David Hume 1711 - 1776

It is crucial in a discussion like this to absolutely define the 1) nature, 2) meaning, and 3) value of the word “honesty” before anything else. Actually, to be honest: It is absolutely necessary for any act, at some level of consciousness however much deceit of others and self-deceit is involved, and for anything like abstract knowledge to be consistently formed. Even a totally self-indulgent person realizes they have conflicts at times with reality that are unavoidable.

Now, it is a rational statement to say, “I honestly know that I am lying.” In fact, to maintain the plausibility of an intentional lie, the consciousness of what the reality is, is even greater than it is for a person “who simply wants to know and tell the truth.” If you operate upon the feeling you are always telling the truth, then automatically everything you say is true even when you are caught in a contradiction. Such a person is surprised and feels they do not deserve a penalty for this. But in ‘material reality’ (as purely the world of sense impression with only its directly related ideas) there is never a reward (or consideration) for stupidity (remember Lenin’s discussion of “naïve materialism”).

Such “knowing and telling the truth” is equivalent to “thinking” on all levels of personality. For a person that is lying, honesty is an absolutely necessary tool. A lie can only be built on a truth. A lie has a second order existence and dependency on the truth. It can have no form or direction without the truth. It is very important to put in here, maybe as equivalent or as a subcategory, “compromise” whether political, ethical or even philosophical, whether secret or public. Because, again fundamentally important, compromise can NEVER be the “truth” except that it is an artificial, fictional (as Hume says laws and transfers of property are, and which Father Robert Sokolowski so brilliantly analyses) compromise, a combining of naturally disparate and even nonexistent elements. “Thinking”, then, for the liar, would be defined as “knowing with specific logic and experience the truth, and being able but not willing to tell it.” One knows from experience, the average, beginning liar is soon tripped up because he did not adequately accord their lie with the truth. If he persists without learning adequate lying, and I have known such people, his existence will cease even to be noted by those around him, or his life expectancy will be very short. So a liar soon learns or soon dies.

A successful liar, then, will necessarily be more intelligent than someone who ‘thinks’ they always tell the truth. This can also be deliberately compartmentalized: A liar can tell part of a truth and part of a lie to one exclusive group of people and tell a different group a different equation of truth and lie. If the more prestigious group never finds out about the lie, no one will listen to the less prestigious group if they do find out about the lie. This is a difficult thing to keep balanced, but if one’s whole way of life is involved with a system of lies, it is the only way such a system will work. However, it is prey to accident. And then one must either have a very good lawyer or know how to disappear. Disappearing is the safer of the two choices. Confronting others, even with a good lawyer, takes the balancing essentially away from skill and gives it primarily to chance. Far too many factors are involved, and you are attached to something that can drag you down.

But this is exclusively for lying to others, and the competent liar must have a firm grip on the truth of things. Lying to oneself, however, is incredibly easy because one feels everything one says to others and to self is the truth. There is no standard of objective rational judgment to interfere throughout one’s lifetime unless an accident happens putting one up against the unavoidable situation where what one believes to be true is at variance with a experienced and testable present at hand fact. But this way of life puts your whole life in the hands of chance because then you have no sound objective judgment whatsoever. However, you will receive great approval from all those around you and thereby approve your self. But then, like the liar and the criminal, that means you can hold on to nothing as certain truth and ultimate value. This is not a matter of clear choice but just “flowing with the current.”

Honesty, to be a true consistent value, must be 1) useful, and 2) satisfy the pleasure of curiosity. It can be useful for the passionately honest person the same way as it is for a liar. Whether it satisfies any curiosity in the liar, unless their life is considered wholly a series of game values, where failure might bring the ultimate consequence, is questionable. However, this would be a weakness in the non-gaming liar because then there are things he wants to hold on to no matter what. The gamester liar, however, knows there is no property for the criminal, nothing, including their lives, of ultimate, value that cannot, when necessary, be released, and know when to cut one’s loses and run. Or cut one’s loses and die.

The reason I state it that way is everyone has learned the consequences of being caught in a lie. You decide between three possibilities: 1) One always tries to tell the truth consistently and obey all the rules you have accepted or at least acknowledged. This necessarily includes trying to tell your self the truth since paying strict attention to external truth quickly shows up inconsistencies in your internal thinking. Yet this trial obviates the even greater effort needed to maintain a consistent lie. In this case, one might be more intelligent than a successful liar theoretically. 2) You learn to tell lies better using logical and experiential criteria, keeping it as close to the real truth as possible so that inconsistencies will seem minor, trivial, so that others say “It meant nothing.” You learn from experience not only quickly but with all its implications. 3) You make yourself emotionally agreeable to yourself and others so the criteria for “always telling the truth” is that it always feels like the truth. It makes you feel good. You are average. No one pays attention to your blunders. But you are the dodo in the survival of the fittest. Life just happens to you, and death comes as a great surprise.

