Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy

By Donald W. Livingston

The Scottish philosopher David Hume is commonly understood as the original proponent of the "end of philosophy." In this powerful new study, Donald Livingston completely revises our understanding of Hume's thought through his investigation of Hume's distinction between "true" and "false" philosophy. For Hume, false philosophy leads either to melancholy over the groundlessness of common opinion or delirium over transcending it, while true philosophy leads to wisdom. Livingston traces this distinction through all of Hume's writings, providing a systematic pathology of the corrupt philosophical consciousness in history, politics, philosophy, and literature that characterized Hume's own time as well as ours.

By demonstrating how a philosophical method can be used to expose the political motivations behind intellectual positions, historical events, and their subsequent interpretations, Livingston revitalizes Hume's thought and reveals its relevance for contemporary dicussions of politics, nationalism, and ideology for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226519210

Book preview

PART ONE

HUMEAN REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER ONE

Is Hume an Empiricist?

Modern philosophy has been obsessed with epistemology. In surveys of the history of philosophy, it is common to find philosophies identified by epistemological descriptions (empiricist, rationalist, idealist, pragmatist, etc.) as if these descriptions captured their essence. But a philosophy is and must be more than its epistemology. One can always ask what is the value of knowledge, and how it is to be ranked in the wider order of valuable things. This is not an epistemological question, and presupposed in every theory of knowledge, whether recognized or not, is some view of the worth of knowledge and its rank in the order of value. No philosopher has suffered more from the narrowing of vision that comes from the modern habit of epistemological classification than Hume. He is commonly identified as an empiricist and indeed as an especially clear case of what radical empiricism is.

Empiricism as Ideology

But what is empiricism? If we mean the doctrine that all knowledge originates from experience and that nothing is in the intellect that was not first in sense, then Hume is an empiricist. But so are Aristotle, Aquinas, and other philosophers too numerous to mention. If we narrow the definition to mean the doctrine that all knowledge claims are either analytic or synthetic and that all necessary propositions fall in the former class and all scientific propositions fall in the latter, then Hume is not an empiricist because he did not think that necessary propositions are analytic. That is, he did not think that what makes a proposition necessary is that its denial is formally self-contradictory. Indeed, he held a doctrine similar to Kant’s that, in addition to analytic propositions, there are propositions which have both empirical content and are necessary.¹ One could go on perhaps indefinitely proposing definitions of empiricism and testing to see whether Hume’s philosophy is a counterexample. But this would be a fruitless and even misleading task, because what is at issue in classifying Hume as a radical empiricist is something ideological. Epistemologies are internally connected to a wider view of the whole of experience, including a judgment about the worth of knowledge. The epistemology can, of course, be abstracted from this wider context, but then it loses its life and collapses into an abstraction. Since there are no radical abstractions, to think of Hume as a radical empiricist is to think of him as, in some way, participating in a certain sort of ideology either as a hero or villain. What ideology could that be?

It will be helpful to begin with the origin of the word empiricism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term appears in English around the middle of the seventeenth century and denotes a medical quack who, without scientific knowledge, practices by trial and error. It was largely a term of abuse throughout the eighteenth century. Any science or art could be debased with empiricism, and an absurd policy in government could be described as the most sorry juggle of political empiricism. James Mill can say in 1817 that mere observation and empiricism are not even the commencement of science. It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that the term empiricism begins to take on the favorable connotations it has today, as when Thomas Huxley says in 1881 that all true science begins with empiricism. It is the favorable connotations of this essentially Victorian term that are now read back into the history of philosophy to pick out a line of heroes or villains: Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Carnap, Ayer, and so on. If Hume was an empiricist, he could not have known that he was, since the favorable connotations of the term were not available to him.

It is true that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume take a position on the epistemological debates of their time that contrasts with that taken by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. We may call this empiricism if we like, but we must be careful to purge the term of its latter-day ideological connotations—something especially difficult to do in the case of Hume. And we must also take care to show how a common empiricism is internal to the natural-law Stoicism of Locke, the Christian Platonism of Berkeley, and the Ciceronian humanism of Hume. Such a generic empiricism contains none of the substantial content and bite usually associated with talk of Hume’s empiricism.

