Charles Petzold

I don’t know what the Philosophy curriculum is like at Princeton University these days, but some of the books published in recent years by Princeton University Press have definitely escaped from the ivory towers. This is philosophy tailored for practical advice, even veering into the territory of self-help. Most prominent is a series of little books on Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers, featuring mostly Roman writers such as Seneca on How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management, Horace on How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet’s Guide for an Age of Excess, Cicero on a whole raft of topics, including How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of a Life, and the volume that’s on my to-read shelf, a collection of writings by Sextus Empiricus entitled How to Keep an Open Mind: An Ancient Guide to Thinking Like a Skeptic.

David Hume seems particularly unsuited to this type of treatment. His philosophical writings focus mostly on epistemology, and his writings on moral philosophy are decidedly descriptive rather than prescriptive. So it was with a proper armor of skepticism that I approached another book published by Princeton University Press (though not in their Ancient Wisdom series) entitled The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well by Julian Baggini.

Despite the title, this turned out to be a enjoyable and informative overview of Hume’s life and thought that maintains a nice balance and interaction between the biographical events and the philosophical writings. Julian Baggini has also spent some time visiting Hume’s places of residence and other Humean landmarks, and he provides first-hand reports on how the locals respect the exciting fact that Hume once slept there. (Spoiler alert: usually not well.)

Throughout the book, Baggini highlights Humean maxims and aphorisms in boldface. These are either direct quotations, or paraphrases or summations, or sometimes even quotes by others that seem appropriate. They are all collected in an Appendix arranged by catagory. Some of these direct quotes are famous:

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

Here’s one that is a Baggini paraphrase:

Ethics without empathy is a contradiction in terms.

And another quote:

“To imagine, that the gratifying of any sense, or the indulging of any delicacy in meat, drink, or apparel, is itself a vice, can never enter into a head, that is not disordered by the frenzies of enthusiasm.”

In other words, eat, drink, and dress flamboyantly, for only the puritans will complain.

These maxims are fun, but there’s nothing quite as pithy or useful as Kant’s Categorial Imperative. Hume lives in a world of more uncertainty and fewer golden rules.

Although this Appendix is not footnoted, sources in the bulk of the book are diligently cited. Baggini has dug deep into Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, the two Enquiries, the essays, letters, Ernest Mossner’s classic biography, the more recent Intellectual Biography by James A. Harris, and much else, although seemingly not the recent biography by Roderick Graham entitled The Great Infidel.

Baggini doesn’t gloss over Hume’s missteps and stumbles. As early as page 28 he courageously confronts Hume’s notorious essay “On National Characters” and spends the next seven pages wrestling with it. This is the essay that contains the shocking footnote in which Hume states that he is “apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” To some, this appalling statement has been sufficient to condemn Hume as a racist and dismiss his entire career. Baggini doesn’t attempt to excuse Hume’s essay, for it is clearly inexcusable, but he does demonstrate that it is out of character, not based on Hume’s personal experience, and inconsistent with the humanity of his other writings. Baggini is also able to extract one of his boldfaced maxims that suggests that we should treat Hume (and everyone else we might admire) with something less than blind idolatry:

Never slavishly follow even the greatest minds, for they too have prejudices, weakness, and blind spots.

The more one reads of the Enlightenment, the more one finds that Enlightenment philosophers were not always as enlightened as we might prefer.

During his lifetime and thereafter, Hume was widely regarded as an atheist. Towards the end of the book, Baggini quotes Mossner’s biography about Hume’s death when

“a large crowd had gathered in St David Street to watch the coffin being carried out. One of the crowd was overheard to remark, ‘Ah, he was an Atheist.’ To which a companion returned: ‘No matter, he was an honest man.’”

One of the apparent goals of this book is to examine how accurate that label of “atheist” truly is. When we examine what Hume wrote and said, the word is not quite right. The reputation of atheism originally derived from Hume’s extreme empiricism in his early and precocious Treatise of Human Nature. Hume followed John Locke in asserting that all human knowledge derives from experience. Both Locke and Hume refuted Descartes by asserting that there aren’t any innate ideas planted in our minds by God that allow us to perceive the existence of God apart from experience.

This was considered at the time a dangerous position, for if we can’t assume the existence of God, then where does morality come from? Locke was able to temper the reception of his views with a commitment to religion in books such as The Reasonableness of Christianity. Hume did not.

Hume knew how provocative his views could be, and he had a certain reticence in unleashing them on the public. He had originally intended his famous analysis of miracles to appear in the Treatise but decided to hold back. It eventually appeared under the title “Of Miracles” in Section X of the later Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and remains one of the most studied and debated of Hume’s writings.

