if Hume’s account of theistic belief as riven with contradictions renders specious the notion that modes of life dictated by these beliefs would offer barriers to sympathetic understanding, Hume must still show that “artificial lives” are not intelligible in terms of the ordinary goods of human flourishing. He attempts to do so in “A Dialogue,” in which Pascal is represented as leading the kind of artificial life that results from allowing speculative opinions—particularly of such a contradictory nature—to interfere with the “natural principles” of the mind:
The aim of Pascal was to keep a perpetual sense of his dependence before his eyes, and never to forget his numberless wants and infirmities. . . . [He] made constant profession of humility and abasement, of the contempt and hatred of himself; and endeavoured to attain these supposed virtues, as far as they are attainable. The austerities . . . of the Frenchman were embraced merely for their own sake, and in order to suffer as much as possible. . . . The most ridiculous superstitions directed Pascal’s faith and practice; and an extreme contempt of this life, in comparison of the future, was the chief foundation of his conduct. (EPM 122–23/342–43)
Pascal is represented as cultivating self-hatred, as pursuing suffering for its own sake, as condemning this life, as allowing “ridiculous” superstitions to determine his way of life. He is depicted as engaging in self-destructive behavior that is detrimental to human flourishing and potentially even counter to the basic need for survival. But note that Pascal’s actions are not, after all, wholly unintelligible to Hume. Hume is able to identify the goods Pascal pursues, even if he regards those goods—of the life to come—as illusory. And in fact, the goods of eternal life can be made intelligible in terms of, or at least by analogy with, the goods Hume does recognize, those of ordinary human flourishing. Pascal seeks only true and secure goods, and concludes that these cannot be this worldly, given the finitude and unreliability of earthly goods. Given his belief that this world is a finite creation of an infinite and loving God, it makes sense for Pascal to seek communion with the source of that creation, the source of all the limited goods we encounter in this life. This is, of course, hardly a full specification of Pascal’s beliefs and their relation to his way of life, but it is enough to call into question Hume’s accusation that Pascal’s way of life, as self-defeating and self-destructive, undermines the very conditions for the pursuit of any goods at all. Pascal does not seek suffering for its own sake; he seeks to recognize his true identity as a fallen creation of God. He does not cultivate contempt of this life but cultivates the awareness that all finite goods issue from God as goodness itself. While Hume argues that sympathetic understanding has arrived here at an absolute limit, there is no reason that thick description cannot accomplish here what it accomplished in the case of Greek infanticide and infidelity—render comprehensible, as ways of pursuing intelligible goods, practices that might still be judged by the observer to be worthy of blame. Hume has not succeeded in drawing a sharp boundary between natural and artificial lives, maxims, and practices. The task of sympathetic understanding remains in place even here.
Does this mean that the monkish virtues are, in fact, useful and/or agreeable? It would certainly be possible to redescribe them in this way—they are “useful” for transforming oneself into the person who will be acceptable in God’s kingdom, say, or for earning God’s favor, or for preparing oneself for the reception of grace. Likewise, they are “agreeable” for those who experience them as anticipations of the glorified life, free of bodily limitations, and as receptivity to divine indwelling. This is not to say, though, that monks cultivate these virtues for the sake of their usefulness or agreeableness. Rather, they cultivate them out of their desire for God. Hume’s explanatory account is flexible enough to accommodate a very broad range of reasons for action—as is economists’ category of “utility.” Does it add to our understanding, though, to reduce the monks’ reasons for action to this other, purportedly more basic, level of explanation? We might expect it to do so, insofar as it gives a unified account of apparently disparate phenomena. On the other hand, if this account lumps together reasons that are meaningfully experienced as distinct, it is not so clearly useful. Ernest Nagel’s comments about the limited usefulness of reductive explanation is applicable here:
[In problematic cases] the distinctive traits that are the subject matter of the secondary science fall into the province of a theory that may have been initially designed for handling qualitatively different materials and that does not even include some of the characteristic descriptive terms of the secondary science in its own set of theoretical distinctions. The primary science thus seems to wipe out familiar distinctions as spurious, and appears to maintain that what are prima facie indisputably different traits of things are really identical.15
Having seen that in fact the monkish virtues, too, can be described as “useful” and “agreeable,” we are able to see that such an explanatory account works only insofar as “useful” and “agreeable” function as thin specifications of ends for action, which can be filled in radically divergent ways. Either Hume’s account amounts to no more than the claim that “in order to be subject to moral assessment, an action must be performed for the sake of some perceived good,” in which case the monkish virtues cannot be excluded as artificial, or “useful” and “agreeable” are substantive, not merely formal, categories. And if “useful” and “agreeable” are substantive, it cannot be claimed that these are the only goods that can be pursued through intentional action, or that any actions not performed for the sake of the “useful” or “agreeable” are pointless and unintelligible. They are “good for nothing” only from some particular perspective.
Sympathetic Understanding in the History of England
The preceding discussion has focused on Hume’s articulating of the principle of sympathetic understanding and its limits and has held this up against contemporary hermeneutically oriented philosophy of history. How is this put to work in Hume’s History of England? Hume famously prided himself on having offered a truly unbiased account, writing in “My Own Life” that “I thought I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices”(E xxxvii). Instead, he reports, he was assailed from all sides, “English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I, and the earl of Strafford.” As the reference to his “generous tear” indicates, Hume does not hesitate in his History to employ the rhetorical tools of sentimentality. He does so specifically in order to dislodge readers from their party prejudices and encourage them to enter sympathetically into foreign points of view. A major concern of Hume’s History is with the destructive effects of various forms of party and faction; Hume’s aim is to narrate the history of England in a way that heals factional divisions and makes way for a more harmonious (and prosperous) future.
It is no surprise that religious belief is presented as a major root of the kinds of social conflict that are most difficult to treat. Moreover, Hume regards this particularly resistant form of zeal as rooted in the self-deceptive or hypocritical character of theistic belief: “The religious hypocrisy, it may be remarked, is of a peculiar nature; and being generally unknown to the person himself, though more dangerous, it implies less falsehood than any other species of insincerity” (H 6:142). In its treatment of religion, Hume’s sentimental history seeks to dislodge readers from their religious prejudices, in order to cultivate sympathy not with alien religious perspectives but rather with the “party of Mankind” as such. Yet Hume’s treatment of individual cases varies considerably. Quite often in the History, he refers to instances of sincere conviction; in Thomas à Becket, for instance, Charles I, and Henry III of France (H 1:333–34; 5:213). For the most part, however, these acknowledgments come barbed: Becket was caught up in a mass delusion; Charles I trusted in a Being whose favor is expressed in incomprehensible ways; Henry III’s belief was sincere enough but did not have the force to regulate his conduct. There are, though, rare instances in which Hume recognizes sincere conviction with actions following intelligibly from that conviction. So, for instance, he
