Beliefs of Fiction
It may be a total absurdity to abuse the notion of ‘fiction’ as the foundation of an entire philosophy. Even other radical empiricisms attempt not to undermine themselves right off the bat in such a way, being rather more ambiguous in their first formal principles. Where could Hume have been going with this idea? In an initial attack on innate rationalism, Hume declares that, “All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas.” This should be read as a naturalist’s demand to subject each and every one of our beliefs to the potential force of our critical measures. Viewing ideas as fictions allows us to treat them in a manner which could lead to our personally-invested belief in them being found to have been either true or false in actuality.
We can not reason about what beliefs are. All beliefs originate from fictions and so this leaves Hume with a difficulty in distinguishing them. He could swindle us with one story or another about something only illusory underlying their difference, but we would want to know further whether their difference was at all objective. This would be to ask whether the difference between beliefs and fictions is real from a perspective outside of our own partial judgment.
They are very closely related then, but a certain sentiment accompanying the senses and memories inflects our beliefs and separates them from fictions. Beliefs can be taken for particular kinds of relations in themselves on the basis of the accompanying sentiment and not always purely in unison as fictions. In fact we could feverishly end up being wrong in each one of our accounts concerning beliefs and fictions but this would change nothing about the difference in accompanying sentiment or lack thereof.
Let us turn to a speculative point. Hume tells us that, “Our conclusions from experience carry us beyond our memory and senses, and assure us of matters of fact which happened in the most distant places and most remote ages.” What are we to make of this conclusion in terms of probabilities? No frequency of representation in experience should amount to more formidable certainty that a past event has necessarily taken place as imagined. Hume has a similar argument, “From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to infinity, there never will arise any new original idea, such as that of a necessary causation, and the number of impressions has in this case no more effect than if we confined ourselves to one only.” But this is exactly contrary to what is expected in a frequentialist understanding of the future arising directly from a field of possibilities, even if the real underlying frequencies of possibilities are some how inaccessible to us. Hume says there is no difference made on the becoming of a new idea of an event as having been caused unless it eventually does happen, it can only characterize events which were already associated with their cause.
Are all parts of these most distant places and most remote ages merely subjective fictions? The entirety of our access to them can necessarily be characterized as such. It would probably be implausible to be skeptical about all parts of the world and its apparent history all at once, but Hume does want us to have the liberty to call into question any given part of it - particularly in the case that it were to have some reason for raising our suspicions. In order to get the grounds for discourse under way, Hume would probably have to admit to being a realist about many things and much of history that is not presently the object of scrutiny. The difference between philosophical causation and natural causation is mostly that when custom takes the strongest form, “…it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree.”
The External World
As a radical empiricist, we may wonder what reason Hume could have had for ever believing that there should be any regularity in life. From a perspective of total skepticism, there should be neither regularity nor experience in the first place. Each one of our of experiences is suspect in itself, and none of them should result in an idea of ’experience’ at all. What could really be said inside an experience is that some impression of sensation was had, and there would not be the time to say this. Though we distinguish between natural and philosophical forms of causation, it is only a formal distinction being made about an onstensibly monistic world.
Another perfectly ordinary feature of human cognition is our belief in the reality of the external world. As I write this lesson, I readily suppose that my fingers are touching a keyboard, that the sun is shining outside and that the radio is playing a Clapton song. In Hume’s skeptical philosophy, what is the status of these beliefs?
The primitive human belief, Hume noted, is that we actually see (and hear, etc.) the physical objects themselves. But modern philosophy and science have persuaded us that this is not literally true. According to representationalists, we are directly aware of ideas, which must in turn be causally produced in our minds by external objects. The problem is that on this view we can never know that there really are physical objects that produce our sensory ideas.
We cannot rely on causal reasoning to convince us that there are external objects, Hume argued, since (as we have just seen) such reasoning arises from our observation of a constant conjunction between causes and effects. But according to the representationalist philosophy, we have no direct experience of the presumed cause! If we know objects only by means of ideas, then we cannot use those ideas to establish a causal connection between the things and the objects they are supposed to represent.
In fact, Hume supposed, our belief in the reality of an external world is entirely non-rational. (Enquiry XII i) It cannot be supported either as a relation of ideas or even as a matter of fact. Although it is utterly unjustifiable, however, belief in the external world is natural and unavoidable. We are in the habit of supposing that our ideas have external referents, even though we can have no real evidence for doing so. Representationalism thusly implodes: the ideas, originally introduced as intermediaries between perceivers and things, end up absorbing both, rendering everything but themselves superfluous.
