Hume's Self as a 'Theatre of Perceptions'

ACADEMIC PAPER

In the paper that follows, I attempt to situate Hume’s philosophy of selfhood as a both a response to the latent transcendentalism in Descartes and as a side-stepped anticipation of the overt transcendentalism in Kant.

Introduction

Descartes’ ‘epistemological turn’ would influence generations of philosophers who, in an attempt to understand the structure of the self, took him – either directly or indirectly – as the starting point of their own reflections. Among the most prominent of these undoubtedly is David Hume. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume forcefully – if implicitly – rails against Descartes’ cogito. Far from a unity, epistemological or otherwise, the self is, for Hume, a hodge-podge of free-floating representations in which no idea is bound to any other in any truly meaningful way. Our mind is but a stage upon which perceptions appear and disappear, emerging from one wing and shuffling off into the other, and never lingering on it for any longer than they need to. In this theatre of the mind, our perceptions belong neither to each other, nor to us, the individuals receiving them. There is no director sitting in the stalls, coordinating the action, and no pre-written script by means of which a coherent narrative can be enacted. The combination of our perceptions in our consciousness is the result, not of predetermined unity, but of perfunctory custom, of our irresistible impulse to ‘pool together’ those haphazard cognitions which we just happen to register in temporal succession. The self, thus considered, is an illusion. The ‘I think’ can no better bundle my thoughts than a grasping hand can gather together particles of air. If metaphysics is a ‘fruitless vanity’, and knowledge is plagued by the inherent limitations of the synthetic a posteriori, there can be no epistemological foundation for the self, nor for that matter a metaphysical one.

In several important respects, Hume’s theory of the self – or of ‘personal identity’, as he designates it – mirrors his epistemology more broadly. His skeptical philosophy, marked, among other aspects, by its refusal to assent to any conclusive idea of necessary causal connection, is one which quite resolutely denies all possibility of certain knowledge – both as acquired by reason and also by experience. Since our ideas of the world are necessarily derived from our impressions, and moreover since these are in turn necessarily dependent on our experience of external reality, our inner faculties are bereft of the capacity to arrive at truthful representations independently and immediately. There are no innate ideas, so any knowledge we assent to must draw on experience, but if, in the hope to find the certainty reason denies, we then turn to sense perception, we quickly understand that we find no joy there either; the mysterious ‘power’ which necessarily connects two objects is here no more readily accessible to us than it was there. The closer Hume scans the objects under his scrutiny, the more he realises that they are bound by no other force than simple relations, mere associations of ideas which never definitively legitimate the epistemic certainty to which they at first appear to testify. If we are accustomed to seeing event B follow from A, we can never be so sure of their connection that we can assert that the latter will always attend the former in every future instance. The world, for Hume, is thus filled with objects which are held together by mechanisms considerably flimsier than established theory might teach us. True and certain knowledge is, accordingly, much less reliable than common sense may induce us to believe.

In the Treatise, Hume takes many of the same conclusions he draws in his general theory of knowledge and applies them to his theory of personal identity more specifically, so that the Humean self can, in a sense, be seen as a small-scale model of external reality, mirroring both its internal mechanisms and the structure of its loosely interconnected units. To use a term already employed in reference to Descartes in the precious chapter, Hume’s theory of self resolutely denies any ‘transcendental’ component – any ‘director’ conducting the characters on his stage of the mind. There is no cogito, no inner unshakeable and unmovable essence of the self that is uncovered when all else is brushed away. When Hume excavates his Nietzschean depths, past all his perceptions, he finds, no Cartesian ‘I think’, but an ever-unfolding kaleidoscope. He peels away a layer of impressions and ideas only to find that these simply give way to another layer, to more ideas and impressions. He continues to dig until he is forced to surrender; there is no ‘I’ existing apart from his impressions. The last perception of reality we encounter before we fall into inner oblivion, then, is as close to a cogito as Hume would dare affirm – and with the enormously important caveat that there is nothing at all universal or necessary about it. Since it is an a posteriori perception, it can be done away with just as easily as any of its brethren, and the essence of the self will be no more compromised than if it remained fixed there. And here is Hume’s point precisely: there is no ‘essence of selfhood’ to speak of, no a priori kernel of the self without which the ‘I’ would fall apart, or at least not be able to function in some predetermined way.

