philosophical classic?
The answers to these questions have to do with subtle historical and interpretive factors surrounding Hume’s early work.8 On the larger questions of the survival and canonization of the Treatise, perhaps this is a matter of the temperament behind the argument. The text is, in many ways, a radical statement written by a man-child in the Enlightenment Promised Land, convinced that philosophy was in need of an intervention. To him, the grand philosophical systems of the seventeenth century (e.g., Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) were abstruse and built on “weak foundations” (T, introd., 1). They employed self-certifying principles to establish timeless and transcendent truths about the nature of the universe and the essence of matter that led to vulgar theism and popular religion. Against these weak foundations the iconoclastic young man searched for firmer and more powerful ones to illuminate the moment of arising and evolution of our ideas, beliefs, and customs. Hume observed that nature, customary associations of the mind, tacit knowledge inherent in the customs of common life, and the passions served to ground our ideas, actions, and beliefs. The Treatise was both an original work of philosophy and an analysis of the state of philosophical discourse. It deftly raised questions about the overall aims of philosophical reflection—what made its claims intelligible, what its foundational criteria were, and how it might do something more than the trivial and the disputational. In this regard, the bold, unsullied, youthfulness of the Treatise made it stand out. Rejecting the standard positions and well-worn arguments regarding metaphysical reason, moral motivation, and the sources of religious belief, Hume’s challenge to philosophical authority seemed, paradoxically, both to undermine and celebrate belief in things that we could neither see nor touch.
To some of his contemporaries, the Treatise contained flashes of brilliance. To most it exposed him to be something of a philosophical acolyte trying to address the quandaries that dogged philosophical discourse and preoccupied religious thinkers from the position of an outsider. Acute in his recognition that the “love of wisdom” was stuck in a bind, he poignantly expressed a profound disillusionment early in the text: “We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all. For my part, I know not what ought to be done in the present case” (T, 1.4.7.7). The dilemma, as Hume saw it, was either to work within the confines of a philosophical method that strove for rational verification in the mode of Descartes or to abandon this sort of philosophical enterprise and discover a more adequate source for understanding our actions that would render our ideas intelligible. Hume thought the way to enhance our self-understanding and make our ideas clearer was to interrogate their sources. To serve this aim, he inaugurated a self-styled natural “science” in which he was, technically, both participant and observer. As the sole recorder and reporter of his own “scientific” data, he situated himself as an unchallengeable authority on experience. The mostly probable and provisional descriptions that he offered were marked by his unique reflective powers, which crucially relied on and critically undermined the very terms and categories that he interrogated (including the ideas of a self, Designer, and external objects). The flexible ideas ‘nature’ and ‘common life’ were the unique cornerstones of his extension of Baconian method.
In effect, the Treatise turned out to be something like a hand grenade thrown into the bunker of Enlightenment rationalism. The first Enquiry has, in some ways, remained its gentler companion text. The explosive critical elements of the Treatise guaranteed, paradoxically, that Hume would never receive a job in the academy and that he would be immortalized by it. Its skeptical aspects offended many, but even its moderate constructive elements, particularly the appeal to nature and affirmation of common life—crucial for the basic theism I am discussing—violently shook the tree of philosophical convention. To readers of his day, Hume did not offer an appropriate way out of the philosophical predicament he exposed; he merely illuminated the bear trap in which philosophy was caught. The young thinker unmasked the emptiness of abstruse reason: it could not live up to its claims for rational certainty or moral truth. Philosophers and nonphilosophers alike, “who must act and reason and believe,” would remain unable, to Hume, “by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them” (E, 12.2.7).
Some of the seeming gaps in the Treatise are filled by pointing out the basic theism that was fundamental to its logic. The Treatise reasoned that the functions of the mind were based on passions and that its ideas depended on associations. Both passions and associations were unstable categories to the rationalists. On the Humean standard, however, passions and associations were stabilized by the assumption of hidden causes, also known as “original qualities of human nature” (T, introd., 8) and “powers of nature” (1.4.4.5). The “ultimate principles” and “general rules” of human nature consistently guided the mind to form and associate ideas. Idea formation requires the mind to relate a collection of distinct perceptions, that is, to do something that goes well beyond the scope of immediate experience. Given this, we might say that the formation of ideas and their subsequent association was partially an act of transcending what was given in experience. Another way to state this is to say that ideas were formed by the mind’s immediate collation of what experience provided. For the Humean, this act of collating perceptions depended on principles of collation itself that were mysteriously given by hidden powers of nature. This means that the principles of human nature that guided the mind transcended the mind (and possibly nature). Gilles Deleuze, in his fascinating study of Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, remarked that Hume’s empiricism was defined by just this kind of dualism. He contended that in the Treatise “an empirical dualism exists between terms and relations, or more exactly between the causes of perceptions and the causes of relations, between the hidden powers of nature and the principles of human nature.” Deleuze’s idea of a “transcendental empiricism” expands our ability to keep track of the basic theism at the core of Hume’s philosophy. He reminds us that our subjectivity, for example, is constituted by, but not reducible to, what is given to us in experience. This means that there is something beyond experience, that Hume is not a strict empiricist, and that—for Deleuze—Hume embraces a form of transcendence. I label the disposition for this sort of transcendence “basic theism.” Deleuze explains it as follows: “We cannot make use of the principles of association in order to know the world as an effect of divine activity, and even less to know God as the cause of the world; but we can always think of God negatively as the cause of the principles [of human nature]. It is in this sense that theism is valid.”9
My claim that Hume’s early philosophy has a basic theism—a sense of order and regularity—can be articulated in both strong and weak forms. The stronger statement is that basic theism is a presupposition of Hume’s philosophy; the weaker one is that Hume’s early philosophy does not foreclose the possibility of basic theism. Neither position demands religious expression nor requires Christian deity. Both rely very minimally if at all on traditional metaphysical arguments for theism, or make any claims about the nature of this “Author.” The disposition I want to direct our attention to is a simple and basic belief, a foundational assumption from which Hume launched into his philosophical work. This belief in basic theism makes experience comprehensible due to the fact that it gives the mind mysterious principles to form an identity by associating ideas of the imagination. If the mind is, as Deleuze argues it is for Hume, a mere “assemblage” of “things as they appear,” then there must be something beyond it, something that is not given in this assemblage but required by it.10 Basic theism is the acceptance of this background for the mind: it meets the Humean standard of reasonability and allows the mind to hold fictions of identity, constancy, and uniformity as it composes ideas. This basic belief and the fictions it both relies on and produces have merit for true and false forms of religion. From the perspective of my speculative project for true religion, the value of documenting this assumption in Hume’s early philosophy is that it allows us to discuss how basic theism might morph into more of a genuine theism.
The evolution of basic theism to genuine theism mirrors the logic of the evolution of basic theism to vulgar theism. NHR explains the latter: the direct passions, fear and hope, modify the