Epistemological theories, I have suggested, move against a deep background of beliefs about the worth of knowledge in a wider scheme of things. As such, epistemologies have an ideological and rhetorical dimension, and may be viewed as speeches embedded in a culture and addressed to that culture. The true home of empiricism is the late nineteenth century and our own time, where it is a theory of knowledge at the service of an ideology of perpetual progress through science, technology, and democracy. It is a militant ideology, resolutely forward-looking and hostile not only to religious tradition but to all traditions. The faint image of this ideology of progress can be found in the theory of history as inevitable progress sketched out by Turgot, Condorcet, and Kant; it appears boldly in the superstitious scientism of Comte’s positivism; it is found in Bentham, Mill, Thomas Huxley, the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, logical positivism, logical empiricism, and various forms of pragmatism. A. J. Ayer records, in his account of the Vienna Circle, that the positivists found little in the history of philosophy with which to identify and that the two thinkers closest to their own views were Hume and Mach.²

Empiricism with its background ideology of progress is very much a speech rooted in the industrial revolution, which provided capital and a vast array of machinery and managerial technology for projects of social transformation. By 1825 the fixed steam engines of Britain were producing the equivalent of the labor of 5,400,000 men. These engines alone represented a capital value of about ten million pounds sterling. A century earlier, when Hume was a university student, the total value of all fixed capital in Britain was around two million pounds. By 1900 the work done by the steam engines of the world equaled the labor of five billion men, more than the entire population of the earth.³ Watt and Boulton sold their first steam engines in 1775, a year before Hume’s death.

The great transformation of the meanings of men and things brought on by the industrial revolution, and in which empiricism finds its natural home, makes no appearance in Hume’s philosophy. The controlling images and metaphors of that philosophy derive from societies of family, kinship, and friends rooted in an agrarian order which cultivated commerce and the sort of light manufacturing that was largely under the control of landed gentry. The technology of production had changed little in five thousand years. Nearly everything was made by hand. The sources of power were what they had always been: wind, water, the strength of animals, and above all, human labor. Thoughts of famine and the decline of the national population were always in the background. Hume thought there were physical limits in the nature of human arrangements that prevented the population of a city from growing much beyond six hundred thousand (E, 447–48). Almost everywhere, combinations of princes and priests ruled as they had always done. Hume’s philosophy encouraged improvement and reform but was radically ignorant of the industrial notion of a progressive society. And its improvements were always proposed with an eye first on the stability of society and the hierarchical orders of family, kinship, and the traditional establishment that held them together. It does not teach—because it can scarcely conceive—deliberate projects of total social transformation which are standard in the ideologies of industrial society; it has no notion of the ceaseless destruction and creation that is known today as progress. It is not a philosophy such as liberalism or Marxism that is forward-looking or that looks impatiently at the present from the perspective of a future that it thinks it knows and, in thought, has already occupied. When the theory of history as inevitable progress first made its appearance in the speculations of his friend Turgot, Hume firmly rejected it (L, 2: 180). The present is not a disposable launching pad for future adventures in technological progress but a place to dwell, to understand, and to enjoy, and something to pass on with whatever improvements are desirable to one’s posterity. The present is understood to be what it is because of the past, because of traditions and customs built into it. And the greatest wisdom is not what an individual following a rational method can discern but the knowledge spontaneously collected by many generations, often working in ignorance of each other, and deposited in traditions, customs, and conventions. It is a philosophy whose favorite way of understanding something is to tell a story about its origins.

Its view of the human world is not technological but poetic. Hume teaches that in a world of constant flux and dissolution, the metaphorical imagination forms identities which are housed in habits, customs, and traditions, and which are its only means of resisting the horror of dissolution. Hence the Humean imagination, although it encourages improvement and even radical change when necessary, betrays a prejudice on behalf of what is familiar and long-established just because it is so. Time is a value immanent in human institutions. But because of this prejudice on behalf of the familiar, boredom may set in, or a custom may outlive its utility. And so novelty is valued as a welcome relief, but only as an enrichment of the deeper and wider background of the familiar. The ceaseless pursuit of novelty and creativity for their own sakes makes no appearance in Hume’s thought.

