Читать книгу The Pursuit of Certainty - Shirley Robin Letwin - Страница 13

CHAPTER 5

Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions

Having tumbled reason from her high throne to set her on earth judging facts and thus removed the divine imprint from man’s soul, Hume used the same means to show that man bore no mark of Satan. For man restored to nature, he described a virtue that required no struggle with sin, no repression, no divine intervention, nothing but what could come naturally to human beings.

The passions, in which Hume casually included animal instincts and passions, along with moral sentiments and natural beliefs, were reduced, like everything else, to a form of sensation. Instead of being the unruly elements of the soul, opposed to reason, they became innocuous “reflective impressions.” They arose, Hume said, as internal responses to “original impressions,” that is, to sensations caused by external objects or operations of the body. In other words, they were responses to bodily pleasures and pains. Some, like the sense of beauty and deformity, were calm; others, like love and hatred, grief, joy, pride and humility, were violent; all were equally natural and capable of being beneficial. They were secondary, internal, reflective impressions and neither good nor evil. They were the results of causes that “operated after the same manner thro’ the whole animal creation”¹ and were therefore, like reason, common to man and animals.

By describing passions as responses to impressions, Hume made it impossible for them to be ruled by reason. Reason, in Hume’s sense, could only judge abstract relations between ideas, or the relations between ideas and matters of fact. With neither of these judgements could reason excite desire or aversion, that is, give rise to passion or influence it.² Passions themselves are called into being by nothing but impressions, and they can be opposed only by contrary passions. What is taken for the combat between reason and passion, Hume explained, is in reality a “calm” passion opposing a “violent” one: “Thus it appears that the principle which opposes our passions cannot be the same with reason, and is only call’d so in an improper sense. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”¹ Man is not then a divided nature but all one, and he is moved, not by two opposing principles, but by a variety of sensations.²

Thus Hume denied the basis for the traditional account of virtue. He had ruled out even the possibility of giving reason ascendancy in Spinoza’s manner. Spinoza, too, had reversed the order of reason and passion, but in his account the master governing passion is the passion to act rationally for its own sake. In the end, Spinoza differentiated man from beast, and the free man from the slave, by his power of making reason and judgement control action and passion. For the only passion reason could not examine was the passion to reason. According to Hume, however, reason is always controlled by passion, by any and every desire which may happen to employ reason as a means to its fulfilment. Reason could never make an all-inclusive survey of all passions or desires.

Yet Hume was very far from wishing to conclude that therefore virtue and vice could or should be confounded. He ranked those who “denied the reality of moral distinctions” among “disingenuous disputants.”¹ Although he appreciated Mandeville’s “spirit of satire,”² and felt considerable sympathy with his attack on the hypocritical enemies of joy and pleasure, who asked men to forswear wants that supported society, Hume could not be so irreverent. He would not for a moment, even in jest, argue that all moral distinctions arise from education, as Mandeville said, and were “at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged by the art of politics in order to render man tractable.”³ Morality is certain, and there is a clear distinction between virtue and vice, Hume affirmed; he denied only that it was absolute.

He managed to preserve the certainty of morals without letting it become absolute by founding it on sentiment. Virtue and vice were not matters of fact whose existence could be discovered by reason. In wilful murder, for instance, no one can observe anything that could be called vice. The only fact in the case that makes us call it vicious is a feeling in some person: “In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.”⁴ Vice and virtue are not then qualities in objects, not anything outside human beings, but perceptions within them:

When you pronounce any Action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing but that from the particular Constitution of your nature, you have a Feeling or Sentiment of Blame from the Contemplation of it. Vice and Virtue, therefore may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern Philosophy are not Qualitys in Objects but Perceptions in the Mind.⁵

That his moral theory was a great advance in speculative science, Hume readily claimed. But he denied that it had any radical consequences for practice.¹ Prudence alone perhaps required him to say so at a time when the arbiters of morality cried down any modification of their theories as a challenge to all established notions of good and bad. And in one sense, it was perfectly true that Hume’s theory left practice unaffected. It did not sanction murder or incest, or deny the value of honesty and gratitude. It did, however, radically change the manner in which these standards were to be applied.

This was inevitable once Hume traced virtue to a basic principle that made it impossible to think of morality in the old way as a divine command. Instead, Hume showed that virtuous behaviour is simply useful to mankind, that it conforms to, rather than violates, what is natural to men. The utility of an action or character, he explained, arouses a natural sentiment of approval. Because of the sympathy between men, this approval becomes general, that is, attached to other things and men and to whatever contributes to the happiness of society. All men can feel a sympathy with the possessor of a useful quality. So men come to approve what benefits not only themselves but also others. And what is useful to men generally is called a virtue.