This is an aspect a successful liar sometimes takes, but only in special circumstances and for short whiles. To be consistently successful, a thorough going liar must know what they are doing in all aspects all the time including evident and authoritative skills. If he is going to pretend he is a diamond cutter, he must know almost enough to be one. The “almost enough” has to be minimal or it will kill you. For as you rise in the skill of lying, the stakes also rise. Or the value of gaming is lost and you find yourself holding on to something that will drag you down. Intense honesty to self as well as evident and demonstrable learning is absolutely necessary. And, here, one sees the distance of distinction between the strict truth teller and the competent liar narrows consistently and considerably more and more so that sometimes the distinction seems lost. But compromises are fundamentally necessary no matter what.

“Honesty” is one’s intent to be perfectly in accord with reality, even, or especially, when people try to use force or fraud upon you. From Hume’s point of view (he is very far from being a simple ‘empiricist’), the “human mind” (or “self” or “soul” – Hume does use the last word) and “reality” occupy polar points with pure “sense impressions” dominating the all-authoritative middle ground. Hume describes both polar ideas as totally composite ideas. The SOLE invariable determinant is “sense impression” without any kind of abstraction/word. So “self” and “reality” are reverse (in intent) but exact reflections of each other. But this is actually an ethical choice. Norman Kemp Smith made a very good case that Hume essentially wrote the parts of A TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE concerning the passions (the absolutely correct word, not just ‘emotions’) and morals first, and THEN proceeded to write the ‘epistemological’ first part with the second and third parts determining its fundamental form. So, if that proposition is accepted (and, although Thomas Aquinas said that authority is the weakest of arguments, one would be going against a profound and time proven authority), then the ethical choice is to submit to the dictates of reality on the part of the strictly honest person and the competent liar. The “emotionally agreeable” person essentially is totally disassociated from reality unless forced.

So, even David Hume acknowledges external authority. This is reflected as honestly as he could possibly be in his analysis of the word “God” which he finally cuts down to almost meaningless, almost trivial – and stops literally on his death bed there. He does absolutely divorce religion from the concept without compromise. But the concept itself he does admit reluctantly as an irritating (?) necessity. The whole discussion in Hume is motivated as a political and legal compromise. But, being strictly honest, he necessarily goes were the thread of logic takes him. His path has been vastly confusing to his interpreters who have a predetermined pattern in their mind he is going to fit no matter what. But anyone, who has seriously read Hume, must admit he left numerous loose threads all over the place. And all the loose threads come together at two poles, the “self” and “God.” Politics and the law may have primarily initiated the discourse, but, being strictly honest, he takes the whole thread as far as it will go. Its primary aspect, at its finish, is that not much is left there. But my point, and Hume’s, is that this “not much” is the result of a thoroughly exhaustive analysis from every one of view

(witness the form and literary gendre of the DIALOGUES especially). Hume ends partially in accord with the mystic Demea (God is totally incomprehensible) and partially with rationalist Cleanthes (one can see an intelligent design in the universe). The average person would conclude Hume essentially tosses the concept of God in the trash heap. But in the NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION in the concluding paragraphs, Hume says:

The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, being at least a general attendant of human nature, may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work; and nothing surely can more dignify mankind, than to be thus selected from all other parts of the creation, and to bear the image or impression of the creator.

In both quotes I shall present, Hume immediately proceeds to show how tawdry humankind has made these ideals. His hatred of religion remains uncompromising, but this is clearly a better/worse distinction. His idea of God is strictly and solely philosophical. But to show it is not simply a political/legal compromise simply to protect himself from prosecution, Hume’s language is extraordinarily precise, far beyond what is needed to pacify heresy hunters. Hume discounts believing “in invisible, intelligent power” as “not an original instinct” on the level of BELIEF in an external world or causation but as “being at least a general attendant of human nature.” J. C. A. Gaskin makes this statement of demotion fatal to a serious consideration of the idea of God. But his argument is flawed because A) he would be making Hume into a congenital liar when he does not need to be for self preservation, and B) he would, even more decisive, be saying Hume began the sentence with a precise logical distinction, then halfway through started lying with loose metaphors. Hume could very well have left his sentence end at “a general attendant of human nature,” and that should have sufficiently satisfied Anglican heresy hunters. But he goes much, much further in the same sentence than is politically necessary. Hume says that the idea of a supreme creator is “a general attendant of HUMAN NATURE.” This then narrows considerably this distance between an “original instinct” and “a general attendant.” Gaskin says being “a general attendant” merely means most humankind believe in some sort or other of divinity, but not all! But that is a relative statement (Hume says the same) and not an exclusion of the idea’s necessary part of “human nature” as tendency and suggestiveness (which Gaskin denies but Hume’s own words here seem to support). The next quote is:

What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its Supreme Creator?

