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ОглавлениеARTIFICIAL LIVES, PROVIDENTIAL HISTORY, AND THE APPARENT LIMITS OF SYMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING
Once regarded as the hero of positivism, Hume is now widely appreciated as a proponent of a hermeneutic philosophy of history. In pursuing his project of developing a science of human culture, of “introducing the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,” Hume recognized that human actions cannot be understood unless grasped as intentional, as performed for reasons, and not simply explained as falling under a covering law. This enterprise requires that the historian be capable of entering into the logic governing foreign beliefs and practices. Still, Hume draws limits to the scope of hermeneutic analysis. On Hume’s account, theistic belief is self-contradictory, requires self-deception, and gives rise to unintelligible behavior. The “moral scientist” is thus licensed to suspend the hermeneutic enterprise and turn to other kinds of explanation. Are these limits justified? We cannot assess them by recourse to external standards, since no such standards are available to us. We can, though, assess them from within, developing an internal critique. The boundaries Hume sets for the range of sympathetic understanding are plausible only if “artificial lives” can be clearly distinguished from the wide range of variation exhibited by “natural lives.” As we will see, on closer examination the distinction crumbles; theistic belief and practice offer no intrinsic barrier to understanding. Indeed, Hume’s own historiographical practice offers evidence of this. Further, Hume’s refusal of providential history can be made plausible only if something like his distinction between natural and artificial lives can be maintained; absent this, Hume’s own philosophical history emerges as itself providential in character.
Hume’s argument that religious lives constitute a special exception to the task of arriving at an internal grasp of foreign perspectives is sometimes replicated by Hume scholars, as we see in Donald Livingston’s endorsement of Hume’s critique of providential history. Moreover, the special treatment Hume gave to theism has helped to legitimate modern historiography as an enterprise that is not merely methodologically naturalistic but actually metaphysically naturalistic. It remains the case in contemporary historiography that religion is often subjected to reductionistic analysis in scholarship otherwise devoted to the task of understanding people on their own terms.1 The cost, in terms of missed opportunities for understanding, is high.
Relinquishing the Search for External Standards
David Hume: Philosophical Historian, published in 1965 by David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin, played a key role in catalyzing a reassessment of the relationship between Hume as historian and Hume as philosopher. It did so by characterizing Hume’s historical writings as an expression of his constructive skepticism. The selection of texts—from Hume’s Treatise, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, History of England, essays, and letters—along with the editors’ introductory essays, issued a challenge to the established view that there was no intrinsic connection between Hume’s philosophical and historical work. At times, Hume’s philosophy had been viewed as antihistorical; indeed, even his overtly historical writings had been judged to be antihistorical.2 Norton and Popkin insisted instead that even Hume’s “most ‘philosophical’ work is historical.”3 While the essential nature of reality cannot be known, the regularities of experience can be, and it is with these that the historian is occupied. Nevertheless, Norton argued that Hume’s new skeptical science was hounded by the same skeptical problems that its focus on appearances was designed to avoid. What is appearance and what is reality, in this case with respect to the past? “In the science of man as much as in purely speculative metaphysics, a criterion of truth appears to be lacking, so that custom and education, one’s personal experiences, play an overriding, though logically indefensible, part in the formation of the judgments and claims making up that science—just as the skeptics had claimed they did in the formation of man’s speculative theories.”4 Norton argued that Hume developed an implicit critical method in response to this problem, seeking to authenticate written documents and weigh the value of testimony. Nevertheless, Norton concluded that the assessment of evidence remains finally “a matter of personal opinion and prior decision”; there is “still no external or shared standard by which evidence can be evaluated.”5 He appealed to “Of Miracles” to bolster his claim that Hume consciously accepted the fact that individual experience is our final standard, seeing this as the only way to avoid a patent circularity in the argument (i.e., disputes over the past are settled by appealing to the past). We decide a priori whether we will take certain kinds of evidence seriously or not, and we do so on the basis of our own experience. Hume’s method, then, is permeated with subjective elements. Norton concludes that “Hume’s critical method, and with it, the science of man, failed, failed as he surely suggests all enterprises conceived after his model must fail”—even if we cannot refrain from forming opinions, and in this sense are licensed by nature to continue the enterprise.6
If Norton saw Hume as a constructive skeptic, later interpreters would tend to emphasize the “constructive” aspect of this characterization. So Donald Livingston, who declares himself indebted to David Hume: Philosophical Historian for helping him see the unity of Hume’s philosophical and historical work, argues that Hume adhered to a philosophy of common life, according to which philosophy’s task is to “methodize and correct” the customs and judgments of common life, repudiating philosophy’s false pretension to stand above and outside all social convention.7 Hume gave up on the misguided attempt to know the real apart from human custom and judgment and accepted instead the task of reflecting on the real through these human conventions. This might be regarded as a form of mitigated skepticism, but it is better understood as a form of pragmatism, although Livingston himself does not invoke the term. Total skepticism, in contrast, is understood to be the outcome of a falsely autonomous conception of the task of philosophy. It continues to lurk as a threat only insofar as the temptation to an autonomous philosophy also continues to exercise residual charm. Within the philosophy of common life, in contrast, the process of piecemeal internal criticism continues unscathed.
