Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:06:26.596Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between Relativism and Design: The Limits of Hume's Secularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2020

Roger Maioli
Roger Maioli*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Florida
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Challenging the common image of Hume as a thoroughly secular philosopher, I argue that Hume occasionally relied on the design argument to defend the objectivity of values. Hume acknowledged that rejecting design might open the door to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic relativism. To avoid this prospect, he allowed himself to repurpose the language of providential naturalists like Hutcheson and claim that “nature,” rather than God, has attuned our faculties to objective standards of morals, beauty, and truth. Historians of philosophy have treated such passages as merely figurative, as they conflict with fundamental principles in Hume's philosophy. I argue instead, from an intellectual historical perspective, that Hume nonetheless expects the passages to be read literally, since only the literal reading helps his case against relativism. Rather than recasting Hume as a defender of design, however, I argue that his appeals to design were less an integral part of his philosophy than a provisional compromise, a response to intractable tensions in the history of secularism.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 1081 - 1105
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, B. W., Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ahnert, Thomas, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 (New Haven, 2014)Google Scholar. For a concise survey see Sheehan, Jonathan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003), 1061–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Smith, Courtney Weiss, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville, 2016)Google Scholar; Matytsin, Anton, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2016)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Karen, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Suderman, Jeffrey, “Religion and Philosophy,” in Garrett, Aaron and Harris, James A., eds., Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion (Oxford, 2015), 196–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 235.

4 Gaskin, J. C. A., Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edn (Atlantic Highlands, 1988), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Those who attribute to Hume more than a minimal theism have remained a minority. Examples include Sessions, William Lad, Reading Hume's Dialogues: A Veneration for True Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002)Google Scholar; and Black, Tim and Gressis, Robert, “True Religion in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25/2 (2017), 244–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Russell, Paul, The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holden, Thomas, Spectres of False Divinity: Hume's Moral Atheism (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially Part II.

8 Smith, Norman Kemp, The Philosophy of David Hume (Basingstoke, 2005), 564, 45Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 564.

10 Norton, David Fate, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton, 1982), 54Google Scholar, original emphasis.

11 Russell, Paul, Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford, 1993), 7Google Scholar.

12 Riskin, Jessica, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago, 2016)Google Scholar, 406 n. 79.

13 Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Natural History of Religion, ed. Gaskin, J. C. A. (Oxford, 1993), 2.5, 45Google Scholar. Henceforth DNR and NHR.

14 Hume, NHR, 134, 183.

15 Hume, NHR, 116.

16 Hurlbutt, Robert H. III, Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument (Lincoln, 1985), 167–8Google Scholar; O'Connor, David, Hume on Religion (London, 2001), 197–201Google Scholar. See also Russell, The Riddle of Hume's Treatise, 282.

17 Philo's view, in the gloss of Gaskin, Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 6, is that “a vestigial design argument establishes a weak probability that natural order originates in the activity of something with intelligence remotely analogous to our own.” Thus Philo can affirm design towards the end without insincerity, staking out a position Gaskin calls “attenuated deism.” Ibid., 7.

18 Yandell, K. E., “Hume on Religious Belief,” in Livingston, Donald W. and King, James T., eds., Hume: A Re-evaluation (New York, 1976), 109–25Google Scholar; Penelhum, Terence, “Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy,” Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), 266–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 There is a form of compatibilist reading that affirms that the design argument is valid as an “irregular” argument—that is, one that does not play by the rules of logic yet proves persuasive for reasons that are hard to specify. Examples of this reading include Pike, Nelson's “Hume on the Argument from Design,” in Pike, ed., David Hume: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis, 1970), 125–238Google Scholar; and most recently Garret, Don in Hume (New York, 2015), 291–2Google Scholar. But even these readings do not treat the design argument as one that plays a role in Hume's own philosophy.

20 Millican, Peter, “Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and the First Enquiry,” in Millican, ed., Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry (Oxford, 2003), 413–74Google Scholar, at 457; Pyle, Andrew, “David Hume and the Argument to Design,” in Bailey, Alan and O'Brien, Dan (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume (London, 2015), 245–64Google Scholar; Berman, David, “Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying,” in Lemay, J. A. Leo (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment (London, 1987), 61–78Google Scholar.