Induction
Hume tells us of causes, “The case is the same with the probability of causes as with that of chance,” and what he tells us of chance is that, “There be no such thing as chance in the world.” The probability of a cause is nothing more than the extent of our ignorance about it certainly having been the case, for the actual event of the cause itself is in no way retroactively produced by the associations that occur within thought. This is to say that being a cause is not a quality inherent in things but a relation that is seen to hold between them, i.e. the experience of one event following another. It is not then the case that each thing must have an individual cause, we may experience a thing immediately as without having had a prior noticeable cause. Or we may also experience some thing as bringing about multiple effects, and so particular numbers of perceived causally-related things do not map well onto probabilities. These points would seem to entail a skeptical refutation of induction.
We can imagine either that the sun will or will not rise tomorrow, and we must then experience it to tell whether it will have actually risen. This shows the expansiveness of the imagination as with the limited modes of real experience. However, all of our imaginations would seem to be a complex which begin with the simple impressions we first encounter. The regularities in the mind are generally more representative (and this is of both sensations and of reflective impressions and ideas), than they are purely imaginative. So much of the memory of events are qualitatively different from the pure machinations of our imagination, we can see that belief is in the first place susceptible to the force of habit.
Chance is not of nature because the existence of things is not doubtable necessarily in the way that our ideas about them are. In fact, each thing either definitely exists or definitely does not exist and there can be no in between. And it is only through the experience of causation that we can even hope to try and determine the identity of anything beyond its present impression as sensation. In causation, we experience connections as occurring through time - and by custom sometimes see these connections as constituting particular identities. So it is in every way as though there were probabilities of causes without there really being any, given only the condition of beliefs concerning causal matters of fact.
Induction considers what has happened up until now. So far back as we can remember on each given day up until now, the sun has risen the next day. By this way, we may make the connection that the sun will rise tomorrow. Beliefs are both the method by which we are inclined toward affirming certain of these regularities in nature as opposed to others, and are also caused by there being certain regularities in nature partly called ‘beliefs’. A strict denial of the latter half of this argument leaves us without any explanation for the origin of belief. Of course, Hume can not arrive at such a notion of causation without first carefully exploring the form of beliefs and their relation to habitual patterns. Hume is not a skeptic about induction. The times we have experienced the sun rising after each given day in the past increases our inclinations today to believe that the sun will rise again tomorrow.
Hume has a ‘problem of induction’ so much as it is a feature of cognition and not an internal contradiction within the logic of his own philosophical system. That being the case, wouldn’t it be all the easier on ourselves to discover now that his notion of induction was a clever manipulation of words meant to cover over the truly consistent character of the actual world. Agreement is often reached that we have little use for this principle. But let us suppose that it is not simply a matter of rhetorical games and ask what consequences might be drawn from it. The chain of causation which is real and not in itself our probabilistic, mediated representation of certain situations is necessarily the case, yet at the same time our grasp of its necessity is open to total negation by chance. Chance and causation might lead to progress or regress from a previous state of affairs but this will admit of no general order to the world. They may lead us to believe certain things about what might happen and those beliefs, erroneous or not, might affect what does happen in expected or unexpected ways.
From within the confines of a Christian metaphysics this could certainly seem troubling. The floors of Heaven are open to falling out from underneath the forgiven. Hume may have been witness to just such an event going on around him all the time. In matters of ethics, absurdity would appear to be lurking right around the corner. Of course, who are we to say which judgment was absolute and which only supposed? For those suffering now in this very moment, Hume could declare: there is no sufficient reason for it, it is not your natural destiny, it can change, it can change right here in life, you need not wait until death. We have seen how to live and we can bring you life too. Some need view him also as an optimist, after all.
What about the dead? What about those young children who went unbaptized, uncircumcised, who did not repent? They too still have hope, there is no telling what circumstances chance might negate. Clearly it is unlikely. Likelihood though does not seem to have much meaning one way or the other concerning the resurrection of the dead. Are we to say of the odds that they are one in one billion, does mere improbability really speak to the extent of our disbelief? Would any measure of our own disbelief finally result in impossibility? We have learned from induction both that certain things should follow and that they may not.
Criminality and the Difference Between Matters of Fact and Rights
Reason can show us the end to which each action leads but only the moral sentiment can decide on an end which is agreeable to ourselves. So, reason is relevant to the matter but necessarily cannot resolve it. This should have serious consequences on a society which recognizes that evil must be attributed to the act from outside and can not in any sense be considered innate or essential to it. Most importantly, who should be held at fault when a crime gets committed? What precedes each action is not a decisive reason to commit a crime, but a passion which in itself has only resulted from a series of reflective impressions in which some line of reasoning may be included but also even yet other passions.
It would seem the appropriate response to this radical situation is not to punish the misdeed but to correct the kind of passions which arise in people leading them to commit crimes. But it is only the same sentiment of morals which can judge the passion as can judge the action. We have not arrived at any new methodology, this society will judge the passions which result in the action in the same way so much as they are able to subject all human intention to sufficient inqusition. There certainly is no end to psychologization of criminality today. We are unsure of whether the criminal possesses some deep actual malintent or simply is mentally ill, rather we are beginning to blindly medicalize all of them just the same.