It is hardly surprising that such an interpretation of Hume’s thought would prove compelling in a postfoundationalist context, nor that Hume so understood would become the focus of a surge of philosophical attention. What, then, becomes of Norton’s diagnosis of the failure of Hume’s critical method, on this interpretation? “Custom and education” do play a key role in the formation of judgments and claims, including the evaluation of historical evidence. But if there is no “external” standard, there are nevertheless “shared” standards; the alternative is not between subjectivism on the one hand and autonomous, external, philosophical judgments on the other. Repudiating as an illusion the aspiration to external standards, Hume regards objectivity as constituted by intersubjective standards. These may, to be sure, be corrupted or provincial, but they are also, by the same token, always open to correction.
History and the Task of Sympathetic Understanding
There remains a danger that the philosophy of common life, having given up on objective standards of judgment in the strongest (if illusory) sense, will strive to portray as shared, communal standards the judgments of a narrow minority. And indeed Hume has been seen as having done precisely this. R. G. Collingwood, for instance, indicted Hume for imposing eighteenth-century values on the past and found Hume incapable of understanding a past age on its own terms. Alasdair MacIntyre accused Hume, more precisely, of championing the values of the English landowning class.8 But Hume was certainly well aware of the challenges posed to human society by differences in perspective: “‘twere impossible we cou’d ever make use of language, or communicate our sentiments to one another, did we not correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation.” (T 3.3.1.16/582)9 Moral judgment, he argued, requires that we give up our particular point of view, and consider character “in general, without reference to our particular interest” (T 3.1.2.4/472). It is not enough that we be disinterested, though; we must achieve a “sympathy with those, who have any commerce with the person we consider” (T 3.3.1.18/583). So a sympathetic understanding of the perspectives of others is vital to our capacity to evaluate others and hence bound up with the enterprise of history, which Hume unabashedly regards as normative.10 Historians, unlike poets, philosophers, and politicians, are the “true friends of virtue, and have always represented it in its proper colours” (E 567). History “keeps in a just medium” between the extremes of a cold and abstract philosophical perspective on the one hand and the “warped” judgment of the man of business on the scenes of life on the other; history “places the objects in their true point of view” (E 568). History is capable of doing this because it gives us a sympathetic understanding of those whose perspectives are initially alien to us, allowing us both to perceive and to assess their reasons for acting.