The tone, tenor, and style of Hume’s philosophy are therefore entirely different from those of empiricism, which is the tip of the ideological iceberg of progress. Here, in philosophy as elsewhere, style and nuance are of the essence. Given the present and backward-looking character of Hume’s philosophy and the importance he gives to custom, one might think of it as an historical empiricism. This is a better identification, because Hume’s conception of experience has more affinity with the notion of historical experience as understood by the English Common Law tradition and the Latin rhetorical tradition in philosophy, as exemplified by Cicero, than with an empiricism which views sense experience as the ahistorical foundation against which scientific theories are tested. But though it is an improvement to think of Hume as a historical empiricist, such violence is done to the conventions governing the use of the term empiricism that this phrase is either misleading or paradoxical. To describe Hume as a historical empiricist is rather like describing Hegel’s philosophy as historical Aristotelianism. There is a point to such a description, but there must be a better way to think about Hegel’s philosophy, and Hume’s. The solution is to resist the prejudice of epistemological classification and to look for a broader topic under which to understand Hume’s thought.

The Sceptical System of Philosophy

I suggest going back to Hume’s own description of his philosophy in the Treatise. He called it simply the sceptical philosophy (T, 180). The exploration of what Hume understood this philosophy to be is the task of this study. But we can make a beginning by sketching out the rationale of Pyrrhonian skepticism. As will be shown later, Hume’s philosophy is different from Pyrrhonism, but it owes much to the dialectic of philosophical reflection first exposed by the Pyrrhonians, and it is with this dialectic that I would like to begin.

The ancient philosophical sects of Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, and the Peripatetic philosophy conceived of philosophy as the search for wisdom or the best way to live. Each had a theory of what constitutes human happiness and also a theory of the source of human unhappiness. For the Platonist, the source of human misery is philosophical ignorance, which is overcome by philosophical knowledge; for the Epicurean, it is pain, which is overcome by maximizing pleasure; for the Stoic, it is a false will, which is overcome by a will in accord with nature or right reason; for the Cynic, it is the tyranny of convention, which is overcome by an ascetic independence. But the skeptics had an especially interesting theory of the source of human misery; they found it not in philosophical ignorance, pain, a false will, or the grip of convention but in philosophical theorizing itself. An act of philosophical theorizing could be overcome only by another act of philosophical reflection which subverted both the first and itself, and so opened the way for a life free of philosophical reflection and guided entirely by the fourfold practical criterion: natural inclination, instinct, the piety of custom, and the practical arts. Sextus Empiricus tells a story of how the skeptics came to discover that the good life is a life free of the oppressions of philosophical reflection.⁴

