LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

one that comes out of her reading of Emil Falkenheim and David Carr and which she describes as the “existential philosophy of history,” an “approach to the philosophical study of history and human nature that examines the influence of historical existence on human consciousness.” Viewing Hume’s corpus in light of these three divisions, Schmidt finds that “a sequence of seemingly disparate passages” might advantageously be linked to reveal Hume’s coherent philosophy of history. A speculative and analytic philosopher of history, Schmidt’s Hume offers “a tentative theory . . . of progress” and recommends a causal understanding of human actions and historical testimony. But Schmidt also argues that Hume’s existential philosophy of history “is an underlying principle in his philosophical system.” Here she emphasizes Hume’s attentiveness to historical context, a theme others touch on to good effect in this volume as well. Hume presents to his readers “an account of the influence of historical existence over human consciousness, which directs us to consider the historical context of human thought, emotion, and action.” In a final section, Schmidt traces Hume’s subsequent impact as a philosopher of history in the works of Auguste Comte, Hegel, John Herschel, J. S. Mill, Carl Hempel, Johann Gottfried Herder, and J. G. Hamann, among others.

      Several of the contributors to this volume, including Schmidt, note that there are interesting links to be worked out between Hume’s comments on aesthetics and his study of history. Timothy M. Costelloe takes up part of that challenge in chapter 9, “Fact and Fiction: Memory and Imagination in Hume’s Approach to History and Literature.” Noting that Hume both “juxtaposes” and “compares” what he artfully refers to as “the craft of the historian to the art of the poet,” Costelloe investigates further to see what this reveals about Hume’s understanding of the rules for literary and historical composition. Starting with the poet and drawing heavily on Hume’s sections on memory and imagination in book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature, Costelloe shows how for Hume there are “three general rules of criticism that are tantamount to techniques, which if followed can guide the creation of successful poetry, and if ignored would produce the opposite.” Turning with that knowledge to Hume as historian, Costelloe argues that for Hume “history is a true copy, a veridical depiction, in contrast to the speculation of narratives that from error, fancy, or dogmatism, depart from matter of fact.” Or, as he puts it later: “Historians, in short, distinguish fact from fiction, as ideas of memory can be separated from those of imagination; historians discern the real shape of events under the clutter which contemporary reports and time have effectively obscured them.” But that is not to say there is no role for the imagination—far from it. Hume perceives that there is “a chain . . . that leads from the present into remote regions of the past, but the links are images of events and the connections between them dark corners to be illuminated.” Important choices must be made about what facts are to be included in any narrative and how those facts are to be relayed. For Hume, “history still involves manipulating the reader” in an effort “to effect the easy transition of ideas in the imagination.” Costelloe constructs from Hume’s text a number of “rules of historical criticism”: historical accounts must “carry conviction,” have a “plan and design,” and aim to “imitate nature.” Compositions that followed those rules, Hume thought, might live up to history’s essential role as an instructor in morals.

      Chapter 10, Douglas Long’s “Hume’s Historiographical Imagination,” shares some ground with Costelloe and Schmidt but recommends an even more central place for the imagination in Hume’s thought and writings. For Hume, says Long, it is “by means of our imagination that we construct the context in which we situate our direct experiences of the world.” In the first part of his essay, Long pursues his theme by looking closely at two important qualities of the imagination: its “sympathetic character” and “constructive power.” In part II, Long differentiates Hume’s thought from that of Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Michel de Montaigne. Bringing Smith’s understanding of sympathy into the mix, Long differentiates Hume’s thought from that of his close friend. This allows us to see more clearly that the History of England “is philosophical history—it is a conventional historical narrative transformed and enlivened by the unprecedented application to historical narrative of Hume’s sympathetic imagination.” Long also maps the “universe of the imagination,” by comparing Hume to Hobbes and Montaigne, two thinkers with whom Hume engaged. In a third section, Long turns to Hume’s discussions of space and time in the Treatise for “insights into the nature and value of the historian’s activities.” He shows that “Hume’s image of a ‘universe of the imagination,’ centered on and bounded by the self, yet paradoxically conveying a vivid sense of the isolation of the self in a vast sea of spatial and temporal phenomena, deserves to be carefully examined as one of the seminal metaphors of modern social, historical, and political thought.” Approaching Hume’s History from this vantage point, Long draws several conclusions, including that the History is “a Herculean attempt to overcome the resistance of historical data to narrative ordering—a sort of fling at cleaning out the Augean stables of historicity.” It is, then, Hume’s effort to map the imagination that so closely links the goals of the Treatise with the History of England and much else that Hume wrote in between. Long reminds us that Hume, in his intriguing essay “Of the Study of History,” tellingly remarked, “we should be for ever children in understanding, were it not for this invention, which extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation.”

      In chapter 11, “The ‘Most Curious & Important of All Questions of Erudition’: Hume’s Assessment of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” M. A. Box and Michael Silverthorne turn our attention to Hume’s essay on that topic. This essay—which has received relatively little scholarly attention—has penetrating light to cast on Hume’s dimensions as historian. Box and Silverthorne note at the outset that Hume here seems to have had two goals in mind: “In its curious aspect, the essay is a virtuoso examination of a historical question about comparative populations; in its implications, it is a polemic about police, manners, and constitutions.” Moreover, “the thesis of the curious examination is expressly skeptical, prescribing suspension of judgment. That of the polemic is an endorsement of modernism and a condemnation of the ancients’ ways.” Box and Silverthorne provide a schematic outline of “Hume’s Skeptical Argument,” whereby Hume offers a critique of Isaac Vossius, Montesquieu, and Robert Wallace. Hume’s arguments related to physical and moral causes are outlined and seen in the context of other essays he wrote as well as the Treatise. But Hume’s “skeptical argument is only as good as Hume’s scholarship.” A real strength of this chapter is its masterful account of Hume’s sources, of which there are dozens, including many classical historians. Plutarch is cited most; Polybius is a “favored source”; Thucydides and Xenophon are “trusted,” as is Xenophon, whose “reliability as a historian rests for Hume on his being a contemporary of the events he narrates.” Less trusted are Herodotus and Livy. Hume’s assessments of Tacitus, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder are more complicated, and extended attention goes to Hume’s critique of Athenaeus’s account of the population of Athens. Several other topics—slavery and infanticide included—are also dissected from the perspective of Hume’s use of sources. Box and Silverthorne conclude that “Hume accumulated from his having ‘read over of almost all the Classics both Greek and Latin’ an astonishing amount of evidence, much of which scholars of population in antiquity still use today, and that he deployed it relentlessly to question, and in many cases, to invalidate definitively, the overconfident generalizations of those admirers of antiquity who had uncritically exaggerated its populousness.” That survey is brought to bear on Hume’s account of “ancient virtue” and “modern luxury.” So what are we to make of Hume’s account? More than anything else, Hume’s “Of the Populousness of Antient Nations” was “a work of history,” but it was also one with ample room for Hume’s skepticism. Hume appears to lead his readers to a rather ambiguous conclusion: “Though we cannot prove that population was lower amongst the ancients,

Скачать книгу