This normative task is regarded by Hume as enhancing, rather than interfering with, the explanatory enterprise; “history is not only a valuable part of knowledge, but opens the door to many other parts, and affords materials to most of the sciences” (E 566). Hume’s science of man did not amount to a reductive naturalism. Doubtless Hume held a naturalist ontology, regarding social and psychological phenomena as taking place at a secondary level of organization that is materially dependent on a more basic or primary level of material reality. And it is true that within the Treatise Hume employed association as a far-reaching explanatory principle, which might lead to the conclusion that he adhered to a kind of descriptivism, wishing to explain all phenomena at one privileged level of explanation.11 But while he certainly does offer covering-law explanations to account both for regularities in human behavior and particular historical events, he finds it most satisfying to offer explanations that refer to the reasons an agent had for acting.12 It is a mistake to oppose this kind of hermeneutical understanding to the enterprise of explanation, for understanding agents’ reasons for action can allow us to more fully explain an event. The business of explanation is highly context dependent, and it is crucial to know what particular why-question is being asked. The simple question, “why did she die?” may be satisfactorily answered in a variety of ways that refer to different levels of explanation: “because of the poison in her system,” “because she committed suicide,” “because she was depressed,” “because of an imbalance in brain chemicals,” and “because of her estrangement from her son’” may all be appropriate answers in particular contexts, some of which have their home in the social exchange of reasons, others in the search for covering laws, whether at biological, psychological, or sociological levels of organization.
Hume was optimistic about the possibility of achieving sympathetic understanding of foreign points of view, and insistent that this understanding did not imply moral relativism.13 We see this particularly clearly in “A Dialogue,” appended to the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. There the well-traveled Palamedes describes for Hume the strange inhabitants of the country of Fourli, where incest and homosexual liaisons are smiled on, marital fidelity disparaged, infanticide accepted, and honor disregarded. Hume’s response is disbelief: “such barbarous and savage manners are not only incompatible with a civilized, intelligent people, such as you said these were; but are scarcely compatible with human nature” (EPM 112–13/328). To call manners “barbarous” and “savage” is to declare them beyond the reach of sympathetic understanding. But in this case the label turns out to be, in Hume’s own judgment, falsely applied. Fourli turns out to be Athens, and only a thicker description is required in order to see these foreign practices in the light of community life as a whole, and thus as performed in the pursuit of intelligible goods. Whereas Palamedes, confronted with the cultural variation between ancient Greece and contemporary Paris, finds it impossible “to fix a standard for judgments of this nature,” Hume advises him that the problem can be resolved “by tracing matters . . . a little higher, and examining the first principles, which each nation establishes, of blame or censure” (EPM 116/333). So, for instance, “Greek loves” arose from the frequency of gymnastic exercises and were regarded as a source of friendship and fidelity. Moreover, the Greeks recognized incest as contrary to reason and public utility but simply defined its limits differently than canon lawyers. And infanticide was practiced only in the face of extreme poverty and was regarded as saving the child from an evil greater than death. Even where Greek practices remain blameworthy, they are understandable, directed toward ends that we, too, can recognize as good.
The Problem of Artificial Lives
As optimistic as Hume was about the possibility of extending sympathetic understanding across cultural and historical boundaries, he believed that he had at the same time identified inherent limits to its scope. He sought to differentiate between natural variations in moral sentiment and practices, on the one hand, and artificial lives and manners, on the other. When it comes to the latter, the “maxims of common life and ordinary conduct” no longer apply; instead, speculative principles determine morality. Palamedes offers Hume two examples, one culled from ancient philosophy, the other from modern Christianity: the Cynic Diogenes and the Jansenist Blaise Pascal. To Palamedes’s request that he reconcile these examples with his account of morality, Hume replies:
An experiment . . . which succeeds in the air, will not always succeed in a vacuum. When men depart from the maxims of common reason, and affect these artificial lives, as you call them, no one can answer for what will please or displease them. They are in a different element from the rest of mankind; and the natural principles of their mind play not with the same regularity, as if left to themselves, free from the illusions of religious superstition or philosophical enthusiasm. (EPM 123/343)
Superstition and enthusiasm, then, are seen as interfering with the natural principles of the mind. More specifically, according to Hume, it is abstract speculations that interfere, when they intrude into the realm of morality. In the ancient world, religion had “very little influence on common life,” but the philosophical schools sought “to regulate men’s ordinary behaviour and deportment” and “produced great singularities of maxims and conduct.” At present, argues Hume, it is religion, rather than philosophy, that has appropriated to itself this dubious honor; it “inspects our whole conduct, and prescribes an universal rule to our actions, to our words, to our very thoughts and inclinations” (EPM 122/342). Where natural lives are concerned, in contrast, however great the variations, it is always possible, argues Hume, to discern the operation of the same underlying principle, which lies at the heart of his account of morality: moral approval is given to those qualities that are either useful or agreeable, to the agent or to those affected by the agent (EPM 118/336).
