A REPORT FROM THE KITCHEN

This has been a brief and unadventurous Paris visit, gastronomically speaking. I have cooked dorade royale [a nice white fish], paupiettes provencales [prepared by the local boulangerie], and a very nice mushroom and ham omelet. I even tried lieu noir, which turned out to be Pollock, and not anything special. Tomorrow evening I shall prepare my signature hazelnut encrusted rabbit, always a success. But no boeuf bourguignonne, no cuisses de canard, not even some coquilles St. Jacques. We had a lovely meal at Rotisserie du Beaujolais, enlivened by the presence of the resident cat, Beaujolais, to whom we fed tiny bits of our shoulder of lamb en brochette [for two]. This evening, we shall walk to the 6th arrondissement for a dinner at a restaurant recommended by one of the many people who have stayed in our apartment -- Restaurant Allard. The menu looked enticing when we walked by several days ago. For lunch, we tried a charming little tea room called The Tea Caddy which sits opposite l'eglise St. Julien le Pauvre and the oldest tree in Paris, propped up but still alive in Square Viviani, just next to Shakespeare and Company [a famous English language bookstore that I first visited in 1955, when it was called Le Mistral.]

Although the internet brings every corner of the world to me instantly, still coming here distances me from America, and the moral ugliness and willful ignorance that seems to dominate it. When I return next Wednesday, I shall have to find some way to write about what I see without utterly despairing.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART FOURTEEN

This is as much as I need to say about the Treatise, I think. As I so often remark, there is a wealth of interesting materials in the work that await those who are willing to take it up and read it straight through. Hume is, among other things, a shrewd observer of la comedie humaine, and almost three centuries later, his anatomization of human foibles and follies is worth reading. Since many who are following this tutorial will, I imagine, have read Locke’s Second Treatise [it is, with Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract, surely the most often assigned classical text of political philosophy in college courses], I might close by quoting a passage from Section iii of Hume’s discussion of justice that will both affront modern readers and also illuminate a familiar passage in the Locke. Writing of the various ways in which the idea of property arises and is deployed, Hume says:

“We acquire the property of objects by accession, when they are connected in an intimate manner with objects that are already our property, and at the same time are inferior to them. Thus the fruits of our garden, the offspring of our cattle, and the work of our slaves, are all of them esteem’d our property, even before possession.”

Compare this with the following passage from Locke’s famous Chapter Five, “Of Property”, of which Bob Nozick, for example, makes such heavy use [“The Lockean Proviso”] in Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

“Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.”

Modern readers often do not realize that “servant” in this context means “slave.” Hume makes explicit what seventeenth century readers would have understood, but that is often missed by Randian libertarians today. Since I own the slave, his [or her] labor belongs to me. Lest anyone dismiss this as a regrettable but no longer operative proviso, I would simply point out that exactly the same process of reasoning underlies the central tenet of capitalism, which is that the product of the labor of my employees [“wage slaves,” as they were once known] belongs to me as the capitalist, and is mine to dispose of as I wish, without regard to the needs or desires of those who actually produced it.

Tomorrow, I shall turn my attention to the very last of Hume’s works to be published, the posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART THIRTEEN

Readers who have engaged with the highly original, iconoclastic, sceptical doctrines of Book I of the Treatise may be surprised, when they come to Book III, to encounter doctrines that markedly resemble those advanced by a number of Hume’s contemporaries. Hume was a member of the school of moral philosophy usually referred to as the “moral sentiment” school. The best known example of the work of this school is the 1759 book entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Hume’s younger contemporary and great friend, Adam Smith, but there were a number of Scottish and English philosophers of the same period who held quite similar views.

The Book is divided into three quite unequal Parts. Part I, which is only 21 pages long, defends the view that moral distinctions are derived not from reason, but from an innate moral sense, or sentiment. We praise actions and approve of traits of character not on the basis of a rational argument but because we are naturally so constituted as to feel a sentiment of approbation when we observe actions or character traits of a certain sort. Hume does not argue that we ought to so approve; he simply observes that we do so, and undertakes by a wide canvas of our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation to discover the principles that seem to guide these sentiments. To summarize very briefly the result of an extended discussion, he concludes that we tend to feel a sentiment of approbation for actions or traits of character that are “useful or agreeable to ourselves or others.” This formula, which he repeats many times, has led some commentators to conclude that Hume is a utilitarian, but I think that is a mistake. Hume does not say that we ought to approve of what is useful or agreeable to ourselves or others. He simply observes that we do, and if someone [such as Kant, for example] were to argue that we ought not to base our moral approbation on these considerations, Hume would, I think, reply that in fact we do, and short of changing human nature, there is nothing we can do about altering our natural tendencies.

