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David Hume. Mark G. Spencer
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isbn 9780271068411
Автор произведения Mark G. Spencer
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Having seen that in fact the monkish virtues, too, can be described as “useful” and “agreeable,” we are able to see that such an explanatory account works only insofar as “useful” and “agreeable” function as thin specifications of ends for action, which can be filled in radically divergent ways. Either Hume’s account amounts to no more than the claim that “in order to be subject to moral assessment, an action must be performed for the sake of some perceived good,” in which case the monkish virtues cannot be excluded as artificial, or “useful” and “agreeable” are substantive, not merely formal, categories. And if “useful” and “agreeable” are substantive, it cannot be claimed that these are the only goods that can be pursued through intentional action, or that any actions not performed for the sake of the “useful” or “agreeable” are pointless and unintelligible. They are “good for nothing” only from some particular perspective.
Sympathetic Understanding in the History of England
The preceding discussion has focused on Hume’s articulating of the principle of sympathetic understanding and its limits and has held this up against contemporary hermeneutically oriented philosophy of history. How is this put to work in Hume’s History of England? Hume famously prided himself on having offered a truly unbiased account, writing in “My Own Life” that “I thought I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices”(E xxxvii). Instead, he reports, he was assailed from all sides, “English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I, and the earl of Strafford.” As the reference to his “generous tear” indicates, Hume does not hesitate in his History to employ the rhetorical tools of sentimentality. He does so specifically in order to dislodge readers from their party prejudices and encourage them to enter sympathetically into foreign points of view. A major concern of Hume’s History is with the destructive effects of various forms of party and faction; Hume’s aim is to narrate the history of England in a way that heals factional divisions and makes way for a more harmonious (and prosperous) future.
It is no surprise that religious belief is presented as a major root of the kinds of social conflict that are most difficult to treat. Moreover, Hume regards this particularly resistant form of zeal as rooted in the self-deceptive or hypocritical character of theistic belief: “The religious hypocrisy, it may be remarked, is of a peculiar nature; and being generally unknown to the person himself, though more dangerous, it implies less falsehood than any other species of insincerity” (H 6:142). In its treatment of religion, Hume’s sentimental history seeks to dislodge readers from their religious prejudices, in order to cultivate sympathy not with alien religious perspectives but rather with the “party of Mankind” as such. Yet Hume’s treatment of individual cases varies considerably. Quite often in the History, he refers to instances of sincere conviction; in Thomas à Becket, for instance, Charles I, and Henry III of France (H 1:333–34; 5:213). For the most part, however, these acknowledgments come barbed: Becket was caught up in a mass delusion; Charles I trusted in a Being whose favor is expressed in incomprehensible ways; Henry III’s belief was sincere enough but did not have the force to regulate his conduct. There are, though, rare instances in which Hume recognizes sincere conviction with actions following intelligibly from that conviction. So, for instance, he recognizes that Sir Thomas More relinquished his position “foreseeing that all the measures of the king and parliament led to a breach with the church of Rome, and to an alteration of religion, with which his principles would not permit him to concur” (H 3:197).16 More acts on religious principle, but his actions are nevertheless intelligible even to the historian who does not share those principles. So Hume’s historiographical practice belies at times his own general statement of limits.17
Providential History
As we have seen, then, while Hume did not reject the attempt to identify covering laws in history, he also sought to develop moral explanations, to achieve sympathetic understanding of historical actors. He understood this as an enterprise that would serve to refine and cultivate moral judgment. At the same time, Hume argued that there was a limit to the scope of sympathetic understanding. Sympathetic understanding is possible only where people are governed by “maxims of common life and ordinary conduct”; not where they live artificial lives, governed by speculative beliefs that contradict the maxims of ordinary life. Where moral explanation is possible, we can understand alien practices or individual actions, even if we judge them to be blameworthy. But when confronted by artificial lives, actions are unintelligible, pointless, possibly subject to causal explanation but not sympathetic understanding of agents’ reasons for acting. I have argued, though, that Hume illegitimately excuses himself from the task of sympathetic understanding by suggesting that lives dedicated to the pursuit of ends that do not conform to his own substantive understanding of what is truly “useful” or “agreeable” are in fact pursuing no goods at all and undermine the conditions of the possibility of human life and flourishing. He does better in the practice of writing history than in articulating its theory.
Donald Livingston, too, explores the issue of the limits of moral explanation. The example he takes up in detail is Hume’s treatment of the Saxon “barbarians” in volume 1 of his History of England. There Hume makes no effort to understand the point of view of those about whom he is writing, and his designation of the people as barbarians effectively captures why. Hume regards a barbarian as almost wholly unreflective, as lacking a conception of himself as a human being, and so as capable of very little self-conscious rational activity. “The Humean historian,” notes Livingston, “must explain the actions of historical agents by rethinking in his own mind the rational activity that is the inside or moral cause of the action. But it is impossible to rethink rational activity where there is none or where knowledge of it is impossible.”18 The fact that barbarians lack a rational interior sets up a barrier to moral understanding. This example works well for Livingston since he is able to conclude his discussion by showing that Hume did, after reading Robert Henry’s account of this historical period, come to recognize that the Saxons were not, after all, barbarians in this sense, and that it was therefore possible to achieve a moral understanding of their actions.19 Precisely where Collingwood’s judgment of Hume as incapable of verstehen thus seems most appropriate, Livingston has thus shown Hume to have recognized and corrected the deficiency. The more stubborn problem, however, is Hume’s articulation of a general principle that excuses the historian from responsibility for seeking sympathetic understanding with those whom he regards as leading “artificial lives.” Indeed, in endorsing Hume’s critique of providential history, Livingston replicates the problem.
Livingston, echoing Popkin, sees as key to grasping Hume’s enterprise as a historian the fact that Hume sought to undermine the dominant model of historical thinking in his day, which was providential. Instead of reading history as the arena of God’s redemptive action and human response or failure of response, Hume, in Popkin’s words, sought “to portray human history as meaningful and comprehensible in its own secular terms, according to a complex of human and natural factors.”20 This leaves open whether human history is to be comprehended in terms of covering-law explanations, in terms of historical agents’ reasons for action, or as some combination of the two, but in any case, the Humean historian will have no need to appeal to divine action in order to explain a historical occurrence, nor will she regard historical agents as contributing unintentionally to the fulfillment of divine purposes. Livingston, for his part, makes clear that Hume appeals both to causal (covering-law) explanations and moral explanations, though he regards moral explanations as most significant in Hume’s historical work. There are times when a moral explanation is available but no causal explanation, and vice versa, and there are times when we are able to offer both. Where we are unable to offer a moral explanation, we regard action as absurd or unintelligible, even if