Whereas the term “artificial” is rarely derogatory in Hume’s thought—after all, the artificial virtues include justice and promise keeping—in this context, it clearly designates something very problematic. Both the maxims of common reason and artificial lives admit of a wide range of internal variation, but Hume argues that there is an absolute division between the two: sympathetic understanding is possible only of the former. This is because sympathetic understanding requires grasping the goods for which agents act, their reasons for acting. But the actions of those who live artificial lives are unintelligible; they do not act for the sake of things that (Hume’s rhetorically constructed) “we” can grasp as goods (“no man can answer for what will please or displease them”). They are, then, apparently like the insane, who may speak as though they have reasons for acting or pursuing particular goods, but whose actions do not follow from these purported reasons in any intelligible way. Their “actions” are thus merely pieces of behavior, to be explained, perhaps, but not understood.
Hume’s twofold move is to identify artificial lives with actions performed for no good at all, that is, irrational actions, while identifying as natural those lives in which moral judgments admit of the particular account he gives in terms of usefulness and agreeableness: “It appears, that there never was any quality recommended by any one, as a virtue or moral excellence, but on account of its being useful, or agreeable to a man himself, or to others. For what other reason can ever be assigned for praise or approbation? Or where would be the sense of extolling a good character or action, which, at the same time, is allowed to be good for nothing?” (EPM 118/336). Hume’s principle of sympathetic understanding requires that we be able to discern the reasons for which agents act, the goods they are pursuing. An action that is not directed toward anything under the denomination good is pointless, unintelligible. But it is not the case that an agent—or observer—must think of an action as useful or agreeable in order for it to have a point. In practice, the discernment of reasons for action is highly concrete and specific. If you pick up your umbrella as you head out the door on a rainy day, your action is immediately intelligible to me as having a point—to stay dry. If you pick up your umbrella and head out the door on a sunny day, having just heard a forecast of glorious weather, I will need some help in understanding the reason for your action—perhaps you wish to return the umbrella to your car, where you usually keep it; or perhaps there is a hidden camera in your umbrella, and you plan to use it to spy on your colleagues. The more foreign and distant your way of life, the more thick description I will need of surrounding beliefs and practices in order to make sense of a particular action. Perhaps you live in a culture that regards umbrellas primarily as parasols, protection from the sun. Perhaps you are a member of a gang that identifies itself by carrying a particular kind of umbrella. When we attempt to describe reasons for action in general, we abstract from all of this concreteness, saying things like, “actions, unlike pieces of behavior, are intentional,” “actions are performed for reasons,” “actions are directed towards ends perceived by the agent as good.”
The monkish virtues were for Hume the epitome of character traits that are “good for nothing”:
celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. (EPM 9.3/270)
We can see that the monkish virtues, at least as described by Hume, seem neither useful nor agreeable to anyone. However, is it really the case that Hume is unable to grasp virtuous monks as acting for reasons? Is he unable to discern the goods for which they act? Is he unable to see their actions as expressions of intentional agency, unable to see them as acting at all, rather than simply exhibiting pieces of behavior?