It is Part II that dominates Book III, running, as it does, for almost one hundred pages. Its title is ”Of justice and injustice,” and it contains the substance of Hume’s political philosophy. [Hume, by the way, was rather conservative politically, in the context of the British politics of his day, but that fact does not figure prominently in the arguments of the Treatise.]

Hume begins be arguing that justice is, in his terminology, an artificial, not a natural, virtue. His discussion is, at least to modern ears, somewhat strange sounding, but what is going on is easy enough to discern. In the new political philosophy of the 17^th and 18^th centuries – the political philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke, of Rousseau, of Kant, and of many lesser lights – one of the great points of disagreement was whether the rights and duties associated with property are natural, and hence bind us in a state of nature, prior to the establishment of a Commonwealth, or are artificial, and arise out of some pre-existing social contract. Locke and Kant are clearly committed to the view that the obligations of property bind us even in a state of nature [although, as I may explain in a subsequent tutorial, Kant is wrong about his own position], whereas Hobbes and Rousseau hold that property rights and associated duties depend for their moral bindingness on an original social contract. In this debate, Hume sides [if I may speak anachronistically, considering the dates of these various writers] with Hobbes and Rousseau, although not, as we shall see, on the basis of an original contract, which he considers a fiction.

Hume begins by observing that human beings, unlike lions or sheep, have natural abilities that are ill-suited to the satisfaction of their natural wants and desires. [There was a good deal of this sort of charming armchair speculative ethology in those days, not very reliable as a scientific guide to animal behavior but in its way rather suggestive about the human condition.] We are not particularly swift or strong, nor are we fitted out with formidable claws and a serviceable fur coat.

“’Tis by society alone,” Hume remarks, “[man] is able to supply his defects, and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures, and even to acquire a superiority above them.” He goes on, anticipating the arguments that Adam Smith would make such good use of thirty-six years later in his great work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: “When every individual person labours a-part, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employ’d in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments [ed. what Smith would call the “division of labour”] our ability encreases: And by mutual succour we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents. ‘Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous.”

This view of the reasons for the appearance of the ideas of justice in society, elements of which can already be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan, eventually shows up, somewhat modified, in Rawls’ notion of “the circumstances of justice.” The idea is this: if each human being were fully capable of looking after his or her basic needs without any sort of cooperation, voluntary or forced; or if the natural powers and abilities of human beings were so dramatically different from one another that no self-interested basis for collaboration existed [but only brute domination]; or finally if human beings, rather like ants, naturally and unthinkingly acted in concert [my apologies to any E. O. Wilson fans], then conceptions of justice and equity and government would never arise.

The remedy for these deficiencies in the natural human condition, Hume, says, “is not deriv’d from nature, but from artifice.” In some way, human beings must enter into a “convention” or agreement to join their forces for the satisfaction of the self-interest of each. We might expect at this point that Hume would go straight to a theory of the Social Contract, echoing the arguments of Locke and Hobbes, with both of whom we was thoroughly familiar. But Hume considers stories about social contracts fictions. Indeed, at this point he makes a very interesting philosophical move, one whose full significance can be seen only after we have carefully studied and properly understood Kant’s moral and political philosophy, as well as that of Rousseau. This convention, Hume says, cannot be in the form of a promise, because promises themselves are the products, not the preconditions, of society. [He thus rejects completely the position articulated by Locke in the Second Treatise on Civil Government.]

The “convention” actually emerges naturally and gradually over time from a series of human interactions that prove to be mutually beneficial. Hume makes the point with a rather charming analogy: “Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other.”