Hume seems to have been fascinated by religion, and he wrestled with the concept of religious belief his entire life. But his conclusions are not quite definitive, and this is frustrating. The more we want to cram Hume’s religious beliefs into a box with an unambiguous label, the slippier he becomes. We want a clear answer, but Hume is uncooperative, and at several points in The Great Guide, Baggini struggles as well with how Hume would fit in today’s range of belief and non-belief.

Although Hume’s contemporaries used the word “atheist” in describing him, he did not think that of himself. Baggini retells the famous story from the time that Hume lived in Paris from 1763 to 1765 and frequented the home of Baron d’Holbach:

It was at a dinner in this house that one of the most famous incidents of Hume’s sojourn in Paris took place, recounted by Diderot. The first time Hume sat the Baron’s table, he remarked that he did not believe in atheists, since he had never seen one. The Baron replied, “Count how many we are here. We are eighteen. It isn’t too bad a showing to be able to point out to you fifteen at once: the three others haven’t made up their minds.” (p. 170)

Baggini adds: “Hume, for all his skepticism, never identified as an atheist, believing it to be too dogmatic a position.” Yet, Hume didn’t keep his antagonism towards religion a secret. Baggini writes:

Today, Hume is a philosophical hero to many atheists who still use his arguments against religion. It seems clear he had no religious faith and believed in no god. Many of his published words about religion are overtly hostile. He says that “terror is the primary principle of religion.” He frequently deplores the intolerance religion breeds, unfavorably comparing the “bigotted jealousy, with which the present age is so much infested,” with the “freedom and toleration” in ancient Greece and Rome that allowed philosophy to first flourish. In some private letters he was overtly sacriligious. He told Captain James Edmonstoune that “I believe I shall write no more History; but proceed directly to attack the Lord’s Prayer & the ten Commandments & the single Cat [catechism of the Anglican Church]; and to recommend Suicide and Adultery; And so persist, till it shall please the Lord to take me to himself.” (pp. 171–2)

It might have been convenient if the word “agnostic” was available at the time, but that word was not invented by T. H. Huxley until 1869, over 90 years after Hume’s death. Hume was someone who knew he could neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, so he would certainly qualify as an epistemological agnostic. But that’s not saying much. Just about every honest person in the world is an epistemological agnostic. We have a word for people who claim to have direct visual or aural proof of God’s existence, and that word is neither “philosopher” nor “theologian.”

Beyond this epistemological deadlock, a individual’s belief or disbelief might be based on upbringing, peer pressure, and that old standby, faith. More thoughtful positions can be reached by suggestions derived from our experience of the world. (One hastens to use the word “evidence.") Some people see God in a beautiful sunset; others see God’s absence in plagues and mass murder. (My personal beliefs are based partially on faith that no omniscient being knows my future or has a plan for me, and partially on the absence of any compelling evidence for God’s existence.)

In Hume’s day, intelligent people perceived God in the harmonious interlocking complexity of living things. A scientific exploration of the world revealed that every living thing seems to have been designed for its purpose and place. This was known as the argument from design, which was part of a more inclusive discipline called natural theology, and still exists today in the guise of “intelligent design.”

We can tell that Hume struggled with the concepts of natural theology because when he came to write about the subject, he chose the form of dialog — a form that can capture the interior mental debates of the author. For sure, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779) is a devastating takedown of natural theology. But the final blow is never delivered. The arguments among the three debaters didn’t entirely convince the dialog’s author, and Philo — the character coming closest to Hume himself — delivers to a rather unsatisfying summation, albeit perhaps the only intellectually legitimate conclusion prior to Darwin:

If the whole of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined, proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it affords no interference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no farther than to human intelligence; and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: if this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe, that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections, which lie against it?

In 20th century science and mathematics we have had to acknowledge uncertainty principles and incompleteness theorems, undecidability and incomputability, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Hume himself — prescient in so many ways — had no final answers.

That natural theology survived David Hume’s savage beating, is, indeed, part of the subtle message of Hume’s extraordinary work. Hume knew all along that all the logic in the world couldn’t influence people’s religious beliefs: “A certain proof,” as Philo says, “that men ever did, and ever will derive their religion from other sources than this species of reasoning.” And sure enough, a couple decades later in 1802 appeared the most famous explication of natural theology, William Paley’s Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.

If David Hume is truly a purveyor of self-help maxims, what he has to teach us is a combination of skepticism and intellectual modesty. Baggini’s title The Great Guide comes from Section 5 of Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning” concludes one paragraph, and the next paragraph begins:

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact, beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.

Which is pretty much a good summation of Hume’s epistemology as well as hinting at his moral philosophy — concepts that come through clearly in The Great Guide along with the aphorisms.