Virtue does not then require men either to discern super-human purposes, or to deny their human needs and wants. Quite the contrary, it shows how best to satisfy them. To be virtuous, men need not struggle with or repress their natural inclinations—“all morality depends on the natural course of our passions and actions.”² The virtuous man is drawn to his duty “without an effort or endeavour.” Virtue therefore is congenial to men and only superstition is “odious and burthensome.”³ Moral conflict is not a combat between divine reason and brute passion, but a purely human balancing of the calm against the violent passions. Thus Hume removed the dismal dress with which divines and philosophers had disguised virtue, and demonstrated that a happy life spent in festivals, mirth, philosophizing, and singing was, as the ancient Strabo had taught, the best way for man to imitate divine perfection.

Although a large part of traditional morality was unaffected by Hume’s denial of super-human perfection, his account of virtue did imply some important changes. He did not, for instance, accept the Christian view of suicide. Since man is not unique but an intimate part of the natural order, whatever he wishes to do with his life, Hume argued, cannot be contrary to nature or God. The life of man “is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster,”¹ and therefore suicide is no more impious than agriculture. When life becomes a burden, when we can do but small good to society at the expense of great suffering to ourselves, there is no obligation to go on living. On the contrary, by committing suicide, we may be doing society a service; and certainly no man would have recourse to such a remedy frivolously.

In much the same spirit, Hume insisted that pride is not a vice but a virtue. All heroic virtue, he pointed out, all that we admire as greatness of mind—courage, intrepidity, ambition, love of glory, magnanimity—“is either nothing but a steady and well establish’d pride and self-esteem or partakes largely of that passion.”² The pagans never decried pride, and those who are anxious to improve life in this world invariably esteem it. They believe that “a genuine and hearty pride, or self-esteem, if well conceal’d and well founded, is essential to the character of a man of honour, and that there is no quality of the mind, which is more indispensably requisite to procure the esteem and approbation of mankind.”³ Only the “religious declaimers” make pride a vice; they denounce it as “purely pagan and natural and represent to us the excellency of the Christian religion, which places humility in the rank of virtues and corrects the judgement of the world, and even of philosophers who so generally admire all the efforts of pride and ambition….”⁴ But humility, beyond what good breeding and decency require of us, is merely one of that “whole train of monkish virtues” which men of sense reject because they “neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company nor increase his power of self-enjoyment. ”.”⁵

Nevertheless, in some other ways Hume insisted on an obligation to depart from nature, and submit to reason. For he found in reason the source of general rules without which social relations were impossible. Even good breeding depended, he pointed out, on neglecting natural sentiments in favour of certain established forms. The rule that we must never praise ourselves but should rather underrate our true qualities, for instance, had become established because men tend to be conceited and cannot judge when they have given too free expression to their exaggerated self-esteem. As such conceit annoys others and destroys easy relations, it seems best to observe a general rule forbidding any self-praise, for thus we are assured that neither our own conceit, nor that of others, will disrupt conversation and conviviality.

The rules of justice are of the same character. Without them, each case would be decided on its own merits, as each man judged them. We would grant a friend the property he claimed from our enemy; the tall boy who had only a short coat would appropriate the long coat from the short boy. We would conduct ourselves entirely by particular judgements that considered only the characters and circumstances of the moment. However much this might accord with our natural sentiments, Hume reminds us, “ ’tis easy to observe that this would produce an infinite convulsion in human society, and that the avidity and partiality of men would quickly bring disorder into the world. …”¹ In order to bring peace and stability into social life, men set up general and inflexible rules, which ensure that they will always view certain issues from the same standpoint, regardless of the particular situation. They agree to judge some matters not as the different circumstances surrounding each dictate, but from a common standpoint accepted by all.

The rules of justice are as a result both natural and artificial. They are natural because the need for them is inseparable from the nature of the human species; they do not arise from humour and caprice, and could not one day be dispensed with as if they were a mere matter of fashion:

The interest on which justice is founded is the greatest imaginable, and extends to all times and places. It cannot possibly be serv’d by any other invention. It is obvious and discovers itself on the very formation of society. All these causes render the rules of justice stedfast and immutable; at least as immutable as human nature.²

They might even Hume said, be called “Laws of Nature.”¹ Yet at the same time, the rules of justice are artificial. For they engage men to act contrary to their natural sentiments. They extend what is felt in one set of circumstances to cover many others. They are “contrary to the common principles of human nature, which accommodate themselves to circumstances and have no stated invariable method of operation.”²

The distinction between natural judgements and artificial rules was all important for Hume. It not only explains the origin of justice, but is at the heart of his moral attitude and defines his disagreement with conventional views of morality. It determines as well his attitude to politics. It arises from his sensitivity to the contrast between impersonal and personal judgements, between abstract, general, unyielding rules and particular judgements conforming to the conditions and needs of the moment. What is generally regarded as Hume’s defence of nature may be better described as a defence of the personal against the impersonal, the concrete against the abstract.

