the disutility of a practice.

[1] Quotations from Hume’s writings are taken from the Oxford Philosophical Texts edition of A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (2000), which includes Hume’s Abstract, and from An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (2000), from the Clarendon Edition of the Works.