The skeptics began as philosophers who were determined to live by the dictates of philosophical theory, no matter what those dictates were. Their happiness depended entirely on possessing the correct theory of nature and of the good life. But they soon discovered that for every theory of reality supported by philosophical reasons, they could find a contrary theory equally well supported, and so they were forced to suspend judgment. This led to depression. For being committed to the philosophical life, their happiness depended entirely on philosophical reason, which was leading nowhere. While in the melancholy state of suspending philosophical judgment, they noticed for the first time the radiant world of unreflectively received common life. Here was society, family, friends, the pleasures of the table, the glory of one’s city, festive companionship with the gods, the ingenious working of a grist mill, and much else. One could delight in all of these things without the mediation of philosophical theory, without having to answer questions about their ultimate origins, nature, or meaning. Philosophers could say that these things are appearances and wonder about their relation to ultimate reality, but their being appearances would not affect our enjoyment of them. Even if the sweetness of honey were an appearance, that would not affect our enjoyment of it, nor its price in the market, nor the value placed on beekeepers. Of course, in the mode of suspending philosophical judgment, one cannot say that the things of unreflectively received common life are appearances. They might be, but then again they might not. The philosophical distinction between appearance and reality vanishes in the mode of suspending philosophical judgment, and the world of common life can appear in its full radiance, untainted by philosophical reflection. It is in this philosophically unreflective order of common life that the skeptics realize they have enjoyed whatever happiness they have known, and it is in this mode of existence that they are determined to stay. But there is an essential tension within Pyrrhonism which makes the achievement of happiness in philosophically unreflective common life difficult. The Pyrrhonians divided all philosophers into three types: the dogmatists who claim to have discovered ultimate truth, the academics who claim that knowledge of ultimate truth is impossible, and the Pyrrhonians who, not making a dogmatic claim one way or the other, continue the search for ultimate truth. Skeptikos means an inquirer. The Pyrrhonians acknowledge that they have no argument capable of showing that philosophical truth about ultimate reality is impossible. But without such a demonstration, the Pyrrhonian is vulnerable to every new philosophical sect that may come along. The new theory could be true, and so the Pyrrhonian is forced out of the peace and self-imposed innocence of common life into the anxieties of philosophical reflection. The old philosophical desire to grasp the real reappears and continues until suspense of judgment and peace of mind are again achieved through argument. The method of Pyrrhonian wisdom is to become proficient at thinking up such arguments so that one will be disturbed as little as possible by the intrusion of new philosophical theory. Since the skeptic can never entirely suppress the desire to philosophize, his happiness is never complete and always exists against a background of philosophical anxiety.

In a sense, the Pyrrhonians were the deepest of the eudaemonistic sects because they were the most philosophically self-aware. Like the other sects, they thought the task of philosophical reflection was to secure happiness and personal well-being. But unlike the other sects, the happiness they discovered required the subversion of philosophical reflection by itself. In undertaking this, the Pyrrhonians threw into question not merely this or that philosophical theory of the good life but the value of philosophical theorizing itself. They thought themselves the most critically reflective of the ancient philosophers, for they could see, whereas the others apparently could not, that philosophical theories contrary to their own were equally well supported by argument. A philosophy that radically questions the nature and value of its own activity is more self-aware than one that does not. In this sense, the Pyrrhonians were the most philosophical of the ancient philosophers. They were not Philistines who opposed custom and the natural inclination to philosophical reflection but, as Sextus Empiricus described them, men of noble nature who, through rigorous philosophical reflection, discovered to their astonishment that philosophical reflection itself was entirely empty.

It should be stressed that the Pyrrhonian questioning of philosophy is itself a philosophical act. Likewise, the insight into the emptiness of philosophical theorizing, the discovery of the domain of common life as the scene for happiness, the recognition of the necessity of the practical criterion (instinct, natural inclination, piety, and the practical arts) as the appropriate guides for living in this domain—all of these are insights won through an act of philosophical reflection. It is of course a paradoxical insight: seeing through to its own vacuity and at the same time recognizing its other (the philosophically unreflective domain of custom and inclination) as its authority. But the conclusions reached by philosophers are typically paradoxical, so this in itself is no reason to reject the purported wisdom of Pyrrho. In the meantime, the Pyrrhonians have entirely inverted the Platonic dictum that philosophical knowledge is virtue. It is now philosophical ignorance that is virtue. For without the recognition of philosophical ignorance, one would be shut out from the scene of human happiness.

What I have summarized as the Pyrrhonian insight into the nature of philosophy is too strong for what can actually be claimed. The Pyrrhonian cannot make the general claim that philosophical theories about ultimate reality are empty nor that the practical criterion and common life guided by the practical criterion is the true scene of human happiness. This is the conviction of the Pyrrhonian, but he cannot give theoretical expression to it. He must always speak undogmatically. All he can say is that every case of philosophical theorizing examined so far appears empty and that he follows the practical criterion undogmatically. He is and must be open to new philosophical theories, and this openness preserves a certain anxiety, but the ethical (eudaemonistic) goal of Pyrrhonism is to eliminate as much of this anxiety as possible by developing the powers and habits that enable a sure and swift return to suspense of judgment. A Pyrrhonian intellect that was ideally whole and fully developed (one might even say holy) would be able to see through a new philosophical theory immediately and so would be able to preserve, without interruption, the peace that transcends all philosophical understanding.

