David Hume’s Theory of Self: An In-Depth Analysis
David Hume, the sceptical Scottish philosopher present during the Age of Enlightenment; a philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century, is considered to be the father of modern empiricism by some. He was the first individual to attempt to develop a consistent empiricist philosophy and to take empiricism seriously. In David Hume philosophy about self essay his philosophical viewpoint will be discussed.
Hume aspires to establish the basic laws that govern the elements of the human mind in its operations and is one of the countless philosophers who pursue to be the “Newton of the mind”. Hume is best known for his extensive work A Treatise of Human nature, where he rejects the traditional characterisation of action and its evaluation, and makes the astonishing proclamation that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” He defends the views that the ends or goals of our actions in all cases are given by our “passions”, not by reason, and that the practical role of reason is to figure out how to fulfil these goals.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emotions loomed large in the philosophical psychology. Theories of the emotions played a pivotal one in the important early modern debates about causation and the proper forms of explanation. A large number of enlightenment philosophers, as part of their adoptance of the new science, considered the emotions to be susceptible to mechanical explanation. Like many emotional thinkers of his time, Hume developed a theory of the passions, categorizing the emotions and them and explaining the psychological mechanisms by which they arise in the human mind. He begins by dividing passions between the calm and the violent, he believes this distinction is not precise but explains that individuals commonly differentiate between types of passion in terms of their degrees of forcefulness. He believes that calm passions are emotional feelings of pleasure and pain associated with moral and aesthetic judgments. A distinguishing feature of the sentiment and passions, Hume believed, is that they touch or strike upon the mind more forcibly than other perceptions.He trusted that our passions are “simple and uniform impressions” with characteristic affective qualities, a change in emphasis, as many did allow emotions to typically have some kind of object.
It was also famously argued by Hume that there is no such thing as a direct causation but there are only observable regularities. There are only impressions we call our own, but no indestructible self. You can interpret the meaning that reason will always be a slave to those passions as further advocacy of this type of empiricism or anti-realism, if you take passions to include sensations of hot or cold or sense impressions.
Some may call the context in his discussion “moral psychology”, as he focuses on how we are motivated to act morally. Particularly he raises questions about the role of practical reason in one’s moral motivation. The views withheld by philosophers before him, as well as after him are opposed, as he believes to act morally is to have a rational grasp of moral truths. The influential conception of practical reason defended by Hume is, the role of reason is only to find out which means helps achieve a given goal and Reason plays no part in determining the goals. He interpreted pure reason to be motivationally motionless, as purely logic can’t give the individual a reason to do something or not. For example, through reasoning we can do realistic determinations to acknowledge which range of actions would provide the greatest happiness of the greatest amount. Even though that does not explain why we seek to maintain the greatest happiness in the first place. Nothing we value can be rationalised solely by reason.
What Hume called desires and what he calls the “passions”, is what our goals are set exclusively by. Desires are “original existences” in our mind and arise from unknown natural causes, they cannot be evaluated as true or false, or as reasonable or unreasonable. (As Hume remarks, it is 'not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger'), we cannot be criticized rationally for our desires. Practical reason by itself cannot give rise to moral motivation, therefore Reason is seen to be the slave of the “passions”. It is contingent on pre-existing desires that enhance motivational force. Hume’s most well-known views about the passions concern their relation to practical reason as he locates all our motivations in the passions. Hume identifies it as “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”. If a person’s actions were not determined, we would therefore have no way to trace these to their springs in character, which is the prerequisite for forming moral judgements. Without having passions we would lack all amount of motivation, all drive to act and impulse, or even our drive to reason, as passions are the engine for all our deeds. This gives the sense in which “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”.
Another belief held by Hume involves passions not being directly subject to rational evaluation, it is a mistake to believe they could be either rational or irrational. Passions are impressions – strong and lively perceptions with a certain “feel” and a direction, or impulse. Whereas Reasoning involves connecting certain ideas together in order to arrive at a belief, which may apply to the circumstances under which passions arise. But no impulse can be generated solely by Reason. For such reasons many individuals assigned a desire model of practical reasoning to Hume, where our ends are given by passions. This view entails Reason being the business of production of beliefs, and our beliefs tend to be only relevant to the means by which we seeks to obtain those ends; as they don’t determine the ends themselves. What seems central to Hume's view is the inertness of reason, its inability to generate impulses for the mind. And it is this that drives Hume to adopt a sentimentalist basis for the origins of our “moral distinctions”.
Hume acknowledges that beauty can only even be as it were 'in the eye of the beholder' because beauty cannot be in the object but must be wholly contained in the pleasurable sentiment it causes us. He states that pleasure is the essence of beauty and we define as beautiful which gives us pleasurable sensations. This shows that reason will always be a slave of the passions. In On the Standard of Taste Hume tries to argue that there are in fact some objective aesthetic standards, by urging us to heed the advice of ideal critics which he goes on to define (i.e. critics possessed of a delicacy of taste, and sound understanding, sharpened by practice and comparison and who are free from prejudice).
Hume additionally attempts to understand the natural foundations of moral judgement; why we approve of some character traits but not of others? He believes that our evaluations are based primarily on affections and sympathy, reason is a secondary role in all this. He distinguishes two components; the first involves immediate affective responses to the perception of character traits and the second involves moral judgements mediated by our sympathy with the welfare of others.
Overall, Hume’s studies on the philosophy of reason and emotion, as well as his touch on moral sentimentalism have clearly influenced the direction of contemporary moral psychology. Throughout his time, Hume questioned many common notions of personal identity, and argued there is no such thing as a permanent “self” over time. He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our conceptions of cause-effect relations are grounded in habits of thinking, rather than in the perception of causal forces in the external world itself. He defended the skeptical position that human reason is inherently contradictory, and it is only through naturally-instilled beliefs that we can navigate our way through common life.