If we have ‘faith’ Hume is still being strictly honest and not lying (and what can you have in another person as what they are within their ‘selves’ but ‘faith’? -- this is the immediately following paragraph), then we have a philosophically interesting statement. At first, “to be enabled to infer” would mean to the ordinary reader that man creates the idea of God. This is, at a slant, true. But Hume says ALL ideas come from the imagination. John Henry Cardinal Newman also places the imagination at precisely such a fundamental level precisely in regard to sense impressions. Therefore logically “an original instinct” and “a general attendant to human nature” come from the same place. If Hume is not using merely metaphorical language but is continuing to be philosophically precise, then “attaining . . . knowledge” and especially being “enabled to infer” come to human being from the “PRINCIPLE” of a supreme creator. An actual object as “supreme creator” is not allowed, but the concept is allowed as a “principle,” which, combined with the narrowing of concepts in the first paragraph, approximately put it on par with the necessary principles of belief in an external world and causation. This is what Donald W. Livingston calls “transcendence” and names as the source of the idea in Kant. It is technically limited and precise. It is like “projection” or “being-there” in phenomenology and Heidegger. One is always ‘going out’ and being wholly absorbed in the world created in the image of the self which also comes seemingly created by the ‘self’ as a ‘real’ whole, that most impossible thing, a real abstraction. You might say it is simply an interconnected system of logical referents. But it is the ACT of reference, a fact, a sense impression of some sort distinct from the sense impression and idea it relates, that then becomes problematic. The ability derived from the sublime principle (therefore also beautiful and aesthetic? as Newman definitely considers, and Hans Georg Gadamer makes into a philosophical system with its own attendant logic), to “be enabled to infer,” is precisely what Hume calls the imagination whose source is wholly unknown and unknowable. If Hume, as is commonly said, wants to deal in human intelligence only with that which is strictly knowable as in sense impression, then with his concept of the “imagination” he has gone way, way beyond that.

Both Hume and Newman state that fundamental and necessary beliefs come from unknowable sources, unknowable in their origins, not their effects. And this remains necessarily philosophically precise no matter how far ‘psychology’ as a so-called science can delve (obviously I am showing my prejudices). Hume would have been absolutely horrified by the present-day quackery of psychology and especially psychiatry. He might, however, have some sympathy with R. D. Laing. Laing relies fundamentally on empirical observation and attention to custom and tradition within individual families. He does not search for a fantastic, unproveable physiological causes, and assume if he gets some sort of result it explains everything. Of course if you are going to tamper with human physiology, of course you are going to get results. But you must understand what you really know of the whole of human nature, and how little that it is understood as a whole which is an empirically proven fact how each human being works, however vast the number of parliamentary voting parts within oneself there are (an image from the TREATISE). A human being as an animal, just like an animal, makes a judgment, comes to a decision, and acts. We know from private experience of uncertainties that are always elements within us voting against the act. But the majority rules, and the act is done. We understand very little even of this process, a process it would seem absolutely necessary to fully understand before you blunder into completely unknown territory.

This, then, is the beginning of establishing the primal existential point of decision. Sartre and Heidegger say in this purely theoretical situation highly simplified from the vast complications of human physiology that cannot be known, where one makes a decision as to one’s fundamental character. It is a decision you can know nothing of – most of the time (the exceptions are unpleasant in the extreme). But you are theoretically purely free, with no determination –theoretically, to be any character you can be. Hume chooses to be philosophically honest and acknowledges in the real, social world you have to make compromise after compromise. Hume becomes committed to being “reasonable,” not simply rational, which entails the ideological necessity of being polite in conversation and letting others have an open field in which to speak. Newman makes a choice to act according to the situation he is born into and follow rigidly the logical conclusions inherent within that situation (this is true also of Hume – the Calvinist rules of introspection were crucial to his becoming a philosopher). Newman becomes a Catholic but also holds the ideal of being an English gentleman extremely high and to be polite as Hume is – though he can be a bit more sharp than Hume against his antagonists. Even so, he like Hume bends over backwards to like his opponents speak their proper piece. Heidegger and Sartre have the same fundamental situation, But one, following a traditional customary way of acting, becomes a committed, though egocentric, Nazi. Sartre becomes a Communist but of a purely egocentric and rebellious sort. These two got along with extremely few people in the world. Neither fit in well at all with the groups attendant to their choices. Both Newman and Hume had their difficulties but worked through their problems with acceptable compromises. Both had a highly prized sense of conscience. Sartre did within thoroughly egocentric limits. Heidegger is the almost perfectly competent liar, and has a conscience, maybe, only to himself, and made obscurity into a high art. But Hume’s conscience was purely circumstantial, logical, and pragmatic, whereas Newman’s came from God. But, of course, it is precisely here that we are dealing with the undiscoverable sources of one’s personal, unique nature.