Hume’s philosophy is founded on a philosophical act of self-inquiry like that of the Pyrrhonians, and therefore the structure of Hume’s philosophy is quite different from what has come to be understood as empiricism. The central idea of empiricism is that there is an unproblematic foundation of knowledge given in experience and usually identified with sense experience, from which all knowledge is derived and against which all theoretical interpretations must be tested. The threat to scientific progress is due to undisciplined interpretations of the world arising from rationalist intuitions or unreflective dictates of custom and tradition. The given in sense experience, being uninterpreted, or nearly so, is the only standard against which interpretations can be brought to account. There are superficial resemblances to this view in Hume, but they must be seen in perspective. A skeptical philosophy in the Pyrrhonian tradition that finds philosophy itself to be suspect and, by inquiring into its nature, subverts all the received foundations of knowledge is not and cannot be a philosophy aimed at constructing an epistemology, empiricist or otherwise. The dialectical structure of Hume’s radical questioning of philosophy is different from the Pyrrhonian, but it contains a Pyrrhonian moment which is sufficient to separate it from the foundational enterprise of empiricism.

Philosophical Self-Understanding

The question What is the nature and worth of philosophy? may not be the most important question that can be asked, but it is surely the most philosophical question. And it is so because self-knowledge is the goal of philosophy and the standard of philosophical truth. Philosophy is the only inquiry that can throw itself into question and still be what it is. The question What is the nature and worth of physics? is a question about physics but not a question in physics. That physics is done at all is the object of wonder, and it will not help simply to do more physics. But the question What is philosophy? is both a question about philosophy and a question in philosophy. The question itself reveals most clearly the nature of the philosophical enterprise: self-inquiry. Likewise, the question What is man? is a question about humanity and a question which manifests an essential human characteristic: self-inquiry. Man just is that being who throws into question the nature and worth of his own existence. In a word, man is a philosophical being, and to philosophize is an essentially human activity. Indeed, it is not too extravagant to suggest that the questions What is man? and What is philosophy? are isomorphic. In both cases, throwing into question what one is reveals an essential characteristic of one’s nature. A science of man is and must be a philosophical science.

A philosopher who presents a philosophical theory of knowledge, or justice, or God, or truth, or whatever, but who has not inquired into the nature and worth of his own philosophizing is not as profound a thinker as one who has. And one who throws philosophy itself into question has plunged into an adventure from which he cannot expect to return unchanged. Having satisfied oneself about the nature of philosophy, one’s earlier efforts might appear as not being true exemplifications of philosophy or as poor approximations. Kant, under Hume’s influence, went through such a metaphilosophical crisis and viewed his earlier work as dogmatic slumber. But the crisis was original to Hume, who is one of those rare thinkers (Plato, the Pyrrhonians, Hegel, and Wittgenstein being others) for whom the radical questioning of philosophy is the defining moment and the key in which all their thought is played. The radical questioning of philosophy is the master philosophical question.

Whatever answer is given to that question will be seen as having the authority to color and shape our understanding of what counts as an authentic philosophical interpretation of impressions, ideas, beliefs, knowledge, justice, and so on. Hume’s science of human nature should be viewed as a philosophical science: an inquiry that emerges as a satisfactory resolution of a philosophical crisis in which the nature and worth of philosophy are thrown into question. This science will have what might in some loose sense be called empirical elements, but these will be constrained by a prior act of autonomous philosophical thought. The radical questioning of philosophy by itself is not an empirical form of questioning to be answered by confirming or falsifying cases. It requires establishing an ideal of philosophizing which a philosophical mind can recognize as its own true nature and which enables it to identify true and false forms of its own activity.

