My Impression of David Hume

A reader requested my opinion of David Hume's work on free will. So I have studied relevant sections from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), plus Wilhelm Windelband's treatment of Hume in A History of Philosophy (1893). I hope the following response makes clear the incompatibility between his view and mine.

Method

In the Enquiry Hume relates an introspective experience of the will:

We feel, that our actions are subject to our will, on most occasions; and imagine we feel, that the will itself is subject to nothing, because, when by a denial of it we are provoked to try, we feel, that it moves easily every way, and produces an image of itself … even on that side, on which it did not settle. This image, or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, could, at that time, have been compleated into the thing itself; because, should that be denied, we find, upon a second trial, that, at present, it can. We consider not, that the fantastical desire of shewing liberty, is here the motive of our actions.

Hume offers more kindness to his commas than to his readers; see how he ascribes unconsidered motives to fellow introspectors! Or, maybe he refers only to his own failure to consider what he's presently considering. In either case, I will hold no grudge against him. Let me instead entertain the sentiment and consider this “fantastical desire” of mine--or his.   

Suppose that my, or Hume's, motive is to demonstrate free will. On second thought, suppose that it's just my motive--that's less presumptuous. Now, suppose that I'm the one moving this hand and that hand, and that foot and this foot. Does it matter that my motive is to show the liberty of my will? I'm still doing what I'm doing. And, in the end, you, my reader, do not know firsthand the motive that resides inside my skull, do you? You know what I say, and what you see me do. But I might be mistaken or confused--or lying. When it comes to mental content, we experience only our own minds. I experience mine, and you, yours. Unless you claim to possess a paranormal power, it's also fair to believe that neither one of us can read the other's mind. Indeed, I do not know anyone who directly experiences other people's motives.

And yet Hume continues so:

And it seems certain, that, however we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where he cannot, he concludes in general, that he might, were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion and disposition. Now this is the very essence of necessity, according to the foregoing doctrine.

Hume is persuaded not by his own mind, which he suspects of deception, but by an outside spectator of his mind. Moreover, his spectator is not an actual individual, whose integrity and accuracy he might evaluate for us; no, he gives a general notion of a spectator who happens to share his exact philosophy. It's as though Hume projected his unreliable introspector onto a spectator, and then quickly forgot about its unreliability. Even if this spectator could know Hume’s mind perfectly, like Hume knows himself, shouldn't he too “feel a liberty” and thus equally be baffled by this “false sensation or seeming experience” that the will is free?

Hume's appeal to improbable spectators, and also to his own general spectating of other people's motives, points to a basic, methodological problem with his investigation of the will: he focuses too much on fantasy, and too little on reality. Let's look at another example of this: his “shade of blue” problem. Here he invents a man who has seen every possible color except for one particular shade of blue. He then wonders if such a man could, “from his own imagination,” supply the missing shade. The obvious answer, Hume agrees, is yes. And normally this would be fine, except that it contradicts one of his fundamental propositions: that ideas are less lively copies of more lively impressions of real objects. So, if the man never received an impression of that shade of blue, how could he create the idea of it? Hume concedes that simple ideas like this are not derived from impressions, yet he casually dismisses the apparent miracle: “this instance is so singular, that it is scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit, that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.” Once again he prefers his fantastic imagination (general maxim) over his realistic observation (a singular idea without a corresponding impression).

When confronted with a contradiction between theory and reality, a proper theorist sides with reality, because he knows that contradictions are impossible in reality, yet plentiful in theory. If an error cannot be found in the observing of reality, then it most likely resides in the imagining of it. Thus, a proper theorist obsesses over the singular, inexplicable thing, and he crafts his ideas to remain consistent with every single known fact of reality. Hume, however, blatantly does the opposite of this. One final example: when facing evidence of free will in action, he dreams of humans as incomprehensible machines.

[The philosopher and physician] know, that a human body is a mighty complicated machine: That many secret powers lurk in it, which are altogether beyond our comprehension: That to us it must often appear very uncertain in its operations: And that therefore the irregular events, which outwardly discover themselves, can be no proof, that the laws of nature are not observed with the greatest regularity in its internal operations and government.

If man is an incomprehensible machine, then Hume can go on pretending that irregularities are secretly regularities, because, of course, nature must be obeyed, as Francis Bacon had observed. But Hume seems to miss the possibility that it's his conception of nature which is the problem, not his perception of it. Perhaps his famous rejection of abstract ideas biased him against exploring such a hypothesis. Otherwise, he might have theorized that the laws of nature must somehow include volitional actions.

Theory

As I consider my own will, it seems necessary that I choose between the alternatives of which I am aware; but, at the same time, I have liberty in that choosing of an alternative. If I hold in mind three different ideas (e.g., rock, paper, and scissors), it seems necessary to choose whether to keep holding them all in mind, let them all go and think of something else, or consider them individually--perhaps even in combination. As long as these options exist in my thoughts, I cannot escape making a choice of mental action, and yet I am free to direct the course of that action. This fact remains true for physical actions that I choose to perform (e.g., making a rock, paper, or scissors gesture with my hand), except that these choices require additional coordination with the body parts involved, i.e., physically mimicking a recalled or imagined movement.