Furthermore, the set of passions and more particularly desires which we are placed with are entirely contingent in the first place. This society is both acting on and acting against an entirely contingent set of reasons, passions, and moral sentiments which then act again upon the rest in reverse. What is seen as criminal necessarily is contingent and can not have any final basis in reason. A society’s beliefs about criminality are aesthetic and not ethical. They have to do with shaping the society in the way that each one of us ourselves personally happen to find beautiful, and not in the way that conforms to some a prior notion of justice. To this end, it would be in our best interest whereever possible to replace in the chain of reasoning passions with reasons. Even if they must in some place still result in the former, ostensibly they may be pushed off into an indefinite point in the future. Fundamentally, contingent reasoning about a matter of fact may later be judged to be mistaken whereas a passion can be held accountable for nothing.
Immateriality of the Soul
Hume deals with the non-being of the soul in terms of futurity. The premise is that merely because the greater part of the soul has not yet existed does not mean that it will not. That part to be sure has so far gone undescribed by all of the great theorists of personal identity from history. Therefore, Hume’s own theory is one of belief and action, about what we may hope and what we may do. In the beginning of the Treatise, he argues against substance as a formal category conditioning the facts of experience. Historically, these sorts of arguments have led to massive actual eruptions of violence over entirely abstract differences of opinion concerning varying notions of what was thought to be the soul.
But in a metaphysical sense, the gig is up. We all would like to ground our arguments about the soul in a self-sufficient argument, materialists and immaterialists alike. Hume turns each of these classical styles of argument against one another. The paradox is that the arguments and the violence could still continue to rage on. One might wonder whether philosophy has itself participated in the unnecessary propagation of these problems. It could fulfill its responsibility by clarifying the issue for good, and that is exactly what Hume had aimed to do. He argues that, “This identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictious one.” What part of it can still be made real through careful study which enters “animals, and ships, and houses” not as self-same identical objects but as a partial matter of the processes of life? A shared human freedom comes from the collective answer to the question about how the soul is constructed, fictious or otherwise. Whatever identity may have once been stated is simply a reference to nothingness in relation to these forces of change.
During Book I of the Treatise Hume assumes a skeptical outlook against the finitude of the human individual as being entailed by his demonstration of the non-substantiality of the soul. In this view, we can not say that the soul of man must perish right along with the body, because we are not able to produce a positive theoretical account about what would necessarily constitute such a relation. All relations are contingent, in so far as they are quite simply not a matter of absolute identity but rather connect together two separate impressions or ideas. We only perceive bodies passing away around us all the time, and so it seems highly probable that this will also happen to ourselves. In any case Hume is still arguing here from a place that assumes the soul’s eternality to be of the utmost obviousness. He is now left with the difficult task of presenting some other account that falls neither into common materialist fatalism nor a return to the theological.
The psychological acount of the individual as a bundle of perceptions sidesteps the original question about the ontological relation entirely. Secular philosophy has produced its requisite metaphysics of the body, and the soul in the last instance has been left relievingly unscathed. Of course, all of the rational reasons which might justify the immateriality of the soul were also found to be lacking. It would seem the grounds have all but been set that Kant could clear up the issue finally for good, knowledge gets denied in order to make room for faith.
In light of the topic question we may ask whether affects like pride and humility hold some particular interest in propagating their own finitude, or if they are merely an accident of it. It might be that these lead us to have a concern for the desire of pleasure and the avoidance of pain not just immediately right now in the present moment, but with regard for matters of the past or future. Why should we ascribe so much significance to the bundle which a particular instance of pride operates on? It is protecting something else of vastly greater value which the great champion of atheism allowed to remain carefully hidden just underneath his apparent abject capitulation to the primacy of pleasures.
Hedonism
According to Hume’s theory, what immediately precedes each action is a passion and not a reason. Therefore, acting on a desire must merely in the end be the result of a passion. Reasons may even get produced in the practice of attempting to have our desires become recognized, but they can not result in the action in itself. It’s strange though for a species of being to be so conniving and yet for so many of its desires to go unmet. One may often wonder whether we are by nature more self-serving or incompetent.
One of Hume’s predecessors had declared that God created the most perfect of all possible worlds. Should a philosophy of hedonism agree here then, that all passions which may become met do? Of course, many simply go unheard, and at least some of those could be called ‘superfluous’. Maybe they were never going to have been a part of the plan. Hume’s hedonism is a merciless, unforgiving, vulgar one. It could also be seen as an explicit anti-natalism, because the one lasting virtue of this world would be to deliberately not bring any more life into it.