HUME DIALOGUES FINAL PART

By the end of Part IX, Hume has pretty well put paid to the two millennium long effort to prove the existence of an infinite, omniscient, perfect Being, call it God, Yahweh, Allah, or the Prime Mover, but Hume has a good bit more to say, and he says it with characteristic elegance. He signals a shift in tone and emphasis at the very beginning of Part X by allowing both Demea and Philo to disparage the efforts of philosophers to deal with a question that engages ordinary men and women at a more immediate and personal level. As Philo says, "I am indeed persuaded that the best and indeed the only method of bringing everyone to a due sense of religion is by just representations of the misery and wickedness of men."

But such "just representations" raise a difficulty that has bedeviled the devout since at least the time of Job. Philo draws not on the Old Testament but on the ancient Greeks [this is, after all, the Augustan Age].

"Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?" Demea opines that no one has ever denied the reality of human misery, but Philo corrects him, noting that no less a philosophical luminary than Leibniz has done so. He is referring, of course, to Leibniz' Theodicy, in which that immortal genius, following the logic with impeccable rigor, concludes that, in the rendering by Voltaire's wonderfully satirical figure, Dr. Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." [Personal aside: I have always been much taken by Leonard Bernstein's musical rendering of Candide. if readers of this blog are unfamiliar with it, I strongly recommend obtaining a recording and listening to it. The operatic aria, "All's for the best in this best of all possible worlds" is worth the price of the DVD.]

There is not a great deal to be said about the Problem of Evil. It is, I suppose, more than any other single thing, what permanently separates the believers from the unbelievers. I rather like Emily Dickenson's version of the problem. She points out that God has so arranged things that we must die to see His face, a fact that she finds incompatible with any conception of his Divine Mercy.

Demea does best, and really, his defense of God in the face of human misery is as good as any, but really, it is a hopeless undertaking. Philo's response is worth quoting, as a forceful statement of his larger theme:

"I will allow, that pain or misery in man is compatible with infinite power and goodness in the Deity, even in your sense of these attributes: What are you advanced by all these concessions? A mere possible compatibility is not sufficient. You must prove these pure, unmixed, and uncontrollable attributes from the present mixed and confused phenomena, and from these alone. A hopeful undertaking! Were the phenomena ever so pure and unmixed, yet being finite, they would be insufficient for that purpose. How much more, where they are also so jarring and discordant!"

Hume continues the discussion in the next Part, hammering home the point that even if we allow for the compatibility of God's infinite power and benevolence with the manifest misery of the human condition, still no one could possibly maintain that these attributes of God could be inferred from that misery. Here is Philo turning on its head the characterization of God as the Divine Architect of the world order:

"Did I show you a house or palace, where there was not one apartment convenient or agreeable; where the windows, doors, fires, passages, stairs, and the whole economy of the building, were the source of noise, confusion, fatigue, darkness, and the extremes of heat and cold; you would certainly blame the contrivance, without any further examination. The architect would in vain display his subtlety, and prove to you, that if this door or that window were altered, greater ills would ensue. What he says may be strictly true: The alteration of one particular, while the other parts of the building remain, may only augment the inconveniences. But still you would assert in general, that, if the architect had had skill and good intentions, he might have formed such a plan of the whole, and might have adjusted the parts in such a manner, as would have remedied all or most of these inconveniences. His ignorance, or even your own ignorance of such a plan, will never convince you of the impossibility of it. If you find any inconveniences and deformities in the building, you will always, without entering into any detail, condemn the architect."

Or, as I like to put it, If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely benevolent, could He not at least have managed a world without mosquitoes?

Philo carries on in this vein for some pages, driving home the utter unsustainability of Demea's position. At the end of Part XI, Pamphilus remarks, "Thus PHILO continued to the last his spirit of opposition, and his censure of established opinions. But I could observe that DEMEA did not at all relish the latter part of the discourse; and he took occasion soon after, on some pretence or other, to leave the company."

So Cleanthes and Philo are left to draw the discussion to a close. Hume does his very best to repair the damage that has been done in the previous eleven Parts to all received religious belief. He allows Philo to say, for example, "You, in particular, CLEANTHES, with whom I live in unreserved intimacy; you are sensible, that notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the Divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes every where the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it."

It takes no intelligence and only the most cursory attention to see that this statement is utterly in conflict with everything Philo has been saying for eighty pages! But Hume persists in his dissimulation, allowing first Cleanthes and then Philo to utter conventional endorsements of a deistic point of view that the arguments of the Dialogues have destroyed. Along the way, in this final Part, there are some nice digs at religious fanaticism, or "enthusiasm," as it was then called. Cleanthes offers the opinion that "[r]eligion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all," but Philo immediately responds: "How happens it them. if vulgar superstition be so salutary to society, that all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs?"

In the very last sentence of the Dialogues, Pamphilus offers his summary evaluation of the debate. "I confess, that, upon a serious review of the whole, I cannot but think, that PHILO's principles are more probable than DEMEA's; but that those of CLEANTHES approach still nearer to the truth."

Even such sophisticated and knowledgeable readers of the Dialogues as Kemp-Smith have accepted this as Hume's own evaluation of the matter, but that seems to me transparently false. Hume was, saving the presence of Kant, the smartest person of his time. The arguments he placed in the mouths of his characters were, after all, his arguments. One need merely compare those arguments with the arguments of the Treatise, all of which of course are presented in his own persona, to see which he truly endorsed.

There is, however, one final bit of biographical evidence we can bring to bear, in the form of a very famous and apparently true story about Hume's final days. James Boswell, the indefatigable biographer and general dogsbody of Samuel Johnson, was obsessed with fears of death. Hume's well-known atheism troubled him greatly, and when that good man was on his deathbed, Boswell hurried to see him. "Well, David," he himself reports that he said, "now that you are about to die, do you still hold to your scepticism about a Deity and an afterlife?" Hume was serene and calm in the face of his own death, and replied that he saw no new evidence that would cause him to come to a different conclusion. Boswell hurried away terribly upset. That night he had a dream in which Hume appeared and told him that he did indeed believe in the afterlife. Boswell was, he tells us, much comforted by this dream, and reassured by it.

And thus I end my tutorial on the Philosophy of David Hume. There is of course a great deal more that could be said, and many other writings we might examine, but this has gone on for well over twenty-seven thousand words, and it is time to bring it to a close and deposit it, along with all my other tutorials, on box.net.