SMALL PLEASURES

Paris is roughly oval, with the Seine running through it from East to West. In mid-Paris, there are two islands in the Seine: the ancient ile de la Cite, on which sits our local church, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and a small man-made island, ile St. Louis, sitting just upstream from its larger neighbor and connected to it by a little bridge. Seven bridges in all join the two islands to the Left Bank. The third bridge, counting from upstream, is pont de l'Archeveche, just where the two islands almost meet. Several years ago, some couple took a little lock, of the sort one sees on bicycles or high school lockers, inscribed on it a romantic message and two names, and locked it to the grill that lines the bridge. Now, thousands of little locks of all sizes shapes, and colors have joined that first lock, memorializing young love. When I walk across the bridge from the park behind Notre Dame to our apartment a stone's throw away, I stop to read some of the locks and wonder about the couples -- are they still together, were they visiting from abroad or do they live here in Paris? This is one of the countless urban delights of this city, which understands how to create and sustain public spaces that are human in size and function.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART TWELVE

There is a very great deal more of interest and importance in Book I of the Treatise, including a fascinating section “Of Personal Identity” that is worth a tutorial all its own. But there are limits to how far I can carry this disquisition on Hume’s philosophy, and there are hundreds and hundreds of pages to go, so I shall move on to Books II and III. Perhaps I can close this discussion of Book I, which ranks as one of the truly great works of philosophy in the English language, by simply quoting a remark made by Hume, almost in passing, in the Conclusion to the Book. “Generally speaking,” Hume writes, “the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” In these troubled times, when the victories of the Enlightenment seem in danger of being reversed, we might do well to reflect on Hume’s wise observation.

Books II and III, though they comprise another 390 pages, call for a good deal less in the way of commentary. Book II is entitled, “OF THE PASSIONS,” and is divided into three Parts: “Of pride and humility,” “Of love and hatred,” and “Of the will and direct passions.” Only the first two sections of Part III, “Of liberty and necessity” and “The same subject continu’d,” deserve extended discussion. But like a number of his contemporaries, Hume was a shrewd and unillusioned observer of la comedie humaine, and many of his comments about human foibles, frailties, and attitudes retain today the charm they must have possessed for their original readers [although not, alas, for the early reviewers.] There was a time when such reflections on human behavior were considered an appropriate employment for philosophers, but the practice has fallen into disuse, and today it is op ed columnists and such like lowlifes who have taken over the task of anatomizing humanity. It is a pity, I think, but there it is.

Before turning to Hume’s important discussion of freedom of the will, I will indulge myself a bit by commenting briefly on the last two sections of Part Two of Book Two, which are called, respectively, “Of the amorous passion, or love betwixt the sexes” [which runs a mere three pages], and “Of the love and hatred of animals” [which occupies two]. Hume, who was of course a bachelor, and is not known to have ever entered into an “amorous” relationship, takes a rather sunny view of sexuality. “ ‘Tis plain, that this affection, in its most natural state, is deriv’d from the conjunction of three different impressions or passions, viz. The pleasing sensation arising from beauty; the bodily appetite for generation; and a generous kindness or good-will.”

“The appetite for generation,” he goes on, “… is evidently of the pleasant kind, and has a strong connexion with all the agreeable emotions. Joy, mirth, vanity, and kindness are incentives to this desire; as well as music, dancing, wine, and good cheer. On the other hand, melancholy, poverty, humility are destructive of it.”

Alas, Hume never encountered Woody Allen.

Hume concludes, rather surprisingly, by suggesting that the passions he has just finished analyzing in humans manifest themselves equally in animals. As he says, “Every thing is conducted by springs and principles, which are not peculiar to man, or any one species of animals.” Presumably, although he does not say so, dogs, like humans, form habits of association from the observation of constant conjunctions of resembling instances, and hence, like us, have causal beliefs. They, too, believe that objects continue to exist when not perceived, as anyone can attest who has seen a dog searching for a bone it has buried. As Hume presents these ideas, they are amusing and piquante, but they are actually a legitimate part of a thoroughly anti-rational, naturalized conception of human nature that has much more in common with modern neurology and behavioral psychology than it does with the long Western tradition of rationalist philosophy.