Hume stressed the deficiencies of impersonal judgements as no other philosopher had. Virtue and vice, indeed all natural qualities, he reminds us, “run insensibly into each other”; they approach one another “by such insensible degrees” that it is exceedingly difficult, “if not absolutely impossible to determine when the one ends and the other begins.”³ But general rules make exact definitions, and admit of no degree. They treat cases similar in some respects as if they were similar in all without considering what tangle of circumstances and motives may excuse one but not another.⁴ Even when rules admit of exceptions, it is only according to a rule. The false distinctions imposed by a general rule give it an air of clarity, but in reality it is much more obscure than a particular judgement. It covers many particulars, and as any one of them may be thought to represent it, a general rule usually means different things to different people.

Besides, a general rule never allows us to dispense with judgement and experience. No matter how perfect in itself, it still needs to be applied properly. One must recognize first of all which general rule is relevant. Then one must know how to take account of the special circumstances in which the rule is being applied. Neither reasoning nor knowledge is enough; prudence is essential:

In every situation or incident there are many particular and seemingly minute circumstances, which the man of greatest talents is, at first, apt to overlook though on them the justness of his conclusions, and consequently the prudence of his conduct entirely depend. Not to mention, that, to a young beginner, the general observations and maxims occur not always on the proper occasions, nor can be immediately applied with due calmness and distinction.¹

However good the laws of a society, they cannot then be perfectly just. As a general idea is a bundle of particular ones, so a general law covers a wide range of particulars, but necessarily singles out some for attention. What the law commands is therefore inevitably more suitable for some cases than for others equally under its jurisdiction. It cannot allow for the character, situation, or connections of every person affected. It may deprive a good industrious man of all possessions just because his tide is not in perfect order, only “to bestow them on a selfish miser who has already heaped up immense stores of superfluous riches.”² It makes distinctions where none exist, and judges, who are obliged to decide for one side or the other, are forced “to proceed on the most frivolous reasons in the world” or “to take half arguments for whole ones to terminate the affair one way or another.”³ No law can escape these defects: “Even the general laws of the universe, though planned by infinite wisdom, cannot exclude evil or inconvenience in every particular operation.”⁴

Nevertheless, Hume was equally anxious to point out that general rules and impartial laws are indispensable. Whatever their inconveniences, they are outweighed by the evil of allowing “full discretionary powers” to any magistrate.⁵ But as general rules have no intrinsic merit, wherever they are not essential, it is better to leave the natural variety of human life unhindered. One ought never to forget the necessity for general rules, while remembering that as they are after all artificial, it is best to limit their dominion. The style of Hume’s thinking about moral and social questions is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in his insistence on both the drawbacks of laws and the necessity for enduring them.

He insisted at least as much that following rules was not to be confused with morality. Whether a man is virtuous depends on his inner experience, not his outward actions, on why he decides, not what he decides: “ ’Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit.”¹

What the moral sentiment approves may vary enormously. And Hume shows us that we have tacitly recognized as much. We admire the Athenians, who permitted their best citizens to marry their sisters, murder their children, and forsake their wives in order to court young men. Brutus, whom we call a hero, conspired to assassinate his best friend. The French, commonly thought to be the most civilized of modern nations, praised adultery, took pride in their subjection to an absolute ruler, honoured men who killed to avenge lighthearted raillery, and applauded parents who sent off their children to be mistreated in holy jails. Indeed, wherever we look, if we judge by what is approved, morality seems to be a mass of contradictions: Fénelon’s standards are not Homer’s; the Koran is revered by Mohammedans for its sublime moral teachings but to Englishmen it seems to teach treachery, cruelty, and inhumanity; the luxuries valued in England and France for their benefits to art and industry are regarded in Switzerland as wanton and vicious.²

