Flesh in the Age of Reason (49 page)

Abandoning his legal studies and launching onto the murky waters of philosophy, Hume plunged into a personal crisis in his late twenties. For a while he studied with great enthusiasm at fever-pitch, but he then succumbed to languor and ennui: ‘I could no longer raise my Mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive Pleasure.’ He endeavoured to work, but by the spring of 1730 he was experiencing marked disturbance. He grew rawboned, looked consumptive, and developed ‘scurvy’, a disordered condition of the skin. He was inclined to blame his studies for his sickness, for he had thrown himself into the philosophy of the ancients, which, being abstract and metaphysical, had engulfed him in the suggestive fantasies of the imagination. Not least, those brave ‘Reflections against Death, & Poverty, & Shame & Pain’ which he read, among such Stoics as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, had the contrary effect upon him: far from enabling him to transcend his malaise, they merely accentuated his perception of sickness, and of falling short of the ideals of his heroes.

All this time, driven by an exacting and sceptical honesty, he was wrestling with his daringly innovative experimental science of the self, abandoning the rather Cartesian philosophy of sublime
a priori
reason touted by such figures as Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston for an unremitting examination of every scratch of sensation
upon the consciousness – studies which were to lead to the bold
A Treatise of Human Nature
.

Hume grew disordered. He was unwilling to accept that his condition was wholly in the head – due, say, to hypochrondria or the ‘vapours’ – for that would have implied a disturbing loss of self-command. He surmised, or preferred to believe, that something organic was amiss, and a physician obligingly ‘prescribed antiscorbutic juices’. These palliatives for the scurvy, however, were only partly successful, and the doctor was not deceived: ‘he laughed at me, & told me I was now a Brother, for that I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned.’ For this the patient was next prescribed ‘a Course of Bitters, & Anti-hysteric Pills’, claret and riding, for his nerves and spirits needed reinvigorating.

Over the course of eighteen months, Hume’s health went up and down. ‘I now began to take some Indulgence to myself,’ he later reflected, upon finding that a regime requiring moderation and balance seemed beneficial:

[I] studied moderately, & only when I found my Spirits at their highest Pitch, leaving off before I was weary, & trifling away the rest of my Time in the best manner I could. In this way, I liv’d with Satisfaction enough; and on my return to Town next Winter found my Spirits very much recruited… For these Reasons, I expected when I return’d to the Countrey, & cou’d renew my Exercise with less Interruption, that I wou’d perfectly recover.

But he was wrong. The next May he began to suffer palpitations; he found concentration difficult and lacked stamina; conscious of fatigue, he could not work without frequent diversions. Still, he wished to believe it was no mere personality disorder – we might say ‘nervous breakdown’ – for that would have implied either hypochondria, incipient madness or the public stigma of malingering. It was, he held, rather due to organic ‘weakness’ than to ‘lowness of spirits’. This was a comforting excuse, yet he could not shut his eyes to the fact that his condition had some psychological tinge. The closest parallel, Hume noted with some trepidation and much self-irony, lay
in the strange sicknesses suffered by religious mystics, as recorded in their pious outpourings or spiritual autobiographies. ‘I have notic’d in the Writings of the French Mysticks, & in those of our Fanatics here,’ he reflected,

that, when they give a History of the Situation of their Souls, they mention a Coldness and Desertion of the Spirit, which frequently returns, & some of them, at the beginning, have been tormented with it many Years. As this kind of Devotion depends entirely on the Force of Passion, & consequently of the Animal Spirits, I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty parallel, & that their rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflections, & that warmth or Enthusiasm, which is inseparable from them.

Hume thus painted a devastatingly sardonic and self-deprecating self-portrait of the philosopher as a young ‘enthusiast’ – hardly a flattering fate for one who was already experiencing deep religious doubts.