The place where Hume has the philosophical mind turn in on itself to examine its own nature and to judge whether present philosophical acts are true to that nature is part 4, book 1 of the Treatise. There, through a series of dialectical maneuvers, he makes a distinction between what he calls true philosophy and false philosophy. Philosophy that is true is genuine philosophy (true to its own nature) and yields self-knowledge. Philosophy that is false is alienated from its nature and issues in self-deception. If the language I have used to describe the dialectical act of philosophical self-examination in part 4 sounds Hegelian and unlike what one would expect of an empiricist, that is because Hume is not an empiricist and because, in this part of the Treatise, he anticipates something of the logic of The Phenomenology of Spirit, which is also an act of philosophical self-inquiry.

Hume’s own language can be made to sound Hegelian. The dialectic of philosophical self-understanding is expressed in the metaphor of a voyage of discovery (T, 263–64). The mind, though a unity, is presented as divided within itself, struggling with itself, and driven by what Hume calls contradictions; the mind at once denies and establishes suppositions (T, 218); deceives itself with experiences which are founded on principles, which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embrac’d by the mind, and which are unable mutually to destroy each other (T, 215); the mind’s own disguises are exposed and discovered as its monstrous offspring (T, 215); one self of the mind takes on the role of master only to find itself enslaved in turn (T, 186). Hume describes the dialectic of philosophical self-understanding in the idealist language of degrees of understanding: opinions, that rise above each other, according as the persons, who form them, acquire new degrees of reason and knowledge (T, 222). To speak of degrees of reason here is not to speak of quantities of factual knowledge, as an empiricist must, but of thought becoming more coherent with an ideal of true philosophy.

Having established this ideal, Hume hopes to establish a science of human nature, that is, "a system or set of opinions, which if not true (for that, perhaps, is too much to be hop’d for) might at least be satisfactory to the human mind, and might stand the test of the most critical examination" (T, 272; italics mine). Hume’s science of human nature is not true in the sense that its propositions correspond with ultimate reality or any other foundation, such as the empiricist foundation in sense experience which is supposedly free of skeptical subversion. Hume taught that there is no such foundation. The science of human nature is true in that it conforms to the mind’s own autonomous demands. And these demands are just the demands of what Hume calls true philosophy. I do not wish to make too much of the comparison between Hume and Hegel, but it is important to see that the philosophies of both are given form by a prior act of philosophical self-examination.

Part 4 of book 1 includes ninety-four pages and contains seven sections. Two of these, Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses and Of Personal Identity have spawned a considerable literature concerned with what is thought to be Hume’s empiricist analysis of what it means to perceive physical things and the nature of personal identity. But the overall purpose of part 4 has been largely overlooked. That purpose is to determine the nature of philosophy and to delineate the normative distinction between true and false forms of philosophical reflection. This is evident in the title of part 4: Of the Sceptical and Other Systems of Philosophy The point of the exercise is to set forth the nature of the true (skeptical) philosophy and to distinguish it from the "other systems of philosophy."

Hume, of course, does raise questions about what it means to perceive things and what it means to say the self is the same over time. But he treats these questions in a bifocal way: asking the first-order question, How is it possible to perceive physical things? while at the same time keeping his eye on the second-order question, What can count as an adequate philosophical theory of perception or, indeed, of anything? This is suggested by the titles of the two sections where Hume discusses perception of the external world: Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses and Of the Modern Philosophy. In these sections Hume is not so much interested in framing the correct theory of perception of physical objects (much less an empiricist analysis of such perception) as he is in exploring various theories of perception as exemplifications of true and false philosophical theorizing.

We must read part 4, then, with bifocals, viewing answers to first-order questions as exemplifications of philosophical theorizing for the sake of answering the second-order question, What does it mean to philosophize? The final section, Conclusion, of part 4 is clearly devoted to answering this question. Hume opens this concluding section with the metaphor of having narrowly survived a perilous voyage through the preceding sections. The lessons learned from the exemplifications of various modes of philosophizing in the preceding sections are reviewed and forged into an understanding of what true philosophizing is.