The same mode of understanding human behavior is manifest in Hume’s discussion of that old reliable philosophical debating topic, freedom of the will. Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, we might say somewhat anachronistically that in this debate, Hume sides with Hobbes rather than with Kant. Hume begins by stating flatly that “by the will, I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” It is instructive to compare this definition with what Hobbes has to say about voluntary actions: “And because going, speaking, and the like voluntary motions depend always upon a precedent thought of whither, which way, and what, it is evident that the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion. And although unstudied men do not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible, or the space it is moved in is, for the shortness of it, insensible; yet that doth not hinder but that such motions are. For let a space be never so little, that which is moved over a greater space, whereof that little one is part, must first be moved over that. These small beginnings of motion within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called endeavour.”

Both Hobbes and Hume are determinists in the great debate about free will and necessity, although they give very different analyses of causal judgments in general, and hence in particular of the causal judgments we make about human action. One can summarize Hume’s position succinctly as being simply this: the degree of observed regularity that gives rise to our causal judgments about objects is matched by the degree of regularity we observe in the behavior of persons. Hence, we are led quite properly and naturally to impute a similar causal necessity to that behavior.

I think a little reflection will tell us that Hume is in fact correct about the degree of regularity and predictability in the behavior of human beings. Think, for example, of driving at sixty miles an hour along a busy highway with traffic flowing in both directions. At every moment, I am counting on those going my way and those coming toward me to exhibit strictly predictable behavior. Indeed, my life depends upon it. I am as confident that the other drivers will not start swerving this way and that, reversing direction, and aiming their cars at mine, as I am that if I am hit by a car coming toward me at sixty miles an hour major damage will be done to me and to my car. The first belief rests on a causal judgment about people; the second rests on a causal judgment about physical objects. Both judgments arise out of the observation of the constant conjunction of resembling instances, as Hume argues in Book I, Part III.

Hume has a rather charming and puckish way of making the point. “Shou’d a traveler,” he says, “returning from a far country, tell us, that he had seen a climate in the fiftieth degree of northern latitude [ed. The latitude of London is 51.50 degrees], where all the fruits ripen and come to perfection in the winter, and decay in the summer, after the same manner as in England they are produc’d and decay in the contrary seasons, he wou’d find few so credulous as to believe him. I am apt to think a traveler wou’d meet with as little credit, who shou’d inform us of people exactly of the same character with those in Plato’s Republic on the one hand, or those in Hobbes’s Leviathan on the other.”

Hume goes on for some time in this vein, invoking his Book I analysis of causal necessity. I think it is not difficult for those reading this to imagine the line of argument. It suffices to quote the concluding line of the last paragraph of the section.

“According to my definitions, necessity makes an essential part of causation; and consequently liberty, by removing necessity, removes also causes, and is the very same thing with chance. As chance is commonly thought to imply a contradiction, and is at least directly contrary to experience, there are always the same arguments against liberty or free-will. If any one alters the definitions, I cannot pretend to argue with him, ‘til I know the meaning he assigns to these terms.”

It is worth noting that Kant agrees completely with Hume. The central conclusion of the Second Analogy in the Analytic of Principles of the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is that to exist in the realm of phenomena or appearances is to have determinate time location, and that is identical with standing in necessary causal connection to what preceded and what follows. To open the way for freedom of the will, Kant is forced to invoke the distinction between things as they appear to us in space and time and things as they are in themselves, and even then, he concludes that we cannot have knowledge of freedom, but only must presuppose it insofar as we undertake to act. But that is a subject for another tutorial entirely.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART ELEVEN

Before I go on to discuss what Hume has to say about the common experience of perceiving objects that change over time, it occurs to me that I should repeat, and emphasize, something I said at the very beginning of this explication but have not returned to, namely that Hume is a Direct Realist. Someone might after all be tempted to say, “There is no problem about treating a multiplicity of impressions as impressions of identically the same object because they are, after all, all caused by the same object. That in fact is just why we say of them that they are perceptions of identically the same object. [And at this point the speaker interposes his or her favorite theory of substantial identity, or whatever.] But Hume rejects this account, for, as I indicated, he argues that we all [children and peasants and the rest of us in our non-philosophical moments] take what we perceive to be the objects themselves, not to be representations of objects or copies of objects. And since I can never step outside my consciousness, as it were, and observe both the object and myself from some neutral standpoint, in order to ascertain their causal relationship to one another, I can arrive at a causal theory of perception only by First developing an ordinary unreflective identification of objects with my perceptions, and Then recognizing the puzzles and problems with that identification, and retreating to a causal theory to sort things out. Thus the causal realist story is parasitic on the original direct realist beliefs, and it is they that must be explained or accounted for in their own terms, before I ever advance a causal realist story about perception.