What lends Hume’s statements regarding the impossibility of sympathetic understanding of artificial lives some initial plausibility is the analysis he offers of theistic beliefs—and the artificial lives based on these beliefs—as utterly self-contradictory and as requiring sustained self-deception. This analysis, which is most fully developed in the Natural History of Religion, essentially presents theists as insane—as perpetually driving themselves insane through their fears and insecurity, their simultaneous tendencies to exalt the deity and to regard the deity as a harsh and arbitrary tyrant, their efforts to laud the deity even as they secretly hate him. According to Hume’s “natural history,” polytheism, though arising out of fearful ignorance, is not irrational or self-contradictory; polytheists simply imagine the unknown causes of the unpredictable events that determine their fates as personal agents subject to potential human influence. Theism emerges out of polytheism as the attempt to influence one deity, seen as particularly relevant, gives rise to ever more exaggerated praise, until this deity is honored as sole, omnipotent, infinite divine power. Contradictions begin to enter in as the deity is praised as transcendent and infinite and yet believers continue to anthropomorphize the deity in order to have some hope of influencing that god; “it is well, if, in striving to get farther, and to represent a magnificent simplicity, they run not into inexplicable mystery, and destroy the intelligent nature of their deity, on which alone any rational worship or adoration can be founded” (NHR 53–54). Since it is fear and anxiety that drives the formation of religious belief, believers naturally tend, argues Hume, to conceive of the deity as a malicious entity who must be placated. On the other hand, in order to have some hope of flattering the deity into compliance with their wishes, believers tend to praise their god not only as omnipotent and omniscient, but also as perfectly good. And while praise of the gods might initially be purely affected, once the deity is regarded as omniscient, it is no longer sufficient to display devotion. Believers thus struggle to suppress their hatred and fear of the deity: “while their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to him measures of conduct, which, in human creatures, would be highly blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses” (NHR 78). Theistic belief is thus on Hume’s analysis pervaded by self-contradiction and self-deception. In fact, it hardly amounts to real belief at all, argues Hume: “the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life” (NHR 71). If the lives of theists were indeed dictated by such a contradictory set of pseudo-beliefs, Hume’s claim that sympathetic understanding here confronts an absolute limit would seem plausible.14 After all, anything follows from a contradiction.
Even 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 recognizes that Sir Thomas More relinquished his position “foreseeing that all the measures of the king and parliament led to a breach with the church 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 on the past.”29 Providential history, though, derives its standards not from past or present but from future events, “and these confer not legitimacy but, necessarily, illegitimacy on the present society.”30
There are several difficulties with Livingston’s analysis of Hume’s attack on providential history. First, Hume’s strictures against those who “reverse the whole course of nature” by making this life “merely a passage to something further” are aimed at those who act for the sake of life in the world to come, a supernatural mode of existence. Inferences to a historical future are something quite different from inferences to an eternal future, and Hume’s attack does not clearly encompass the former, only the latter. Hume focuses on the difficulty of making new inferences from a cause whose existence has been inferred from a single work or production. “The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single being in the universe, not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities, we can, by analogy, infer any attribute or quality in him” (EHU 11.26/144). We can thus infer from experienced effect to divine cause, but cannot infer from this anything that we have not actually experienced as caused by God. Given that human nature and agency are not, unlike God and the universe, a “single work or production,” but rather something of which we have experienced very many instances, we can legitimately construct covering laws governing human agency and use these to infer to the future. The problem with providential history, in Hume’s eyes, is thus not its reference to the future as such, but its claim that God is the cause of history, and more particularly with claims to know a future beyond history.
Second, even if Hume were successful in undermining the possibility of inferences from past or present to the future, this would not (as Livingston concedes) render illegitimate attempts to predict the future, hope for the future, or hypothesize about the future. Nor does it undercut criticism of the present order on the basis of an imagined and hoped-for future. This is important, since it is not at all clear that all forms of providential history, or even all forms of providential history present in eighteenth-century thought, involve a claim to know the future, to view the future as though it has already happened. Some forms of providential history look to the restoration of a past golden age, thus conforming to Livingston’s stricture that the past be the source for present legitimacy.31 Some combine keen hope for the future with an insistence on the impossibility of knowing the future, often rooted in Jesus’s reminder that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). Some see the end of history as inevitable but regard events within history as themselves open, an arena for free, undetermined human action. Some expect catastrophe to usher in a new transhistorical age, while others, focusing on the notion of a millennium, expect gradual improvement culminating in a new historical golden age; the latter, at least, are hardly alienated from the present or tempted to violent revolution.32 And while there were