David Hume and the Problem of History.
Ulrich Voigt, David Hume und das Problem der Geschichte, Berlin 1975
PREFACE
I present both David Hume the historian and David Hume the philosopher under the single heading of “David Hume and the Problem of History”: Hume is seen as a man trying to understand, and solve, a fundamental philosophical problem of history. Consequently the historian David Hume is considered as he is thinking about problems concerning history as such, that is to say, he is considered as far more than just a historian in any ordinary sense. Hume was a thinking man who worked as a professional philosopher and as a professional historian, and here I treat of him as a unified object of my study and not as the author of two separated bodies of written works. Indeed, a re-enactment of the Humean thinking experience is demanded throughout this book.
Hume is seen exploring a new field of experience, namely the historical, using principles he has already delineated solidly. Now, Hume started his philosophical life with an experimental research into human nature conceived in a definitely non-historical sense. No wonder he ran into difficulties when he tried to understand history with this equipment at hand. But what precisely was the nature of these difficulties? To what extent did Hume succeed in developing new and more appropriate ideas? This author argues that Hume, was no dogmatist, but a keen observer and an enthusiastic experimenter who perceived of his old formulas as not really covering the historical but leaving room for more consistent philosophical solutions. Here Hume is set in comparison to Giambattista Vico.
A New Field of Experience:
This author argues that, for Hume, history was a world of absurdities, and the task of the Humean historian being to explain these absurdities. “Absurdity” is defined as:
“a phenomenon which is in contradiction to reason and therefore to all natural expectation.”
This means that history is centred on the unpredictable, and the historian has the task of explaining how it is based on human nature. Absurdities crystallize into “institutions” and so history gets a strong basis of well established structures. Once these institutions are taken for granted (as explained, though still absurd, matters of fact) there is created by the imagination “probability” and “necessity.” Humean reason now teaches us not to fight institutions but to accommodate to them, to smooth them out, to try and make them less dangerous. Machiavelli had taught how to live in a devilish world. Hume teaches how to live in an absurd world. Here Hume is set in contrast to Voltaire, on the one hand, and to Edmund Burke on the other.
The world cannot be just a world of absurdities. If it were, no human being would be able to notice any discontinuity with logically imagined ideas mistakenly associated with the wrong original sense impressions. There are no values of timeless significance, even reason, refinement of taste and sentiment.
“An alteration . . . in the temper and circumstances of mankind wou’d entirely alter our duties and obligations,” TREATISE, Bk III, Part II, section II, Selby-Bigge/Nidditch ed., pg. 496.
Despite the absurdities, there exists progressive coherence in an individual’s life, and this constitutes the essence of what should be called:
“self or that succession of related ideas and impressions of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness,” Ibid, II, I, II, pg. 277.
Thus the task of the Humean historian is to strengthen the progress of individual experience:
“as our idea of ourself is more or less advantageous,” Ibid. “
‘Tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin,” Ibid, III, II, pg. 495.
“They must seek for a remedy, by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with the fixed and constant advantages of the mind and body,” pg. 489.
“’ Tis certain, that no affection of the human mind has both a sufficient force, and a proper direction to counter-balance the love of gain . . . There is no passion, therefore, capable of controlling the interested affection, but the very affection itself, by an alteration of its direction,” pg. 492.
David Hume, the historian, is associated as an enlightenment thinker along with his Scottish friend Adam Smith and with the laissez-faire economics of pure self-interest and the anarchic individualism of his French friend Denis Diderot.
Adam Potkay (The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, Ithaca and London 1994, p. 159 ff.) described Hume as a man who, for his own purposes (i. e., “each man loves himself better than any other single person,” TREATISE, III, II, II, pg. 487) demonstratively stuck to the idea that in individual human life there can be nothing more important than refinement of taste and sentiment in relations of emotional sympathy and enjoyment with other free and independent individuals in thinking.
“The sentiments of others can never effect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own,” Ibid, III, III, II, pg. 593.
In consequence, David Hume took the aesthetic side of his historical narration very seriously which overlapped with his scientific aims. Here, Hume’s “dissertation-style” is described in contrast to Lawrence Sterne’s “digression-style”.
"History as re-enactment of past experience":
Here we are at Collingwood’s famous dictum, and, indeed, I am, as a historian, shaped by Collingwood’s Idea of History. This means I constantly try to overcome the scissors-and-paste methods and thus aim at a scientific history. But, as I try to delineate in note No. 44 on page [155], I argue, against Collingwood, that “authority” cannot be completely eliminated, that is, scissors-and-paste will always be a necessary part of the historian’s equipment. Here, we must acknowledge practical experience’s authority that observers nearest in time to the event have experiential advantages that cannot be overcome by interpretations trying to include contexts that did, in fact, exist, but which the original sources did not take into account as important according to their own sets of values. This means we must understand those situational and therefore variable scales of value, including Hume’s own. However, with Hume, we have a historian who, as a philosopher, recognizes that values change as situations and times change. This means that I, contrary to Collingwood, have doubts as to any abstract scientific character of history that puts in question the authority of the individual observers.
