Hume on true and false philosophy

The notion of true and false philosophy is not something one often comes across when one reads about Hume, which is not surprising because Hume himself does not often use this distinction.

Hume does not explicitly define what true and false philosophy are but he suggests what they are like. For example, Hume thinks that

352 According to Hume, also religion can be “true” or “false”. In his essay “Of Superstition and

Enthusiasm” Hume presents these as “the corruptions of true religion” (E, 73). Hume also, at least twice, briefly refers to “true atheism” (T 1.4.5.17; SBN 240 and NHR 4.4).

353 See, for example, McDonald 2009.

[n]othing is more requisite for a true philosopher, than to restrain the intemperate desire of searching into causes, and having establish’d any doctrine upon a sufficient number of experiments, rest contented with that, when he sees a farther examination would lead him into obscure and uncertain speculations.³⁵⁴

Not surprisingly, it seems that Hume’s own approach to philosophical problems is of the true kind while others are often of the false kind. Roughly speaking, the biggest flaw of the false philosophy is that it is out of bounds. The setting of these bounds is probably the most important thing in Hume’s philosophising. Bearing in mind the importance of Hume’s theory of the perceptions of the mind it is not surprising to observe that it is also behind Hume’s distinction between true and false philosophy. Hume points out that his

intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their

operations. For besides that this belongs not to my present purpose, I am afraid, that such an enterprize is beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know body otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses. As to those who attempt any thing farther, I cannot approve of their ambition, till I see, in some one instance at least, that they have met with success. But at present I content myself with knowing perfectly the manner in which objects affect my senses, and their connections with each other, as far as experience informs me of them. This suffices for the conduct of life; and this also suffices for my philosophy, which pretends only to explain the nature and causes of our perceptions, or impressions and ideas.³⁵⁵

354 T 1.1.4.6; SBN 12-13.

355 T 1.2.5.26; SBN 64. Compare this to what Kant later said about the impossibility of knowing what is the case with the objects in themselves independent of human sensibility in The Critique of Pure Reason (see

It is essential to Humean thought that true philosophers should only describe how different kind of human ideas are formed with reference to sensory experience. When we observe that we entertain certain beliefs about our surroundings, we should only try to explain how we come to hold those beliefs and not try to make statements about the true nature of events independent of us perceiving them in one way or another. This is what Hume says “my philosophy” is all about. In a footnote to the previously quoted paragraph, Hume argues, as an example of what he means, that “the

Newtonian philosophy” should only be understood as an enquiry into the appearances that objects make on our senses, not into the real nature of objects if we want to avoid full “scepticism and uncertainty”.³⁵⁶ If this is true philosophy, then one way to formulate what it means to be “led astray by a false philosophy” is

when we transfer the determination of the thought to external objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexion betwixt them; that being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that considers them.³⁵⁷

So, in a sense, Hume’s true philosophy is about the workings of the human mind or nature, not how things really are. One important feature of false philosophising is then a kind of philosophical blindness to the epistemological “divide” between mind and external objects. Hume is often seen as a thinker who wants to severely limit the amount of possible human knowledge based on his

Kant 1929, A42/B59–60).

356 T 1.2.5.26n12; SBN 634. For a discussion of Hume’s relation to Newtonianism, see Schliesser 2007.

357 T 1.3.14.27; SBN 168.

empiricist standpoint and this view is justified in many ways and maybe even more so, if the point of view to his thought is strictly philosophical and, particularly, epistemological.

On the other hand, Livingston, more from the point of view of the history of ideas, declares that “no philosopher has suffered more from the narrowing of vision that comes from the modern habit of epistemological classification than Hume” and sees Hume as not an empiricist in the ideological sense of the term and thinks that one should “resist the prejudice of epistemological classification and to look for a broader topic under which to understand Hume’s thought”.³⁵⁸ Livingston also points out that the term empiricism “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” and begins to take on the modern favourable connotations only in the late nineteenth century “as when Thomas Huxley says in 1881 that ‘all true science begins with empiricism’”.³⁵⁹ In my view, though, it does not follow from this that it is somehow misleading to describe Hume as an “empiricist” from a modern point of view if the history of the term empiricism is acknowledged at the same time. Nevertheless, it seems that, especially in the analytic tradition, scholars often have too narrow an interest in just certain epistemological dimensions of Hume’s thought more or less ignoring the “philosophy of culture” emerging from his writings. Further, as a warning against anachronistic interpretations of classic texts, Hintikka claims that the essential difference between Hume’s thought and that which is typical in the practice of modern natural sciences is the fact that Hume does not differentiate the concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’.³⁶⁰ Hintikka argues that when Hume writes about “the

358 Livingston 1998, 3, 7. Livingston already in 1976 complains how most “Hume scholarship still congregates around the epistemological and ontological problems raised in Book I of the Treatise, and even here there is a fairly limited selection of topics” (Livingston and King, eds., 1976, 4).

359 Livingston 1998, 4.

360 Hintikka 1969, 39-40.

experimental Method of Reasoning” in the subtitle of T, he in fact means a method based on experience and does not mean experiments in the sense that they are actively performed in the modern natural sciences. This means that for Hume the role of an enquirer into human nature remains passive. Hintikka even declares that Hume, in a sense, was “completely blind” to the experimental method in the modern active sense of the term.³⁶¹ I suggest then that this brief excursion into the history of ideas at least partially explicates the passive role of the true philosopher in T and elsewhere in Hume’s writings. He or she is an experiential observer and enquirer into human perceptual reality but does not actively perform experiments to probe into their true or probable nature. Or possibly the issue of the missing shade of blue is at least a thought experiment? If it is, then it seems that this is only the case from the post-Humean perspective, because the term ‘thought experiment’ was not used in the English language until 1854.³⁶² So, to wrap up this section with the title of Hintikka’s paper, “concepts have their fate, too”.³⁶³