He was in a cleft stick. Study prostrated him, but an easy life left him empty and frustrated. After four years of intermittent depression, he had had enough. ‘I began to rouze up myself; & being encourag’d by Instances of Recovery from worse degrees of this Distemper, as well as by the Assurances of my Physicians, I began to think of something more effectual, than I had hitherto try’d.’ His recourse was to lay bare the history of his complaints in a long and revealing letter addressed to a physician, probably George Cheyne, the great expert on such maladies, or perhaps John Arbuthnot, both London-domiciled Scotsmen whom we have already encountered.

It is at least possible that the very act of composing this epistle composed his malady – indeed, that he
expected
it to do so – enabling Hume, through taking his own ‘history’ in the guise of his own physician, finally to master his condition. Thus, he may have effected a self-cure, using the actual doctor as a surrogate, and at last discovering in the process the true power of mind over matter – not in the Stoic sense of detached superiority (‘apathy’), but through an insightful self-analytical psychology. Hume apparently ‘found him
self ’, and thereafter he managed his temper perfectly, enjoying sunny equanimity through the remainder of his prosperous career. Admittedly,
A Treatise of Human Nature
, published in 1739 and 1740, ‘fell dead-born from the press’, but later works enjoyed better success. In 1741 and 1742 he published the
Essays Moral and Political
, which was better received. Concluding that the failure of the
Treatise
‘had proceeded more from the manner than the matter’, Hume then recast the first part of it as the
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1748), and later parts as the
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
(1751). In the following year he published
Political Discourses
, which had a warm reception. He was appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, and began work on the
History of England under the House of Tudor
(1759), as well as two volumes of a
History of Great Britain
under the Stuarts (1754, 1757), while
The Natural History of Religion
appeared in 1757. In the late 1760s he held various diplomatic posts, and saw his reputation rise, principally as a historian and man of letters. The
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
was completed shortly before he died in 1776.

This early and acutely self-monitored sickness episode was a critical episode in shaping Hume’s philosophical temper and credo. For it was living proof of the desperate frailty of pure reason, a demonstration of the inescapably psychosomatic and somato-psychic nature of consciousness: thinking could not divorce itself from sensation, and sensation was rooted in the senses, in the body. His nervous collapse surely indicated that his own special philosophical project – which included delving into sensations so as to resolve the problem of identity – risked and required the kind of morbid introspection that made him sick. Philosophy was inseparable from autobiography.

Yet out of his sickness Hume emerged as the advocate of a new breed of philosopher, in a way notably paralleled a century later by the outcome of John Stuart Mill’s nervous breakdown, which transformed the young scientific utilitarian into a libertarian individualist. Those who wallowed in morbid introspection remained religious enthusiasts; to understand and overcome the condition led to Humean philosophy.

Largely on the basis of such personal psychological experience, Hume advanced radical notions of the self in his
Treatise
, with its call for a new science of human nature, the foundation of the edifice of the human sciences. Man was to be understood scientifically, that is, naturalistically, independently of vulgar anthropocentric prejudices and of the dictates of faith. For by then Hume had become a religious sceptic who, over the years, would advance a profound critique of belief in miracles and propose the illegibility of any ultimate order, meaning or purpose to the cosmos. There was no rational basis upon which to make inferences from creation as ‘effect’ to any fundamental ‘cause’ or Creator, and hence no natural religion – a conclusion intriguingly anticipating William Blake’s, though from a totally different perspective.

Hume’s critique of the orthodox natural-theological claim that a knowledge of God could be derived from facts about nature hinged on the ingenious critique of causality advanced in his
Treatise
. The concept of causation was doubtless the basis of all knowledge, but it was not itself capable of demonstration. Experience showed the succession of events, but did not reveal any necessity in that succession – it was habit which created the expectation that one event would invariably follow from another. Custom was not knowledge, however, and did not strictly justify projections from past to future, from the known to the unknown. Causality was thus not a principle derived from the order of things but a mental postulate. Belief in a rational order of nature was only a premise, and so no God could reasonably be inferred from nature. The thrust of Hume’s later religious thinking was that religion was irredeemably anthropomorphic and animistic, the projection of human attributes upon God, or the gods.