With this in mind, I present Hume’s thoughts about the scissors-and-paste method as something that appears to be central to his concerns. The scissors-and-paste method depends on trusting the original literary sources as having valid individual points of view that must be systematized into one overall, understandable, but inclusive view, instead of the Post-modernist tendency to undermine and rewrite those sources to have them say something they never intended and could never so intend to say, as imposed textually on those sources -- an intellectual anachronism at best, and a mere fantasy at its worst. There is absolutely nothing wrong with fantasy in history, according to Hume, as long as one does not give it the authority of “science.” The whole motive to either write or read history is purely selfish and personal and is therefore based, as all Hume’s ideas are, on passion.
"One always has a motive in history. And one must also never make the totally irrational assumption we so commonly do that the “past” is somehow “real.” The only time there is, is the present. Whatever is the “past” is part of the present. And even though the “future,” of all the tenses, most utterly fascinates us, and excites in us both joyous expectations and horrifying dread, in which all apocalypses and ends of the world have their ‘place,’ it too is just a figment of the imagination in the present. “The idea of time . . . arises altogether from the manner in which impressions appear to the mind, without making one of their number . . . By what fiction we apply the idea of time . . . tho’ it be impossible to shew the impression, from which the idea of time without a changeable existence is deriv’d; yet we can easily point out those appearances, which make us fancy we have that idea, “ TREATISE, I, II, III & V, pp. 36-7, 65.
And, in reference to the ‘reality’ of buying and selling, what most people consider the most real and value-establishing act of all, Hume says,
“But as to the translation of property from one person to another is a more remarkable event, the defect of our ideas becomes more sensible on that occasion, and obliges us to turn ourselves on every side in search of some remedy . . . In order to aid the imagination in conceiving the transference of property, we take the sensible object, and actually transfer its possession to the person, on whom we wou’d bestow the property. The suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of this sensible delivery, deceive the mind, and make it fancy, that it conceives the mysterious transition of the property. And that this explication of the matter is just, appears hence, that men have invented a symbolical delivery, to satisfy the fancy, where the real one is impractical . . . This is a kind of superstitious practice in civil laws, and in the laws of nature, resembling the Roman catholic superstition in religions in religion. As the Roman catholics represent the inconceivable mysteries of the Christian religion, and render them more present to the mind, by a taper, or habit, or grimace, which is suppos’d to resemble them; so lawyers and moralists have run into like inventions for the same reason, and have endeavor’d by those means to satisfy themselves concerning the transference of property by consent.” III, II, IV, pp. 515-6.
One wonders what Adam Smith thought of that. The point is, if “time” can be shown to be an utter fraud in its most intense ‘reality,’ then one sees the debates of history can only resolve themselves in passions and never in science. History has many valuable uses as a passion, but as David Hume has demonstrated time and time again, no “fact” of a “sense impression” of itself conveys any ideas whatsoever. Here one might turn from contemplating history as science to science as science and wonder how many religious practices are indulged in within its holiest of inner sanctums.
No doubt my book, in some ways, is a book about Collingwood and not just a book shaped by Collingwood. This is not confined to method, but concerns his conception of European historiography as a whole. The title “David Hume and the Problem of History” suggests the obvious, that this problem of history is more than a problem of David Hume. Thus Hume is imbedded into a wider context, and here I come to conclusions which differ from those Collingwood proposed in The Idea of History, making Hume appear as a much more important and independent link between Giambattista Vico, 19th century historicism, and present day purveyors of academic history. Collingwood said,
“It is the historian’s business . . . to apprehend the past as a thing in itself . . . The philosopher is concerned with these events not as things in themselves but as things known to the historian, and to ask, not what kind of events they were . . . but what it is about them that makes it possible for historians to know them,” THE IDEA OF HISTORY, Oxford, 1956, pg. 3.
As in the transference of property, the symbol “history” is invented to explain why things are the way they are, how they got that way through a continuous and enduring sense of time somehow outside the bonds of our mere “sense impressions” whereas the only demonstrable and at-hand “fact” that even must abandon the concept “thing in itself” is “sense impression,” the original foundation of all knowledge, and it is always NOW. Any ‘history’ one attaches mystically to an object may help us comprehend something otherwise unnoticed about its present form, but it can in no possible way whatsoever discover a “sense impression” of the past. That is solely reserved for the immediate present.
Donald W. Livingston’s Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, published in 1984, created the guiding theme of my book, namely, that these two sets of Hume’s activities are mutually interdependent and mutually illuminating. It is important to consider the emphasis on “understanding” in the many different points of view that surround David Hume as philosopher and historian simultaneously, as their center as Hume is the supreme philosopher in the English speaking world and, outside that mere national context, the most influential modern philosopher that has shaped the whole course and the grounds of discussion of analytic and deductive thought in both the continental philosophy of Kant and Hegel (and therefore all modern continental philosophy), who wanted to change and ‘expand’ him into something ‘more,’ and British philosophy who wanted to make him linguistically and mathematically-logically strictly correct. This project Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated as a failure from “within,” according to its own premises.
Therefore David Hume always bursts out of the bounds of those that try to see him as a mere “popularizer” of philosophy because he is a human being that lived literally and naturally within his philosophy and therefore made it accessible to all because it was grounded in the common living basics of human existence per se. And, yes, this all is a product of my imagination, the ground of all thought.
Ulrich Voigt, October 2001
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