In the preceding sections philosophical thought suffers self-alienation. In section 1, Scepticism with Regard to Reason, reason is shown to subvert itself. In section 2, Scepticism with Regard to the Senses, philosophical theories of perception which seek emancipation from vulgar perceptual realism subvert themselves. In section 3, Of the Antient Philosophy, the ancient philosophical theory of substance is shown to alienate the thinker from the true understanding of substance he possesses; such thinkers suffer the punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus (T, 223). In section 4, Of the Modern Philosophy, causal reasoning, which is the essence of modern scientific philosophizing, is shown to subvert itself and to destroy the possibility of belief in an external world. In section 5, Of the Immateriality of the Soul, the theological interpretation of the soul as immaterial is shown to support atheism not theism. In section 6, Of Personal Identity, the philosophical theory of a substantial mind is subverted and replaced with the image of the mind as a bundle or republic of perceptions. This section is the only one in which the first-order question of what constitutes personal identity is in the foreground and the second-order question about the nature of philosophizing is in the background. The bundle theory of personal identity is one of the best-known examples of empiricist analysis in Hume. But he rejected it in the Appendix to the Treatise, where he welcomed the opportunity of confessing my errors (T, 623). He did not replace it with another theory, and it is not clear why he rejected it. But the Treatise ends with no answer to the first-order question about personal identity, empiricist or otherwise. Finally, in section 7, Conclusion of This Book, philosophical thought comes to rest with a conception of its activity that is coherent with what is thought to be its own nature: a system of thought satisfactory to the human mind (T, 272). This act of philosophical self-knowledge issues in the distinction between true and false forms of philosophizing and enables the thinker to engage in first-order theorizing which does not issue in the self-alienation, self-deception, or self-subversion so vividly portrayed in the cavalcade of philosophical folly presented in the preceding sections.

This concluding section of part 4, book 1 is the most important section of the Treatise and is the key to understanding the special character of Hume’s philosophy. In answering the master question about the nature of true philosophizing, Hume brings to a close the story of book 1, Of the Understanding, which itself is merely a preparation for the investigation of the Treatise proper, namely, human conduct in its broadest sense and the passions which are the source of conduct. Since it is the passions that move us to act, they are the central study of the Treatise and the special study of Book 2, Of the Passions (T, 8). Book I, Of the Understanding, is important because our passions are determined by our understanding of ourselves and the world (T, 8). Book 3, Of Morals, examines the world of culture, which is the public display of the passions determined by the understanding. The highest act of self-understanding is philosophy. Book I examines what it means to understand and so necessarily issues in a story, the dramatic conclusion of which is a dialectical investigation of the philosophical act itself. This critical investigation of philosophy is absolutely crucial for the project of the Treatise, for a disorder in philosophical reflection, if taken seriously, yields a disorder in the understanding of ourselves and the world. This in turn generates perverse passions.

The empiricist reading of Hume takes him to be an especially clear case of epistemological foundationalism. Sense impressions are viewed as the uninterpreted foundation on which knowledge is built and against which it is tested. But it would be more correct to say that the foundation of the Treatise occurs at the end of book 1, not at the beginning where impressions are introduced. The foundation of the Treatise is the distinction explicated at the end of book 1 between true and false philosophical theorizing, and this investigation is not and could not be an empirical one. Empirical investigations yield hypotheses about objects and are confirmed or disconfirmed by objects. The dialectical investigation ending in the distinction between true and false philosophy is not a study of objects but a form of self-inquiry: an act of the speculative intellect seeking to understand its own nature. What we learn at the end of book 1 is that impressions perceived by passionate agents in culture are shaped by general rules, judgments, customs, and conventions. Rules, Hume said, are able to impose on the very senses (T, 374, 147). For purposes of analysis, we can talk about impressions as being unstained by judgment and custom, but our concrete experience of impressions is always shaped by judgment and custom. Hume is concerned to examine the concrete experience of human conduct as determined by our passions and by the understanding which generates those