many eighteenth-century theologians who thought it was possible and worthwhile to offer rational proofs of the existence of a future life beyond history, or, like Joseph Priestley, to attempt to discern in contemporary events the guiding hand of God, such efforts are not necessary concomitants of Christian or other sorts of religious faith and indeed have been subject to theological critique as misguided assertions of the power of human reason where a stance of faith is more appropriate. What is needed, then, is a more fine-grained description, which is capable of differentiating among a variety of Christian views of history, all of which might be termed providential in some sense, but not all of which are subject to Livingston’s critique. One result will be that Hume’s own grand story line of the improvement of the human mind will no longer appear sharply distinct from at least some forms of providential history. Hume rejected providential history but embraced his own teleology of progress, one that appealed not, as did nineteenth-century historiography, to an abstract scheme, but one that embodied hope for the future.33As Noel Jackson notes, “Hume offered a mode of historiography that catered to the needs of a credit economy that depended for its own prosperity upon the image of a stable and largely secular future.”34 Hume’s ordering of the past certainly orients him to the future in a particular way; he hopes for the triumph of the “party of humankind” and for the demise of the monkish virtues, even as his inferences based on past experiences of human nature do not give him excessive confidence that his hopes will be realized. To be able to speak of improvements of the human mind implies not only a point of departure judged vicious or imperfect, but also an imagined perfection of the human mind, in light of which the present is discerned as improved but still imperfect.35
Finally, it is hardly clear that providential history is “in total alienation from the standards that constitute the present social and political order.”36 The present can be viewed as “passing” and “inadequate” without therefore being regarded as “illegitimate,” but Livingston suggests that the former implies the latter.37 In fact, Hume would surely agree that the present order is both “passing,” that is, finite and subject to end or change, and “inadequate,” that is, in less than perfect conformity to ethical standards. Given that the standards of Hume’s social and political order were shaped in the context of Christian faith and eschatological hope, it is closer to the truth to say that Hume is the one who is in alienation from these standards. If, as Livingston argues, the present receives its legitimacy from the past, how is it legitimate, on Livingston’s own grounds, for Hume to critique the legitimate Christian moral order? It can appear so only given a sharp distinction between artificial and natural lives, a distinction that has dissolved upon closer examination. Once the bright lines between artificial and natural lives—those between providential and Humean history—begin to fade, we—and Hume—are left with a more complex picture and a more differentiated critical task.
History as Rhetoric
Livingston rightly notes that “the providential view of history provides an a priori framework for interpreting historical events.”38 How does this differ from a Humean view of history? Hume often uses the term “true” when speaking of history. History, as we have seen, places objects in their “true point of view” (E 568), it perceives historical actors “in their true colours” (E 566), and historians are “true friends of virtue” (E 567). Nevertheless, while history is not written from some merely relative point of view, neither is it written into the objective structure of the world. Rather, the historical point of view is, in Livingston’s words, the “point of view written into the very idea of history.”39 Once the distinction between natural and artificial lives is dismantled, along with the notion that providential history is a single discrete understanding of history that can be clearly opposed to Hume’s own truly historical understanding, we are left with competing a priori frameworks for interpreting historical events, written into different ideas of history, and constitutive of different forms of community. These can be seen as in partial conformity with the standards that constitute the present social order, and in partial alienation from these standards. A wholly artificial form of life would be self-defeating and unable to sustain itself, just as an utterly alienated historical perspective would be unrecognizable as a historical perspective.40 But anything short of this extreme is neither unintelligible nor illegitimate as a historical perspective.
This is not to deny that Hume is able to offer a critique of various forms of providential history, showing the historical accounts they offer to be wrong or blameworthy. But it is to insist that these must be engaged with substantively and piecemeal, rather than being dismissed a priori on formal grounds. Confronted with accounts of history shaped by Christian eschatology, it is obviously not sufficient to point out that these are alienated from the point of view Hume endorses, nor that Hume is alienated from the point of view endorsed therein. Rather, in critiquing the dominant conventions of his day, Hume must appeal to standards that are present or at least implicit within the society, and point out how they stand in tension with or contradict other commitments. And he must then persuade his readers to retain some of these while dropping incompatible commitments. Because common life is in fact pervaded by contradictions of various kinds, there will always be room for this kind of internal criticism, which preserves us from an immobile conservatism. But since logic by itself cannot determine which of two incompatible commitments should be dropped, criticism is always in part a rhetorical affair.41
Is this not 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, and the Autonomy of Social Scientific Laws,” Theory and Decision 48, no. 2 (2000): 101–22. McIntyre’s essay also helpfully elucidates the context-dependent character of explanation and defends the possibility of autonomous social scientific laws even given a naturalist ontology.