21 Pyle, “David Hume and the Argument to Design,” 258.

22 Newton, Isaac, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th edn (London, 1730), 378Google Scholar.

23 Hume, DNR, 7.8, 79, original emphasis.

24 Ibid., 7.12–13, 81.

25 Ibid., 8.2, 84.

26 Ibid., 8.6, 85.

27 Harris, James A., “The Epicurean in Hume,” in Leddy, Neven and Lifschitz, Avi S., eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2009), 169Google Scholar.

28 Hume, DNR, 8.12, 88.

29 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Millican, Peter (Oxford, 2007), 96, 107Google Scholar. Henceforth EHU.

30 Hume, EHU, 11.4, 97.

31 Ibid., 11.20, 102.

32 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (London, 1843), 339Google Scholar.

33 See, for example, Danford, David W., David Hume and the Problem of Reason: Recovering the Human Sciences (New Haven, 1990), chap. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merrill, Thomas W., Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015), chaps. 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Merrill, in particular, writes against the view that Hume was a relativist, a view defended among others by in, Peter Gay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), 448–65Google Scholar.

34 Carey, Daniel, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Oxford, 2006), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Beauchamp, Tom L. (Oxford, 1998), D.25, 116Google Scholar. Henceforth EPM.

36 Ibid., D.25, 191.

37 Ibid., D.37, 194, original emphasis.

38 Ibid., D.31, 193.

39 Ibid., D.36, 193.

40 Ibid., Appx. 1, 163.

41 Caygill, Howard, The Art of Judgment (Oxford, 1989), 71Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., original emphasis.

43 For an evaluation of his attempt see Korsmeyer, Carolyn, “Relativism and Hutcheson's Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36/2 (1975), 319–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Hutcheson, Francis, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Leidhold, Wolfgang (Indianapolis, 2004), 28Google Scholar.

45 Hume, David, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F., (Indianapolis, 1987)Google Scholar. Henceforth E.

46 Ibid., 230.

47 Ibid., 229, original emphasis, 241.

48 In Kivy's words, “The Humean program in aesthetics is the translation of value judgments into factual judgments.” Kivy, Peter, “Hume's Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” in Babich, Babette, ed., Reading David Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste” (Berlin, 2019), 57–66Google Scholar, at 65.

49 Hume, E, 235.

50 Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “Introduction” to David Hume, Moral Philosophy (Indianapolis, 2006), x–xxxiii.

51 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Hume, E, 226–50, at 234.

52 Sayre-McCord, “Introduction,” xxvi.

53 Hume, E, 233.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 230.

56 Ibid., 235.

57 Ibid., 233.

58 Ibid.

59 Cooper, John Gilbert, Letters Concerning Taste, 2nd edn (London, 1755), 7–8Google Scholar.

60 For Hume, those who wrote of nature's sympathies and antipathies or believed that nature abhors a vacuum “were guided,” like children and poets, “by every trivial propensity of the imagination.” Hume, T 1.4.3.11; see also NHR, 3.2.

61 Reynolds, Joshua, “The True Idea of Beauty,” The Idler 82 (1759)Google Scholar. Reproduced in Elledge, Scott, Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, vol. 2 (Ithaca, 1961), 836Google Scholar.

62 Hume, NHR, 168.

63 Hume, E, 231.

64 See, for example, Hume, E, 14 and EHU, 12.33, 120.

65 Norton, David Hume.

66 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, Mary J. and Norton, David Fate (Oxford, 2001), 1.3.8.12Google Scholar. Henceforth T.

67 Ibid., 1.3.8.12, 72.

68 Hume, EHU, 10.19, 85.

69 Ibid., 10.16, 84.

70 Ibid., 4.20, 26.

71 Hume, T, 1.4.7.10, 175.

72 Ibid., 1.4.7.13, 177.

73 Ibid., 1.4.4.1, 148.

74 Ibid., 1.4.4.1, 149.

75 Ibid., 1.4.7.7, 174.

76 For a reading of the Enquiry as a rigorous defense of inductive reasoning see Peter Millican, “Hume's ‘Scepticism’ about Induction,” in Bailey and O'Brien, The Continuum Companion to Hume, 57–103.

