The Commercial Philosopher The Enlightenment is often miscast as the ‘Age of Reason.’ In truth, it dethroned rational philosophy in favor of sociology and psychology. By Jeffrey Collins
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-commercial-philosopher-1452461565
In the summer of 1776, the celebrated diarist James Boswell visited the Edinburgh home of David Hume, where the philosopher lay dying. Hume, atypically thin and “ghastly” in pallor, was nevertheless “placid.” Interrogated by Boswell, he affirmed his view that the afterlife was an “unreasonable fancy.” With “death before his eyes,” Boswell reported, Hume blithely predicted his own annihilation. “I maintained my faith,” wrote Boswell, but “left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.”
This scene often serves as a miniature representation of Hume’s career. Boswell’s watery piety crashes against Enlightenment reason. Superstition flinches before knowledge. The sang-froid of Hume’s godlessness amazed contemporaries, and modern atheists have treasured the tale.
James A. Harris’s “Hume: An Intellectual Biography” punctures most of this mythology. Though an atheist, Hume was nowhere near as dogmatic as his current admirers. He was certainly not a rationalist. His reputation for philosophical intrepidity, furthermore, has been overblown.
ENLARGE Hume: An Intellectual Biography
By James A. Harris
Cambridge, 621 pages, $55
David Hume was born in 1711 in Scotland, the third child of a gentrified lawyer. He would spend much of his life at the family’s country home, Ninewells. As a younger son, Hume required an occupation. He flirted with law and business and enjoyed some minor government jobbery. But he always wished, Mr. Harris writes, “to live the life of a man of letters.” This aspiration was just becoming possible as an expanding commercial print market replaced a reliance on aristocratic patronage.
Writing would eventually make Hume rich and famous, but for many years he lived a transitory, modest life. He was often unhappy. For much of the early 1730s, Hume endured an emotional breakdown. During this time, and periodically thereafter, he lived with his family—unable to establish himself in the world and crippled by depression (the “disease of the learned,” as one of his doctors called it). His gloom emerged from his reading and from the belief that the strictures of traditional Christian and Stoic morality were an impossible burden to bear.
Mr. Harris’s book is, as advertised, an intellectual biography. It will not supplant E.C. Mossner’s standard biography of 1954. As a historian of Hume’s ideas, however, Mr. Harris far surpasses Mossner. Hume wrote prodigiously: on philosophy, economics, politics, religion and English history. Mr. Harris extracts no “system” from this variety. He proceeds chronologically, fixing each work amid surrounding texts and debates. Mr. Harris’s Hume exists not in the flesh but on the page, engaging fellow philosophers, such as Mandeville, Montesquieu and Shaftesbury.
There are costs to Mr. Harris’s erudite method. Hume’s friendship with Adam Smith, his Continental travels, his notorious falling out with the paranoid Rousseau: None of this is narrated in detail. Mr. Harris’s textual explications can have a dry, lofty air. But patient readers are rewarded. Hume emerges as a product of the Enlightenment as it really was, not as it exists in complacent legend.
In his earliest and most substantial writings, Hume adopted Locke’s empirical outlook—the idea that all knowledge is derived from the senses—but drove its inherent skepticism further than Locke had dared. Hume denied our capacity to understand, even imperfectly, material causation, and he abandoned any notion of “final cause” (or purpose) in the created order. He also denied the temporal stability of our individual personalities. That a rock would invariably shatter glass, or that I am the same man I was last week, were mere imaginative tricks used to order the chaotic welter of sense. They were not demonstrably true.
In Hume’s view, vanity and comfort-seeking were the key components of our “mental anatomy,” and the operations of sentiment propelled human society. This privileging of mental disposition was typical of the era, as was Hume’s fundamental utilitarianism. The Enlightenment is miscast in most textbooks as the “Age of Reason.” In truth, the Enlightenment dethroned rational philosophy in favor of sociology and psychology. Hume’s “Treatise of Human Nature” and “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” undermined not just religion but rationalism as well.
In mid and later life, Hume wrote essays and narrative histories of England, reaching a wide audience and achieving the fame he had long sought. These works flattered and charmed, rather than challenged, his readers. They contained real insight, as Mr. Harris shows, but they also reflected the mannered dilettantism of their era.
Hume remains most famous for his irreligion. His essays defending suicide and attacking miracles vexed the orthodox, and they loathed him in turn. In his “Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion,” he sabotaged the Newtonian theology of designed creation that was popular in his day. What caused the first cause? he asked. Why do we celebrate divine design amid so much decay and misery? These provocations, in fact, operated effectively against a fairly narrow range of theological argument: a rational religion emerging from Lockean empiricism.
Mr. Harris notes that Hume sought to examine religion from a “maximally detached” point of view, in order to “weaken the hold” of superstition. The Enlightenment often congratulated itself for such campaigns of disenchantment, but how plausible was such a project for a philosopher who privileged sentiment and utility over truth? Mr. Harris reminds us that Hume’s own disbelief—and not just the religiosity of his opponents—might well be psychologized. Hume preferred philosophy to religion because philosophy “has little capacity to interrupt for long the course of our natural propensities.” As one who sought “morality without austerity, pleasure without effeminacy, and a love of life without a fear of death,” Hume knew that atheism could bring its own relief. Whether it was true was beside the point.
Mr. Collins is a professor of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
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