But in fact the disagreements are unimportant; they arise not from differences in morality, but in circumstances. The moral sentiment operating at different times and places dictates quite different conclusions. It is with morality as with rivers: “The Rhine flows north, the Rhone south; yet both spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated, in their opposite directions, by the same principle of gravity. The different inclinations of the ground, on which they run cause all the difference of their courses.”³ In almost everything he wrote, Hume emphasized that there was no reason for all men, even all creatures, to live in the same way:

What seems the most delicious food to one animal, appears loathsome to another; what affects the feeling of one with delight, procures uneasiness in another. This is confessedly the case with regard to all bodily senses: But if we examine the matter more accurately, we shall find, that the same observation holds even where the mind concurs with the body, and mingles its sentiment with the exterior appetite.¹

It is always difficult to understand that another man might enjoy what we are indifferent to. And depending on our inclinations, our temperament, mood, and circumstances, we ourselves will judge the same things differently: “Man is a very variable being, and susceptible of many different opinions, principles, and rules of conduct. What may be true while he adheres to one way of thinking, will be found false, when he has embraced an opposite set of manners and opinions.”² We need neither admire nor condemn another man’s preferences. It is foolish to stand staring at one another like the Capucin monk and the Ambassador from Tunisia who had never seen the like of each other before, and could not be persuaded that “the turban of the African is just as good or bad a fashion as the cowl of the European.”³

Whereas other philosophers had taken great pains to draw the best or highest sort of man, to decide whether the practical man or the contemplative man was superior, Hume denied precedence to any sort. He said only that human happiness seems to consist of three ingredients, action, pleasure, and indolence, “and tho’ these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the particular disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure, the relish of the whole composition.”⁴ It seems to be true, he thought, that action and employment make men less vulnerable to the stings of fortune, moderate the affections, and provide entertaining thoughts. But not all men are fit for such pursuits; indeed men have very different aptitudes for happiness. They are governed by their native temper and constitution, over which “general maxims have little influence.”⁵ Those of great delicacy of passion have perhaps “more lively enjoyments as well as more pungent sorrows than men of cool and sedate tempers,” but they are more nearly at the mercy of fortune. Contentment can be courted best by developing a highly refined taste, which “enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.”⁶ But delicate taste is not as burdensome as sensitive passions, because, although we cannot control external circumstances, we can decide what books we shall read, what diversions we choose, what company we keep. Thus a man becomes more self-sufficient and less dependent on accident: “When a man is possessed of that talent, he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem or a piece of reasoning than the most expensive luxury can afford.”¹ This was, however, merely homely advice to those seeking contentment. It did not impose anything on them in the name of virtue. There is no single set of virtuous choices. What matters with respect to virtue is only how well a man balances his passions, so that he never falls victim to one or the other, and never becomes obsessed by some enthusiasm that must torment him and his fellow men. “If a man have a lively sense of honour and virtue, with moderate passions, his conduct will always be conformable to the rules of morality. …²

Hume’s only firm moral commandment was a negative one—that there is no a priori way of deciding for or against some kinds of gratification. He did not therefore share the attitude of most moralists to luxury, but insisted that it has a good as well as a bad sense. Whether it is vicious depends entirely on the circumstances: “In general, it means great refinement in the gratification of the senses; and any degree of it may be innocent or blameable, according to the age or country, or condition of the person. The bounds between virtue and vice cannot here be exactly fixed more than in other moral subjects.”³ Any form of asceticism outraged Hume. He could not see that any gratification, however sensual, could “of itself be esteemed vicious.”⁴ Only those whose minds are “disordered by the frenzies of enthusiasm,” he declared, could imagine anything vicious in enjoying meat, drink, or apparel. Such indulgences become vices only when they are “pursued at the expense of some virtue.” But where they do not interfere with the needs of friends, family, and every proper object of generosity or compassion,” they are perfectly “innocent and have in every age been acknowledged by all moralists.”⁵

What this might mean in practice is admirably illustrated in Fielding’s novels. In Fielding’s mind, the philosophical problem about the relation between reason and passion, that impressed Hume, took the shape of a difference between Allworthy and Masters Thwackum and Square. Like Hume, though by a different route, Fielding became interested in the teachings of the divines; and his library was well stocked with theological treatises. He declared himself in the party of the rational Low Church which Clarke represented, but his pharisees, whether free thinkers or pious, all speak in Clarke’s syllogisms. Not any particular belief, but simply the propensity to reduce every issue to a matter of good reasoning distinguished Fielding’s villains. They are men who can justify anything. When Tom lies to protect Black George, Thwackum can demonstrate that he ought to be punished with texts from Solomon. And Square explains that although there was something resembling fortitude in the action, as fortitude was a virtue and falsehood a vice, they could not be united together, and since the pardoning of Tom would confound vice and virtue, his punishment should be even larger to keep the distinction clear. But within Allworthy’s breast, there was something with which “the invincible fidelity which that youth had preserved corresponded much better than it would have done with the religion of Thwackum or with the virtue of Square.”