Hume thus lived and died an unbeliever, much to the consternation of James Boswell, who hovered around his deathbed, desperate for a last-minute confession (as did Catholic priests at Voltaire’s). None was forthcoming, and Hume died faithful to his lifelong scepticism. In consequence, he entertained no belief in a non-material Christian or Platonic soul, or, for that matter, in life after death, and his religious writings offer shrewd reflections upon
the self-delusions which engendered ‘superstition’ among Roman Catholics and ‘enthusiasm’ among Protestants, bodying forth fantasies of existence beyond the grave. In this way, Hume pulled the rug away from under Christianity by proposing a naturalistic psychology of faith. What then was left of religion? ‘The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.’

Religion could thus provide no privileged account of man – in this Hume was advancing views far more radical than those of Locke and his immediate followers. Hence the need for a science of human nature. Man was properly an object of scientific enquiry, based upon experience, in line with the fact-based natural science of Newton and the philosophical empiricism of Locke. The
Treatise
was subtitled ‘An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’.

Such a ‘science of man’ was necessarily critical and subversive in tendency: it asked ‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’ Through such questioning, Hume explored and exploded the grounds of traditional ideas of the subject: received ‘truth’ turned out to be wishful thinking for the most part, betraying a deplorable readiness to be deceived for the sake of reassurance. In the process he criticized sloppy metaphysicians and theologians for the illegitimate thought-leaps they made from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, from mere matters of fact to supposed duties and eternal fitnesses. Hume sought a rigorous account of the self derived from ‘careful and exact experiments’, the ‘only solid foundation’ for which lay in ‘experience and observation’. All neo-Cartesian apriorism was out: ‘any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.’

Hume, indeed, drove empiricism much further than Locke, dissolving his rather confident category of ‘demonstration’ (knowledge) into ‘belief’. It was not that Hume was bent upon showing that all was random or unintelligible, only that man’s mental equipment for
understanding it was circumscribed and imperfect. ‘When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions than when I only consider the objects concerning which I reason.’ He was, however, prepared to fall back upon the general experience of the uniformity of human responses: ‘Would you know’, he famously asked, ‘the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English.… Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places.’ On that basis, he was confident of the feasibility of a science meant to ‘discover the constant and universal principles of human nature’.

The
Treatise
opened by addressing the capacity of the mental faculties to generate knowledge about the self and the world beyond. Eliminating all concepts not derived from experience and observation, Hume explained that our knowledge was limited to ‘impressions’ (perceptions) derived from observation and introspection. All complex ideas were to be traced back to such elementary sense ‘impressions’ or to internal impressions or feelings, and to associations derived therefrom. The hoary scholastic doctrine of ‘substance’ was slain, once again, as vacuous verbiage, nor could true causal powers be discovered – one must live with ‘constant conjunctions’ reliant upon belief in the uniformity of nature.

For these reasons, no fixed and stable self was knowable (or, for all we could be sure, present at all). Resuming Locke’s discussion of identity (conscious selfhood), Hume drove it to sceptical conclusions: since experience was made up of ‘impressions’, and these – for Hume, as for Locke’s radical disciple Anthony Collins – were irredeemably atomized and discrete, there was, in truth, no such demonstrably constant unity as a ‘person’, merely
pointilliste
impressions of continuity, dots on a page which we might be disposed to join up. Personal identity was thus necessarily contingent and wreathed in doubt. Truths still self-evident to the theist Locke could not survive Hume’s sceptical scrutiny. Peering into himself, he discovered (he reported) no coherent, unitary, sovereign self, master in its own house, only a flux of perceptions. During sleep, existence in effect ceased. Given
the inability to meld disparate perceptions, identity was thus ‘merely a quality which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination… Our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas’.