of Rome, and to an alteration of religion, with which his principles would not permit him to concur” (H 3:197).16 More acts on religious principle, but his actions are nevertheless intelligible even to the historian who does not share those principles. So Hume’s historiographical practice belies at times his own general statement of limits.17
Providential History
As we have seen, then, while Hume did not reject the attempt to identify covering laws in history, he also sought to develop moral explanations, to achieve sympathetic understanding of historical actors. He understood this as an enterprise that would serve to refine and cultivate moral judgment. At the same time, Hume argued that there was a limit to the scope of sympathetic understanding. Sympathetic understanding is possible only where people are governed by “maxims of common life and ordinary conduct”; not where they live artificial lives, governed by speculative beliefs that contradict the maxims of ordinary life. Where moral explanation is possible, we can understand alien practices or individual actions, even if we judge them to be blameworthy. But when confronted by artificial lives, actions are unintelligible, pointless, possibly subject to causal explanation but not sympathetic understanding of agents’ reasons for acting. I have argued, though, that Hume illegitimately excuses himself from the task of sympathetic understanding by suggesting that lives dedicated to the pursuit of ends that do not conform to his own substantive understanding of what is truly “useful” or “agreeable” are in fact pursuing no goods at all and undermine the conditions of the possibility of human life and flourishing. He does better in the practice of writing history than in articulating its theory.
Donald Livingston, too, explores the issue of the limits of moral explanation. The example he takes up in detail is Hume’s treatment of the Saxon “barbarians” in volume 1 of his History of England. There Hume makes no effort to understand the point of view of those about whom he is writing, and his designation of the people as barbarians effectively captures why. Hume regards a barbarian as almost wholly unreflective, as lacking a conception of himself as a human being, and so as capable of very little self-conscious rational activity. “The Humean historian,” notes Livingston, “must explain the actions of historical agents by rethinking in his own mind the rational activity that is the inside or moral cause of the action. But it is impossible to rethink rational activity where there is none or where knowledge of it is impossible.”18 The fact that barbarians lack a rational interior sets up a barrier to moral understanding. This example works well for Livingston since he is able to conclude his discussion by showing that Hume did, after reading Robert Henry’s account of this historical period, come to recognize that the Saxons were not, after all, barbarians in this sense, and that it was therefore possible to achieve a moral understanding of their actions.19 Precisely where Collingwood’s judgment of Hume as incapable of verstehen thus seems most appropriate, Livingston has thus shown Hume to have recognized and corrected the deficiency. The more stubborn problem, however, is Hume’s articulation of a general principle that excuses the historian from responsibility for seeking sympathetic understanding with those whom he regards as leading “artificial lives.” Indeed, in endorsing Hume’s critique of providential history, Livingston replicates the problem.
Livingston, echoing Popkin, sees as key to grasping Hume’s enterprise as a historian the fact that Hume sought to undermine the dominant model of historical thinking in his day, which was providential. Instead of reading history as the arena of God’s redemptive action and human response or failure of response, Hume, in Popkin’s words, sought “to portray human history as meaningful and comprehensible in its own secular terms, according to a complex of human and natural factors.”20 This leaves open whether human history is to be comprehended in terms of covering-law explanations, in terms of historical agents’ reasons for action, or as some combination of the two, but in any case, the Humean historian will have no need to appeal to divine action in order to explain a historical occurrence, nor will she regard historical agents as contributing unintentionally to the fulfillment of divine purposes. Livingston, for his part, makes clear that Hume appeals both to causal (covering-law) explanations and moral explanations, though he regards moral explanations as most significant in Hume’s historical work. There are times when a moral explanation is available but no causal explanation, and vice versa, and there are times when we are able to offer both. Where we are unable to offer a moral explanation, we regard action as absurd or unintelligible, even if we have been able to formulate a covering-law explanation. This, argues Livingston, is the case where popular religion is concerned; Hume develops a causal explanation, but concludes nevertheless that “the whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery” (NHR 87). “The suggestion is that a moral account of popular religious practices (of the sort Hume gave of the seemingly irrational behavior of Athenian politics) is needed but is not available. It is for this reason that Hume is forced to describe the practices of popular religion pathologically as ‘the playthings of monkeys or sick men’s dreams.’”21
Livingston offers a subtle account to show why Hume’s rejection of providential history is justified. Hume, Livingston argues, regarded historical order as mind dependent. History is not a structure objectively present in the world but is “internal to a certain point of view of the world and would not exist at all if people did not adopt that point of view.”22 Still, like moral or aesthetic judgment, historical judgment is not arbitrary or merely relative to some partisan perspective; “the point of view in question is not considered by Hume to be relative to this or that historian; it is a point of view written into the very idea of history.”23 Historical order is, for Hume, perceived with reference to a grand story line, “the story of the ‘improvements of the human mind.’”24 This theme is not arbitrarily chosen or projected; rather, it is a “received historical theme,” which serves to constitute the community to which Hume addresses himself, “all reasonable people,” “the party of humankind” (EHU 10.27 /125; EPM 9.9/275). “The community would cease to be what it is if that story were no longer told.”25 Therefore, the project of narrating the story of the improvements of the human mind is a condition of the possibility of the existence of humankind.
Providential history, like Hume’s history and his History, is governed by an overarching story line that brings order and unity to historical events. What is illicit about providential history is that it appeals to the future in order to judge the present, whereas Hume, argues Livingston, shows that it is only legitimate to appeal to the past in order to judge the present. In inferring a cause from an effect, Hume famously argues, we must carefully proportion the former to the latter; “the one can never refer to anything farther, or be the foundation of any new inference and conclusion” (EHU 11.14/137). It is only “vain reasoners” who “instead of regarding the present scene of things as the sole object of their contemplation, so far reverse the whole course of nature, as to render this life merely a passage to something farther; a porch, which leads to a greater, and vastly different building; a prologue, which serves only to introduce the piece, and give it more grace and propriety” (EHU 11.21/141). Providential historians assert that they have knowledge of future events. They attempt to narrate the future, to cast the future into the past tense.26 It is not that they hope or anticipate something in the future, or even that they attempt to predict future events, but that they foresee or foretell the future. Thus, the present is viewed “in terms of future events thought of as, in some sense, already having happened.”27 Many of our concepts, Livingston argues, are past entailing; they hold only if some past-tense statement is true: “is a wife,” “is a priest,” “is a gold-medal winner.” These are critical to the “narrative imagination” and “constitute the conceptual framework of the moral world.”28 We cannot make sense of the present, and certainly cannot coherently evaluate present states of affairs, except with reference to the past. From this Livingston concludes that “social and political legitimacy, in the broadest sense, is constituted by narrative relations holding between past and present existences where the past is viewed as a standard conferring legitimacy on the present and, as Hume paradoxically observes, where the present may also be taken as a standard for conferring legitimacy