Hume’s term for the process we have been describing, in virtue of which I impute identity to a multiplicity of resembling impressions, first when they are continuous, then even if they are gappy, is constancy. But constancy alone cannot account for my belief in the continued and independent existence of objects. To explain that belief, I must also appeal to a second characteristic of my perceptions, which he labels coherence. It is quite common for me to find, putting it naively and unphilosophically, that objects change over time. To use Hume’s own example, not only do I have only a gappy series of perceptions of the fire in my grate, inasmuch as I do not stare fixedly at it but only notice it intermittently; it is also the case that frequently I leave my closet [his word for a study] and return to find that in the interim, the fire has burned down, leaving only ashes in the grate. Nevertheless, I readily suppose that the ashes are identical with the fire, but are simply a later stage of the same object. Clearly, this supposition is in multiple ways unsupported by any rational argument. What leads me to this familiar conclusion?

Hume’s answer is as follows: I have repeatedly observed my fire to burn down to ashes, looking at it all the while. This constant conjunction of resembling impressions triggers my innate propensity to associate these perceptions together in the manner I have already explained, leading me to form a series of causal beliefs. In order to preserve the coherence and order of my experience, I posit an unobserved sequence of causes and effects htat connect up my perception of the fire in my grate before I leave my study with the perception of the ashes in the grate after I return. I flesh out my experience by these quite unjustifiable but irresistible positings. Furthermore, the action of the mind in running over a series of causes and effects resembles the action of the mind in running over a series of perfectly resembling impressions, and so my mind associates them together, and imputes to the causal series the identity that it has previously imputed to the series of perfectly resembling impressions.

Thus, starting from a perceptual experience that is in actual fact quite fluid, changeable, gappy, and inconstant, I repeatedly fill in the gaps, posit unperceived impressions, confuse two different but similar actions of the mind, all in the service of forming and then reposing belief in the idea of a coherent, orderly, predictable, manageable experienced world of objects.

Among the many questions that this account might provoke, there is one to which Hume gives a quite striking answer, one whose philosophical significance is very great especially for someone like myself who is constantly reading Hume with an eye to the theories of Kant. Here is Hume’s way of posing the question, followed by his answer:

“ ‘Tis certain, that almost all mankind, and even philosophers themselves, for the greatest part of their lives, take their perceptions to be their only objects, and suppose, that the very being, which is intimately present to the mind, is the real body or material existence. ‘Tis also certain, that this very perception or object is suppos’d to have a continu’d uninterrupted being, and neither is to be annihilated by our absence, nor to be brought into existence by our presence. When we are absent from it, we say it still exists, but that we do not feel, we do not see it. When we are present, we say we feel, or see it…. How can we satisfy ourselves in supposing a perception to be absent from the mind without being annihilated[?] …

“...As to [this] question, we may observe that what we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity. Now as every perception is distinguishable from another, and may be consider’d as separately existent; it evidently follows, that there is no absurdity in separating any particular perception from the mind; that is, in breaking off all its relations with that connected mass of perceptions, which constitute a thinking being.”

To any of you followed my tutorial on The Critique of Pure Reason before embarking with me on this consideration of the philosophy of David Hume, I can say that this is the precise point at which Kant breaks with Hume. Kant insists on the unity of consciousness, and his analysis reveals that we cannot even bring this mass of perceptions -- what Kant calls “the manifold of sensibility” – to the unity of consciousness unless a process of synthesis has been gone through, a “reproduction in imagination according to a rule.” It is that new step in the argument that allows Kant to conclude that the systematic organization of the experienced perceptions constitutes a world order – and that our belief in that world order is not a mere habit, but in fact is deducible from the unity of consciousness itself.

Well, this is very hard for me, and I imagine hard for you as well, so I shall stop here until tomorrow.

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

Well, that was short. Bachmann is now toast, so I guess it no longer matters that her husband is a transparently gay gay-hater. Perry is a far more dangerous character, but he too may not last the month. I have seen a good many strange election cycles, but this is far and away the weirdest.