My mature will is free, but it is not wild. I regulate chosen thoughts and actions according to chosen values. I'm free to stand on or leap off a high cliff, but I might always choose to stand, because I extremely value my life. This value-based control of volition explains why the will seems more constrained in choices that affect higher values, while it seems less constrained in choices that affect lower values. It also accounts for the regularity and irregularity which Hume observes in human behavior. People have similar values because they have similar natures, but they also have different values because they have and make different choices. Hence, we see a variety of regular and irregular behaviors in human beings.

Upon careful comparison, I am not entirely at odds with Hume, despite our fundamentally opposing methodologies. He does allow for some freedom in action:

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we chuse to remain at rest, we may; if we chuse to move, we also may.

I take him to mean that we control a sort of on-off switch that either activates or deactivates our body--his “incomprehensible machine.” And in the sense that we are free to move or not, it is agreed. However, in the sense that we do this “according to the determinations of the will,” it is probably not agreed. I believe that, beyond primitive reflexes, we freely move or not, in coordination with our chosen purpose, and with self-regulation based on our system of values and disvalues, our morality.

Concerning mental action, again we agree and disagree. Hume writes:

But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.

It is not hard to confine thought within small limits, when you disregard the singular instances that pop up outside those limits. Remember that Hume discounted the “shade of blue” anomaly. He generally mistreated his ability to form abstract ideas, and so, unsurprisingly, it does not appear in his medley of mental powers. I, however, count it among the faculties subject to my will. For this insight, I am indebted to Ayn Rand, who developed her theory of concept-formation in the book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979). In Chapter 2 she states:

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition. 

The units involved may be any aspect of reality: entities, attributes, actions, qualities, relationships, etc.; they may be perceptual concretes or other, earlier-formed concepts. The act of isolation involved is a process of abstraction: i.e., a selective mental focus that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others (e.g., isolates a certain attribute from the entities possessing it, or a certain action from the entities performing it, etc.) The uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental entity which is used thereafter as a single unit of thought (but which can be broken into its component units whenever required).

By willfully focusing attention on the similarity among objects, humans can initiate a process of abstraction and integration, out of which we create concepts and words. If unidentified or ignored, this mental process will happen automatically as we observe things and learn words from others. (This might explain the feeling of epiphany that sometimes accompanies new ideas.) Through introspection, however, this action can be learned and used volitionally in service of one's chosen purpose.

And now, to solve Hume's “shade of blue” problem, let me quote Rand again, this time regarding concepts of color:

Man forms such concepts by observing that the various shades of blue are similar, as against the shades of red, and thus differentiating the range of blue from the range of red, of yellow, etc. Centuries passed before science discovered the unit by which colors could actually be measured: the wavelength of light--a discovery that supported, in terms of mathematical proof, the differentiations that men were and are making in terms of visual similarities.

Hume was able to imagine his missing shade of blue, because already he had conceived of “a gradation of shades.” He therefore applied his abstract idea to the question of the missing bluish color, which, by logic, would be lighter than the one, and darker than the other. He failed to give this simple answer, however, perhaps because he considered such reasoning to be instinctual or mechanical, not volitional.

[O]ur wonder will, perhaps, cease or diminish; when we consider, that the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts in us unknown to ourselves; and in its chief operations, is not directed by any such relations or comparisons of ideas, as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties.

And here, again, he is partly correct. This sort of reasoning is indeed mechanical or automatic, unless one learns to use and control it by choice.

Causality

I'm critical of Hume for abusing his abstractions (and his punctuation!), and also for choosing his problematic theory over his healthier observations of reality. In concluding this opinion, though, I must recognize his significant disadvantage in terms of general knowledge. His efforts predated all of the scientists and philosophers, apart from Newton and Aristotle, who have influenced my own method and theory. Even my fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes, famous for focusing on a case's singular fact, even he arrived after Hume in the timeline of history. And so, my most generous evaluation of Hume includes an appreciation for his early struggle to apply Newtonian causality to human action.

It is universally acknowledged, that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions: The same events follow from the same causes.

Hume takes man's motive to be the cause of man's action. Yet the real cause of man's action is man, himself, his whole person. He acts--with self-control, with willpower. And because he must coordinate his mental and physical actions (unlike strictly physical, nonliving entities), the same motive will not always be attended by the same action. If, on one occasion, he lacks coordination, or loses concentration, he might fail to achieve a particular purpose, while succeeding in every other instance. But, because his motive is not the actual cause of his action, the law of causality remains unviolated. Nature demands only that man's action be consistent with his identity, not with his motive, which is a product of his mind. At a certain level of physical and mental development, man's nature becomes volitional, causing him to act volitionally. He must therefore use his free will, or lie down and die. To borrow Hume's terminology, out of necessity man acts with liberty.

© 2019 by Sean William Green

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