The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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       The Philosophical Enthusiasm Renounced

      In the end, Hume’s feeling for the complexity and uncertainty of everything human destroyed his faith in his own philosophy. All his painstaking inquiries led him to conclude that there were no grounds for being sure of anything, either in philosophy or common life. He had after all shown that the belief in truth was nothing more than experience and habit working on imagination to give some ideas more force than others. His philosophy seemed to require him to regard no opinion as more probable or likely than any others, and made it meaningless even to desire to known ultimate truth:¹ “’Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we attempt to justify them in that manner.”²

      This was in a way what Hume had set out to do. He had intended his philosophy to persuade men that there was no infallible truth about human behaviour and the world. Although men had to act in ordinary life as if they were certain, Hume wished them always to keep a reservation in their minds and hearts. In a sense, he was asking only for what truly reasonable men have always done, although there have never been many such men. For most people have to choose between doubting and believing, and can rarely understand the possibility of doing both at once. In fact, however, Hume had gone beyond characterizing the reasonable man. He had translated a state of mind, a disposition, into a philosophy.

      As a result, he began to fancy himself “in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.” If once he left his study, to converse, dine, or play backgammon with his friends, when he returned, his speculations struck him as “so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther.”¹ The solitude which the pursuit of philosophy imposed upon him was nearly unbearable. He began to fancy himself some “strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate.”² In short, philosophy, with all its “subtleties and sophistries,”³ seemed hardly a reasonable occupation.

      Yet he could not give it up. While composing the Treatise, he was still wholly infatuated:

      I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations which actuate and govern me. I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful and another deformed; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed.⁴

      It was something after all, he decided, to have given a new turn to philosophical speculation and to have emphasized the importance of experience, of observing human nature, as against theorizing about it in the abstract. And he became reconciled to being more certain than his speculations warranted; he told himself that it was proper to “yield to that propensity which inclines us to be positive and certain in particular points, according to the light in which we survey them in any particular instant.”⁵ But before very long, he came to think differently.

      During the years after he returned with his Treatise from France, while he was marking time in London, in the worldly society of the coffee houses, at the Rainbow, or with other Scotsmen at the British in Cockspur Street, his doubts about philosophy grew upon him. The indifference with which his book had been greeted confirmed this mood. He began to suspect “in a cool hour” that most of his reasonings would be “more useful by furnishing Hints and exciting People’s Curiosity than as containing any Principles that will augment the Stock of Knowledge that must pass to future Ages.”⁶

      In the essays that he wrote during those years, he expressed odd sentiments for a philosopher. While discussing the sceptic, he took to task the philosopher who, having once laid hold of a favourite principle, extends it “over the whole creation and reduces to it every phenomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning.”¹ Philosophical devotion, he said, was like the enthusiasm of a poet, “the transitory effect of high spirits,”² as wed as of leisure, genius, and study. The philosopher “no sooner puts in his stake than he is transported”³ by those passions he himself condemned. While he reasons about life, “life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.”⁴ His great philosophical endeavour no longer appeared to be quite so amiable or important an undertaking. Indeed, his devotion to philosophy looked much like any other fanaticism. He began to feel that by turning to philosophy, he had not after all exorcised the spirit of the Kirk.

      There were good reasons for this feeling. After he became disenchanted with his Church, his character and outlook did not change at once. The young philosopher reflecting on the Treatise could easily be recognized as a son of the Kirk. The letter he wrote to Dr. Cheyne shortly before leaving for France has a distinct air of piety about it, even of priggishness. He told the doctor how he had studied the “books of morality” by Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, how smitten he had been with “their beautiful representations of virtue and philosophy,” and how he had tried to improve his temper and will, fortifying himself with “reflections against death, and poverty, and shame, and pain, and all the other calamities of life.”⁵ He observed his ailments minutely, dosed himself meticulously, and took to riding because it was good for his health. When he wrote from France to a school friend, he supplied statistics—Rheims has 40,000 inhabitants, 30 families keep coaches. And for his “idle thoughts,” he offered a pompous dissertation on the differences between French and English manners. He was no longer a fierce Presbyterian, but he was not at all like the favourite of Parisian salons that he later became.

      Indeed the Treatise itself is very much the credo of a man who has found a faith to replace one he had lost. For the supreme philosopher, no less than a devout member of the Kirk, is obsessed, as Hume said, by a particular vision of truth, by the desire to demonstrate that it is the only truth, and that it can be reduced to some one or few principles. Even a philosopher who lets the reader see his perplexities is seduced by his own abstractions. Thus Hume, while he was composing his Treatise in La Flèche, was possessed by the philosophical enthusiasm. He proclaimed his to be the one real philosophy, a new revelation of the truth about human nature. His was a holy crusade against Satan, who had taken on the form of abstruse metaphysics, final causes, and substance, and his talisman against Satan was the “experimental method.” While exposing the true nature of human reason. Hume was as relentless as a pious Presbyterian denouncing an adulteress. Although his Treatise is remarkable for his willingness to let loose ends hang without attempting to tie them up, he did try to make a whole creed. The urge to do so, hardly compatible with the moral message of his philosophy, was part of his puritan heritage, which had taught him the habit of encompassing all that he thought, felt, and did in one creed. Even when he set out to СКАЧАТЬ