77 For an overview of these debates see Millican, “Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume.”

78 Hume, EHU, 12.23, 116.

79 For a particularly sophisticated defense of this view see Millican, “Hume's ‘Scepticism’ about Induction.”

80 Hume, EHU, 9.6, 78.

81 Ibid., 9.5, 77.

82 Ibid.

83 Hume, DNR, 8.9.

84 Gaskin, Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 328.

85 Hurlbutt III, Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument, 151.

86 O'Connor, Hume on Religion, 142.

87 Hume, T, 1.3.14.32 and 1.3.16.9. See also Hume's letters to Hutcheson of 17 Sept. 1739 and to Gilbert Elliot of Feb. 1751.

88 Hume, EHU, 5.21, 40.

89 Haakonssen, Knud, “The Structure of Hume's Political Theory,” in Norton, David Fate, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge, 1993), 182–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 190.

90 Hutcheson, An Inquiry, 180.

91 Ibid., 81.

92 Ahnert, Moral Culture, 88.

93 Hume, EHU, 5.22, 40.

94 Ibid., 12.12, 112; see also T, 1.3.5.2 and 1.2.6.7; EHU, 5.6, 32–3.

95 Hume, EHU, 4.21, 27–8.

96 Hume, T, 1.4.4.1, 148.

97 Superstition arises “from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholy disposition, or from the concurrence of all these circumstances” (Hume, E, 73–4).

98 Hume, EHU, 10.17, 84.

99 Ibid., 5.21, 40.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., 5.22, 40.

102 Ibid., 5.2, 31.

103 Examples not mentioned in this paper include Hume, T, 1.4.1.7, 1.4.2.1, 2.1.5.6, 2.1.5.10, 2.2.6.6; EHU, 8.35; EPM, 1.9; and E, 131, 132, 162.

104 Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2015), x.

105 Ibid., 148, original emphasis.

106 Ibid., 262.

107 Boyle, Robert, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Davis, Edward B. and Hunter, Michael (Cambridge, 2012), 3Google Scholar.

108 Chambers, Ephraim, Cyclopædia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2nd edn (London, 1738)Google Scholar, II, 7B, original emphasis.

109 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, de Buffon, Comte, “First View on Nature,” quoted by Louis Châtelier in “Christianity and the Rise of Science, 1660–1815,” in Brown, Stewart J. and Tackett, Timothy, The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7 (Cambridge, 2006), 251–64Google Scholar, at 259.

110 Kames, Lord, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 3rd edn (Edinburgh, 1779), 28Google Scholar.

111 Dwight Codr has traced a similar transition in the role of “nature” in the domain of political economy. See his “Money, Reason, and Religion: A Secularization Story,” in Christine Desan, ed., A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 75–94.

112 Diderot, Dennis, Pensées sur l'interpretation de la nature, ed. Duflo, Colas (Paris, 2005), 59Google Scholar.

113 Radicati, Alberto, A phliosophical [sic] dissertation upon death (London, 1732), 10Google Scholar, original emphasis.

114 Naigeon, Jacques-André, “Discours préliminaire” to Thiry, Paul-Henri, d'Holbach, Baron's Système de la nature (Paris, 1990), 19Google Scholar.

115 Turner, Matthew, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (London, 1782), 47Google Scholar.

116 Ibid., 28.

117 Bentley, Richard, The Folly of Atheism, and (what is now called) Deism (London, 1692), 27, 3Google Scholar.

118 William Rose, review of Hume's Dialogues in Monthly Review, Nov. 1779. Reproduced in Fieser, James, Early Responses to Hume's Writings on Religion, vol. 2 (Bristol, 2001), 221Google Scholar.

119 The relevant text for La Mettrie is not L'homme machine (1747), but the more radical Discours sur le bonheur, ou Anti-Sénèque (1748).

120 Riskin, The Restless Clock.

121 Hume, T, 1.3.14.9–11, 107–8. See also Hume, David, A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, ed. Mossner, Ernest C. and Price, John V. (Edinburgh, 1967)Google Scholar.

122 Riskin, The Restless Clock, 238.

123 Ibid., 248.