So, Hume disavows the transcendental self. Or does he? Here, we come to an idea I will more fully tease out toward the end of this chapter. As I read Hume, I am struck with the ‘impression’ that Hume is haunted by the spectre of a transcendental self which, however obstinately he refuses to acknowledge it, continues to hover over his shoulder, rattling its chains in even – and perhaps especially – some of the most fundamental passages of his celebrated work. The transcendental implications of many of his ideas are at every turn sidestepped and even summarily dismissed, even when they are directly conjured up and enticingly flirted with. The result is a work both fascinating for its bold conclusions but also astonishing for the incompleteness and unintegratedness of its set-up. And although it may appear obvious and even facile to project such a post-Kantian reading on Hume, one that pegs him as a ‘closeted’ transcendentalist, it is one which, given the ‘force and vivacity’ with which it struck me, I couldn’t resist presenting. This chapter will, accordingly, be devoted to an exploration of Hume’s theory of selfhood as an extension of his skeptical philosophy more generally, and will end with a transcendental critique of the same.

Hume’s skeptical philosophy

In order to ease ourselves into Hume’s philosophy of the self, we will do well to first explore his theory of knowledge in general terms. This will allow us to do two things: firstly, to understand how the foundational ideas of his philosophy relate to his theory of selfhood; secondly, to better draw comparisons between the two, so that we can begin to understand the Humean self as a microcosmic iteration of objective reality.

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Hume’s epistemology begins with his division of perceptions into two categories: impressions and ideas. Impressions are those perceptions which strike us with ‘force and liveliness’. These are, more often than not, the direct and immediate result of an object’s initial presentation to the mind through experience, its first point of entry into our consciousness. Hume then calls ideas those perceptions which, since they are derived from impressions, lack the force and liveliness of the original perceptions of which they are mere copies[1]. Both forceful impressions and faint ideas can be either simple or complex, either unsusceptible or susceptible to division into smaller parts. Important for Hume is the notion that no simple idea can appear spontaneously in the consciousness without having first been generated by an earlier impression, which must likewise yield a correspondent simple idea[2]. Once an impression has struck the mind, it ‘passes’ over, if you will, and settles in the consciousness more permanently as an idea, and it can do so in one of two ways – either in the memory or in the imagination. In the first, there is high degree of fidelity to the original impression, and so it will retain much of its original force and liveliness. In the second, much of this intensity is lost. The ideas retained in the imagination are less faithful to the original impression, and so the mind is able to mix and combine them in practically limitless ways.

We will get to the precise ways in which ideas are associated in the imagination in a moment. We would in the meantime do well to take a brief detour and draw attention to an important implication in Hume’s theory of perception: its empiricism. Since all ideas are derived from impressions, and cannot spontaneously surge in the consciousness independently of experience, all knowledge, for Hume, is necessarily a posteriori – or at least all knowledge that has any practical value. Reason alone can give us no other information about the world than the purely tautological. We are able to affirm, without recourse to experience, that all bachelors are unmarried men, but are at a loss when we then attempt to infer what percentage of them is above the age of 35 – until, that is, we receive enough impressions of relevant external objects to make such an inference. No new knowledge about the world can be arrived at a priori; it must come from experience. And here, we find the first stepping-stone both toward Hume’s radical skepticism, and also toward his denial of any transcendental self. Descartes’ rationalism, whose conclusions are in important ways exactly contrary to Hume’s, rests on the transcendental bedrock of the cogito. I am able to reason my way deductively through a series of assertions which take, as their point of departure, an axiomatic first principle, because all these flow from a necessary and universal wellspring, one which gushes forth from the deepest and most unchangeable parts of me. For Hume, since there is no transcendental ‘I’, knowledge is, rather, gathered from the outside in. More than a wellspring, the mind is rather an empty and porous vessel, one submerged in a pool from which seep in millions of impressions like so many droplets, slowly filling it over time. The result is a self which, however ‘full’ it may become, nonetheless always remains heterogeneous, since its perceptions have entered it haphazardly, and are combined without any centrifugal power to lend it unity.

Now for our discussion of the imagination. For Hume, the imagination is that faculty of the mind in which ideas are associated to form meaningful relations. This process of association takes place according to so-called ‘universal principles’[3] and ‘relations’[4]. In the first, we find three species; in the second, seven. The difference between these two sets, the principles and relations, and the roles they respectively play in the imagination, is, to my mind, rather unclearly delineated by Hume. For, on the one hand, the function of the former seems to no significant degree distinguishable from that of the latter, and on the other, a glance at the three ‘principles’[5] reveals that two – resemblance and cause-effect – are repeated literally as relations, and the third – contiguity – is subsumed as a sub-category of the relation of time and space. I feel that Hume might just as easily have eliminated the first list altogether and consolidated the second. He does, admittedly, give a sense of greater necessity to the principles, a sense, in other words, that the operations of the imagination would be ‘unaccountable’ without them, but, though at first blush this might be taken as the principal difference between them, one quickly understands that this would still not account for the needless presence of the three in both lists – for it would hard to imagine them, at the same time, both more and less ‘necessary’. To further the confusion, several relations absent in his original list are proposed at numerous points later in the Treatise, and are not necessarily assimilable to any one of those found in it; relations which, though not necessarily named so, operate unmistakably in this way. One of these ‘renegade’ relations, diversity, is, critical to Hume’s theory of selfhood – as we shall see further on.