12. These are what Livingston terms “moral causal explanations,” Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 191.
13. I have elsewhere placed this aspiration within the context of other contemporary thinkers who shared Hume’s concern with cultivating resources for coping with moral diversity and make no attempt to replicate that discussion here. See Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chaps. 1–2. See also Daniel Carey’s Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 4–5, which depicts these thinkers as likewise “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistence could be located in mankind,” 1.
14. In fact, though, Hume’s account of theism is perhaps most persuasive as an account of certain very particular forms of religious life, notably the one in which he grew up, a strict form of Scottish Calvinism. Even here, it can be argued that Hume’s account is simply blind to the theological nuances that render the stance internally coherent—although he might counter that most uneducated Scots would not themselves have grasped the nuances.
15. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 340.
16. See also his account of Cardinal Pole (H 3:430).
17. For a fuller discussion of the place of the History of England in Hume’s account of the limits of sympathetic understanding, see Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chap. 5.
18. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 240. Livingston is also concerned with the topic of barbarism in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, but here his focus is on how civilizations can fall back into a kind of “barbarism of refinement,” 217–19.
19. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 245–46.
20. Popkin, “Skepticism and the Study of History,” in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxx–xxxi.
21. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 193. According to Livingston, Hume’s critique leaves room for a form of philosophical theism, essentially amounting to a regulative belief about nature as an ordered whole that serves to guide inquiry, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 63–66. This is a suggestive interpretation, but one that requires a strong reading of Hume’s texts; I do not engage with it here.
22. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 234.
23. Ibid., 234.
24. Ibid., 234–35.
25. Ibid., 235.
26. Ibid., 300.
27. Ibid., 143.
28. Ibid., 301.
29. Ibid., 301.
30. Ibid., 301.
31. On early modern European society (including, e.g., Calvinist ideals of the advancement of the kingdom of God) as dominated not by an idea of progress but by the notion of a return to a golden age in the past, see J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98–101.
32. See George Marsden’s account of Jonathan Edwards’s “millennial optimism,” in contrast with opposing contemporary views, in Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 333–40.
33. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 215.
34. Noel Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, vol. 1, ed. Christopher John Murray (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 504.
35. This is apparent in Livingston’s characterization of Hume’s true philosophical theism: “this metaphysical belief about the world as a whole, that it is ordered by ‘some consistent plan’ and reveals ‘one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible,’ in turn guides scientific activity in its research within the world,” Philosophical Melancholy, 66.
36. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 285.
37. Ibid., 286, 291.
38. Ibid., 288.
39. Ibid., 234.
40. The reasons for this have been given classic formulation by Donald Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 5–20.
41. Annette Baier argues that the test of reflexive self-survey is all Hume needs in order to justify the virtues he champions over against others; A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 215–17. Lottenbach, though, points out that most rivals to Hume’s position are not actually self-defeating, and are in fact capable of reflexive self-approval. He sees little to distinguish reflexive self-approval from “complacent self-congratulation,” “Monkish Virtues, Artificial Lives,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 3 (1996): 387. It is important to recognize both the power and the limits of this sort of internal criticism; it is inherently one part logic and one part rhetoric.
42. This is not to say, of course, that Enlightenment historiography won the day. Indeed, while Hume’s History of England undeniably established his reputation as an author, it was not in its own day received as impartial. In the next generation, Romantic historiographers critiqued Hume for a general failure of empathy with his subjects, not simply those dominated by religious convictions; Hume’s approach was seen as too abstract, too detached. The Romantic ideal was itself to be displaced by nineteenth-century philosophical historians who likewise dismissed Hume, now for lacking insight into the structural forces driving historical change. See Mark Salber Phillips and Dale R. Smith, “Canonization and Critique: Hume’s Reputation as a Historian,” in The Reception of David Hume in Europe, ed. Peter Jones (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 312–13.
43. Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” 504; Catherine Bell, “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 33; Alister Chapman, “Intellectual History and Religion in Modern Britain,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 232.
44. Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 138; emphasis in original.
45. Ibid., 138.
46. Ibid., 144.