It was those who “utterly discarded all natural goodness of heart” that Fielding hunted. He had no use for the virtuous lady who despaired over the loss of a ribbon but ostentatiously affected contempt for things of the world; for the good man, who owed no one a shilling, entertained his neighbours lavishly, and gave charity to the poor, but had nothing beyond justice for suffering sinners; for anyone who shuffled with principles and combined the greatest primness of expression and regularity of behaviour with the least possible sacrifice of his own interests. He preferred Parson Adams, who lived with exuberance, absorbed vast quantities of beer, tobacco, and gossip in Lady Booby’s kitchen, and settled disputes vigorously with a terrifying mutton fist.

Parson Adams perfectly represents the benevolent man Hume admired. He is a man of good heart whose virtue is instinctive, and the opposite of a formalist who compensates for his want of generous impulses by rigidly observing the law. That moral standards are not something apart from mankind, unyielding and impersonal, is the essence of Hume’s moral teaching. It is the opposite of Kant’s view that man’s reason obliges him to set up rational goals that he must forever keep before himself and pursue. Hume preferred rather to have men work from day to day for immediate, limited objectives, guided by conscience and accumulated experience.

Whereas Hobbes and Locke, empiricists though they were, were still seeking a single, unifying vision of life, Hobbes in terms of will, Locke in terms of reason, Hume emphasized imagination, a receptive, passive power, not a creative, moulding power. What gives form to life, as Hume saw it, is not any ideal mould into which all men must fit, nor some distant overpowering end to be pursued throughout life, but felt principles that guide the manner of choosing without prescribing in advance what is to be chosen.

As an analysis of moral behaviour, Hume’s account left something to be desired. He admitted the influence of reason in a number of ways but left its nature undefined. He described the calm passions as founded on a distant view or reflection. In his discussion of artificial virtues, the practical reason seems to determine the sense of moral obligation, and at times Hume even implied that unreasonable conduct may result not only from false judgements but from a failure to make certain judgements. He not only made it clear that judgements bring to our attention certain facts which affect our desires, but he distinguished sharply between mere liking and moral approval, which depended on being able to see a thing or action independently of its relation to one’s own interests. Yet precisely how felt principles were related to judgements, or how from a judgement that a means is desirable we are moved to desire that means, whether practical judgements can prompt passions, or whether reason operating under the control of one passion had any power to control other passions, Hume did not say. He was after all less anxious to elaborate a complete psychology of moral behaviour than to liberate morality from the dominance of pure reason, and show up the deficiencies of both the puritanical antipathy to nature and the rationalist illusion that a code of moral conduct could be deduced from a few absolutely certain principles. In order to deny that moral action could be reduced to a set of impersonal universal rules, he tried to exclude reason as a source of moral conviction and to put feeling in its place, thus making it impossible for the moral reaction to be anything but concrete and personal.

Perhaps the best summary of the moral temper Hume was defending is to be found in his views on personal identity. The person, he said, is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”¹ He described the mind not as an essence or permanent core, but as a “kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.”¹ We like to think that there is a connecting principle, and we invent fictions like a soul or self or substance. But in fact there is nothing, Hume declared, beyond a succession of related sensations, an easy transition of ideas that produces the notion of personal identity, for we can have no notion of any existence or of any simple substance apart from particular perceptions.² Man cannot then escape doing what Spinoza described as “willy-nilly things which he knows absolutely nothing about.” He cannot survey the whole of his life and decide which things he ought to desire most. Whereas Spinoza regarded men who remained at the mercy of circumstances as not properly free beings, both Hume’s moral theory and his description of the self were designed to impress on men that they were necessarily at the mercy of circumstances and could never take account of all possible actions and their consequences. They could not hope to be perfectly self-conscious.

Hume recognized that his view of the self led him into inconsistency—he could not explain what it was that did the perceiving of distinct existences, nor could he see any other source of connection among them. But having raised the question, he was content to leave it unresolved. He had not constructed a perfect philosophical system, but he had succeeded in describing how the human person looked to a man of his moral temperament. Like everything else in the universe, it was not formed by an effort to make a unity or impose a pattern. It had no sharp outlines. It was an amorphous whole that came together out of assorted sensations, actions and ideas. It was a theatre, and a bundle.