The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ Those of great delicacy of passion have perhaps “more lively enjoyments as well as more pungent sorrows than men of cool and sedate tempers,” but they are more nearly at the mercy of fortune. Contentment can be courted best by developing a highly refined taste, which “enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.”⁶ But delicate taste is not as burdensome as sensitive passions, because, although we cannot control external circumstances, we can decide what books we shall read, what diversions we choose, what company we keep. Thus a man becomes more self-sufficient and less dependent on accident: “When a man is possessed of that talent, he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem or a piece of reasoning than the most expensive luxury can afford.”¹ This was, however, merely homely advice to those seeking contentment. It did not impose anything on them in the name of virtue. There is no single set of virtuous choices. What matters with respect to virtue is only how well a man balances his passions, so that he never falls victim to one or the other, and never becomes obsessed by some enthusiasm that must torment him and his fellow men. “If a man have a lively sense of honour and virtue, with moderate passions, his conduct will always be conformable to the rules of morality. …²

      Hume’s only firm moral commandment was a negative one—that there is no a priori way of deciding for or against some kinds of gratification. He did not therefore share the attitude of most moralists to luxury, but insisted that it has a good as well as a bad sense. Whether it is vicious depends entirely on the circumstances: “In general, it means great refinement in the gratification of the senses; and any degree of it may be innocent or blameable, according to the age or country, or condition of the person. The bounds between virtue and vice cannot here be exactly fixed more than in other moral subjects.”³ Any form of asceticism outraged Hume. He could not see that any gratification, however sensual, could “of itself be esteemed vicious.”⁴ Only those whose minds are “disordered by the frenzies of enthusiasm,” he declared, could imagine anything vicious in enjoying meat, drink, or apparel. Such indulgences become vices only when they are “pursued at the expense of some virtue.” But where they do not interfere with the needs of friends, family, and every proper object of generosity or compassion,” they are perfectly “innocent and have in every age been acknowledged by all moralists.”⁵

      What this might mean in practice is admirably illustrated in Fielding’s novels. In Fielding’s mind, the philosophical problem about the relation between reason and passion, that impressed Hume, took the shape of a difference between Allworthy and Masters Thwackum and Square. Like Hume, though by a different route, Fielding became interested in the teachings of the divines; and his library was well stocked with theological treatises. He declared himself in the party of the rational Low Church which Clarke represented, but his pharisees, whether free thinkers or pious, all speak in Clarke’s syllogisms. Not any particular belief, but simply the propensity to reduce every issue to a matter of good reasoning distinguished Fielding’s villains. They are men who can justify anything. When Tom lies to protect Black George, Thwackum can demonstrate that he ought to be punished with texts from Solomon. And Square explains that although there was something resembling fortitude in the action, as fortitude was a virtue and falsehood a vice, they could not be united together, and since the pardoning of Tom would confound vice and virtue, his punishment should be even larger to keep the distinction clear. But within Allworthy’s breast, there was something with which “the invincible fidelity which that youth had preserved corresponded much better than it would have done with the religion of Thwackum or with the virtue of Square.”

      It was those who “utterly discarded all natural goodness of heart” that Fielding hunted. He had no use for the virtuous lady who despaired over the loss of a ribbon but ostentatiously affected contempt for things of the world; for the good man, who owed no one a shilling, entertained his neighbours lavishly, and gave charity to the poor, but had nothing beyond justice for suffering sinners; for anyone who shuffled with principles and combined the greatest primness of expression and regularity of behaviour with the least possible sacrifice of his own interests. He preferred Parson Adams, who lived with exuberance, absorbed vast quantities of beer, tobacco, and gossip in Lady Booby’s kitchen, and settled disputes vigorously with a terrifying mutton fist.

      Parson Adams perfectly represents the benevolent man Hume admired. He is a man of good heart whose virtue is instinctive, and the opposite of a formalist who compensates for his want of generous impulses by rigidly observing the law. That moral standards are not something apart from mankind, unyielding and impersonal, is the essence of Hume’s moral teaching. It is the opposite of Kant’s view that man’s reason obliges him to set up rational goals that he must forever keep before himself and pursue. Hume preferred rather to have men work from day to day for immediate, limited objectives, guided by conscience and accumulated experience.

      Whereas Hobbes and Locke, empiricists though they were, were still seeking a single, unifying vision of life, Hobbes in terms of will, Locke in terms of reason, Hume emphasized imagination, a receptive, passive power, not a creative, moulding power. What gives form to life, as Hume saw it, is not any ideal mould into which all men must fit, nor some distant overpowering end to be pursued throughout life, but felt principles that guide the manner of choosing without prescribing in advance what is to be chosen.

      As an analysis of moral behaviour, Hume’s account left something to be desired. He admitted the influence of reason in a number of ways but left its nature undefined. He described the calm passions as founded on a distant view or reflection. In his discussion of artificial virtues, the practical reason seems to determine the sense of moral obligation, and at times Hume even implied that unreasonable conduct may result not only from false judgements but from a failure to make certain judgements. He not only made it clear that judgements bring to our attention certain facts which affect our desires, but he distinguished sharply between mere liking and moral approval, which depended on being able to see a thing or action independently of its relation to one’s own interests. Yet precisely how felt principles were related to judgements, or how from a judgement that a means is desirable we are moved to desire that means, whether practical judgements can prompt passions, or whether reason operating under the control of one passion had any power to control other passions, Hume did not say. He was after all less anxious to elaborate a complete psychology of moral behaviour than to liberate morality from the dominance of pure reason, and show up the deficiencies of both the puritanical antipathy to nature and the rationalist illusion that a code of moral conduct could be deduced from a few absolutely certain principles. In order to deny that moral action could be reduced to a set of impersonal universal rules, he tried to exclude reason as a source of moral conviction and to put feeling in its place, thus making it impossible for the moral reaction to be anything but concrete and personal.

      Perhaps the best summary of the moral temper Hume was defending is to be found in his views on personal identity. The person, he said, is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”¹ He described the mind not as an essence or permanent core, but as a “kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.”¹ We like to think that there is a connecting principle, and we invent fictions like a soul or self or substance. But in fact there is nothing, Hume declared, beyond a succession of related sensations, an easy transition of ideas that produces the notion of personal identity, for we can have no notion of any existence or of any simple substance apart from particular perceptions.² Man cannot then escape doing what Spinoza described as “willy-nilly things which he knows absolutely nothing about.” He cannot survey the whole of his life and decide which things he ought to desire most. Whereas Spinoza regarded men who remained at the mercy of circumstances as not properly free beings, both Hume’s moral theory and his description of the self were designed to impress on men that they СКАЧАТЬ