what Hume has been up to all along? Surely he uses rhetoric to brand certain forms of life as “artificial” or “barbaric,” certain forms of history as “true,” certain communities as “the party of humankind”? Yes—but insofar as this rhetoric falsely claimed that certain forms of life are beyond the pale of sympathetic understanding, are incoherent or unintelligible in terms of the shared goods of “common life,” it is a rhetoric that can and should be rejected. It is one thing to try to describe one’s own conception of the useful and agreeable in ways that will be attractive and persuasive to others; it is quite another to argue that moral judgments and ways of life that do not align with these particular goods so described are incoherent and unintelligible. We can, in proper Humean fashion, both sympathetically understand Hume’s temptation to do so and find it blameworthy. We are left, then, with something still meaningfully called a philosophy of common life, though no longer with the illusion that this common life neatly excludes popular theistic practices or providential history as artificial or unintelligible, nor that it is particularly unified or determinate.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Hume’s highly influential History of England, along with his other writings, helped to foster the emergence of a secular historiography that interpreted human history as comprehensible by reference to a variety of psychological and social factors.42 Hume’s history was meaningful in terms of a story line that made no reference to God or to an otherworldly destiny. He helped to establish methodological naturalism as the modus operandi of the human sciences.43 Moreover, in a context dominated by competing confessional histories, which privileged one religious group while tending to discount members of other confessions as self-deceived, self-interested, power-hungry, and/or insane, Hume prided himself on offering an impartial account. Hume’s methodological naturalism and his impartiality are not unconnected; because Hume did not think that God was advancing the cause either of Puritans or of Anglo-Catholics, he traced the fortunes of these groups without reference to divine aid or retribution. And because he did not identify with any particular religious “party,” he did not find it difficult to avoid privileging one over the others.
Naturalism as a methodological postulate, however, can easily give way to what one historian has called “the dogma of metaphysical naturalism.”44 Metaphysical naturalism, unlike methodological naturalism, does not hold simply that the tools of historians are capable only of discerning natural causes, but rather asserts that there is no transcendent reality beyond or grounding the natural. The metaphysical naturalist works “in a manner analogous to that of a traditional, religious confessional historian, insofar as one’s analysis relies substantively on one’s own beliefs.”45 Such a stance is hardly impartial between religious and nonreligious outlooks. Precisely because it is nonreligious, it fosters a reductionistic approach to religious belief and practice, in which religious phenomena are viewed as properly explained as a function of regularities at some more basic, primary, “real” level. So, for instance, Durkheim believed that the object of worship was in fact society, and he offered a functional analysis of religion as aiding social cohesion. Nor were functionalist and reductionist approaches a passing phenomenon; today, for example, early modern Christianity is widely viewed as “a means of political control and social discipline.”46 Yet as we saw earlier, even a naturalist can recognize that descriptivism, the drive to reduce all phenomena to one privileged level of description, can easily distort or wholly lose the very phenomena we wish to understand. Surely the task of historical understanding requires first that we seek to understand what beliefs and practices meant to those who held them and engaged in them. That is, it requires that we capture the level of description at which the agents themselves lived, and recognize that reducing this to some other, purportedly more primary, level of description may well elide precisely the distinctions we desire to have explained. Of course it is possible, even likely, that the historian will encounter instances of insanity, self-deception, and insincerity, and will need to probe beneath the level of description at which an agent purportedly proceeds. It is also possible that the historian will find explanations that proceed at some other level satisfying despite the fact that they lose some of the distinctions relevant to participants. This is because the historian is always mediating between the world as experienced by the subjects of his study and the world as she herself experiences it; the task of translation requires the conceptual apparatus of both.
What is particularly seductive about Hume’s philosophy of history is that it marries a general commitment to sympathetic understanding—that is just the sort of thick description of the perspectives of historical agents that is in fact needed—with a critique of the artificiality of theistic lives that appears to legitimate making religious belief and practice an exception to the task of sympathetic understanding. If religious belief is utterly incoherent and religious lives utterly self-defeating, sympathetic understanding is inherently impossible; so why attempt it at all? But as we have seen, Hume has not in fact shown that in theistic convictions or monkish virtues sympathetic understanding comes up against its limits. No a priori dismissal is legitimate; the historian’s first task, in each particular instance, remains that of seeking sympathetic understanding.
NOTES
1. For various explorations of this theme, see the special issue “Religion and History,” ed. David Gary Shaw, History and Theory (December 2006), especially the essays by Shaw, C. T. MacIntyre, Catherine Bell, and Mark Cladis, as well as Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).
2. Most influentially, R. G. Collingwood insisted that Hume had deserted philosophy for history: see The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 73. Similar judgments from the period include those of John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (New York: Dutton, 1932), 266; John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 289; and Haskell Fain, Between Philosophy and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 9.
3. David Fate Norton, “History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought,” in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxxiii.
4. Ibid., xxxix.
5. Ibid., xliv.
6. Ibid., xlviii.
7. Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. This argument is further extended in Livingston’s Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 295.
9. Livingston counters that Collingwood’s accusation “is simply false.” “Hume’s doctrine of moral causes is, in fact,” he states, “the earliest statement of the modern doctrine of verstehen or what Collingwood calls the reenactment of past thoughts,” Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 235. Livingston’s analysis is indebted in part to James Farr’s “Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A ‘Sympathetic’ Account,” History and Theory 17 (1978): 285–310; it was Farr who first invoked the term verstehen in connection with Hume’s thought. A similar analysis is developed by S. K. Wertz in “Hume, History, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 481–96; republished in Between Hume’s Philosophy and History: Historical Theory and Practice (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000).
10. I have given a fuller account of sympathetic understanding, its compatibility with moral judgment, and its purported limits, in Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 4–5.
11. For a critique of descriptivism, see Lee C. McIntyre, “Reduction, Supervenience,
