An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume)
Been a while since I’d read philosophy. Saw Hume sitting in a bookstore and remembered a Discord interaction, wherein a Christian friend told me to “lowkirksixsevenuinely just read hume” because “[e]very atheist thinker whose not a new atheist is just copying hume”, so I took him (Hume) home.
I found myself more interested in the formulation of Reasoning and Habit in the earlier sections: it got at something inherent in human nature, something everyone can sort of feel for themselves. The later sections (especially X-XII) get less descriptive and more normative: there is a gap between human nature as Hume has just described it, and the behaviour of most humans in history. The style is very typical of the early modern period: sentences can get long and intricate. Still, I found most of it pretty clear.
In what follows I’ll write about what jumped out at me, without touching on everything that’s in the Enquiry (I don’t mention animal reasoning, the existence of things, occasionalism, etc.). It does not necessarily reflect my enjoyment of the text.
How David Hume (1711-'76) would have looked if he were a portrait
In billiards, you make balls hit other balls expecting them to move. Hume talks about why
The central idea of the enquiry is: we can’t truly know that a certain event will follow another event like we know 1 + 1 = 2; we can only remember what happened, and predict what will happen based on that past experience. So for all I know the Sun might not come up tomorrow, or this keyboard might turn into wood, or I might. But because all my past experiences of the world don’t involve such things, or are even contradicted by them, I should believe that they almost definitely won’t happen. We can’t know why or if things cause other things, but we can reflect on our experiences and conclude that they probably just do that.
This past experience can be applied to future events, but also to past ones that we didn’t experience. In the latter case, we’re also helped by testimony from others. This is because our experience teaches us what makes somebody more or less trustworthy as a witness reporting an event, especially a miracle. To Hume, a miracle is a violation of the laws of Nature. Even assuming the most critical, most honest, most intelligent source (like Tacitus, who wrote of how the goddess Serapis cured blindness through emperor Vespasian’s spittle), it would still be more likely that all witnesses were deceiving or deceived than that the laws of Nature herself were broken.
And sure, the laws of Nature were deduced from past experiences (of making hypotheses and doing experiments). But if you’re a scientist, you wouldn’t call something a miracle if it breaks the rules: you’d update the rules to account for it. That’s just learning from experience, adjusting your model to explain more data points. I’m not saying Hume’s entire reasoning falls apart here, only that he’s confusing his current best model of reality with the ‘laws’ of reality. If the latter resembled intuitions about billiard balls in Hume’s time, they don’t anymore: the fundamental principles of the world seem much less understandable to us now.
Hume is also quite picky with his examples of miracles, preferring traditions that his Anglican audience would already disapprove of: Muslim, pagan, Catholic and heretical… He even denies the Old Testament as a historical record, but carefully avoids the New one - while implying it wouldn’t hold up either. He seems to believe most people are, basically, stupid. ‘Barbarous’ and ‘ignorant’ places believe and spread more miracles, he says; conmen didn’t go to fancy places like Rome or Athens, but to Paphlagonia or Judah (no mention here of the miracle worker from remote Nazareth, only of the ‘superstitious’ people hated for rejecting his divinity).
What bothers me most is that somehow, the people Hume considers nearest to Nature should be least aligned with the faculties that, he says, Nature endowed humans with (reasoning and habit). Talk about violating the rules of Nature… See, I am an atheist - but if you’re gonna describe the mechanisms underlying human thought, then why does so much of our behaviour disagree with them? Do you have to come out of this specific educational machinery, from the right place and the right time in human history, to figure out thinking?
Hume seems to suggest most people just don’t think good, then stops thinking about it. But there are situations where all ‘rational’ behaviour fails to make a difference, and I still want to try something if it could avoid a terrible outcome. At worst, it’ll only make me feel more in control, and let me consider things more calmly afterward. I’m not talking about prayer, but I might as well be; plenty of theists know that they can’t know that God exists. A lot of them would agree that belief in God isn’t like belief in tomorrow’s sunrise. Between that and ignorance lies something else, less certain but more of some other adjective… Don’t know which, but not irrational.