Now we come to Hume’s coup de grâce, to the skeptical conclusions that lent his philosophy the infamy it enjoyed until Kant. Having elucidated the structure of the mind, the nature of its perceptions, its faculties and cognitive principles, Hume then sets about applying these foundational concepts to a thorough analysis of the possibilities of certain knowledge. And he does this, chiefly, by attempting to break down the mechanisms of his most beloved relation of ideas: cause-and-effect. When two objects are seen as connected by this force, what exactly binds them together? What exactly is meant when we say that one object is the cause of another? Critically, Hume is here not interested in dictionary definitions, although he provides these as well[6]; he is concerned, not so much with defining causation, as with penetrating deep into its mystery and finding its precise location in or amongst the objects it characterises. Even more precisely, Hume is after that particular aspect of causation without which it could never been understood as a ‘power’ or ‘efficacy’: the element of necessary connection. This is that enigmatic principle, many times taken for granted by philosophers but never fully fleshed out, according to which, in every event, past, present and future of cause A, B will certainly follow. It is on this principle of necessary connection that Hume hinges the possibility of certain knowledge, and on its location he pegs the hope of affirming the same. Hume scours every possible corner in search of it, now looking at each object individually, now at the relational forces binding it to its attendant. But, try though he may, he can find no further relation binding any two objects than contiguity, succession and – at a stretch – constant conjunction, so that, although the objects in question must be found in extreme close proximity to each other spatially and temporally, and also one, the cause, must always precede the other, the effect, there can be said to be no deeper connection between them. The quality of necessary connection, which is required to deem the relation a ‘productive power’, is ever elusive, to be gleaned neither in any single quality of the objects[7] nor in their essence[8], and finds no correspondent impression from which its idea can be convincingly derived[9]. Hume’s conclusion is that neither reason nor experience can show a necessary connection between objects[10], for in the former, the arguments traditionally put forth to support are revealed spurious[11], and in the latter, past instances of a cause-effect conjunction are found insufficient to give us certainty that all future ones will resemble them[12].

Certain knowledge is therefore impossible, for it depends on a principle, necessary connection, which nature systematically refuses to yield. What we are left with, having understood the radicality of this refusal, is mere probability. As we are repeatedly exposed to instances in which objects A and B are presented to us contiguously and successively, we modify our expectation of any future instance of this conjunction, so that, with each new one, we feel the probability of this future event increasing. Knowledge, for Hume, is in fact nothing more than cumulative assurance resulting from the “addition of probabilities”[13]. More than knowledge, then, we have belief; more than certainty, possibility. It is belief that drives our actions, since, upon nature’s denial of anything apodictic, it is all we have left to fall back on in a world, to whose ambiguities the only adequate response would otherwise be a skeptical, perhaps even nihilistic surrender. Worded in Humeish, ‘belief’ is that quality of ‘force and liveliness’ with which an idea in endowed by custom, that is, from that which “proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion[14].” So, it is custom that provides the belief of a necessary connection between objects, not any inherent quality in them, nor any relation observable between them.

Hume’s theory of the self as a re-iteration of his broader epistemology

It is perhaps not so remarkable that many, if not most of Hume’s skeptical conclusions about the nature of knowledge in general can be applied to the possibility of knowing the self more specifically. In Part 4, section 6 of the treatise – On Personal Identity – he states his position in no uncertain terms. “We have no idea of the self”[15], he argues, and any attempt to find one will land us in “manifest contradiction and absurdity[16].” Just as he searches for necessary causation in both reason and experience, so too he attempts to locate the self using at least two different methodologies. I shall call the first the Cartesian, and the second, the Humean. In the first, Hume follows Descartes’ example and attempts to dive deep into the centre of his ‘I’, swimming past all his perceptions and hoping to uncover a ‘treasure’ buried in the deep, an immovable kernel existing apart from them. Where Descartes stumbles upon the cogito, however, Hume finds nothing but a void, or at most, perceptions giving way to more perceptions. In the second method, he attempts to trace the idea of the self back to its initial impression, and likewise finds the exploit to be futile. There is no single impression of the self, for if there were, it would need to be constant, since the self is imagined to be so, and there can be patently no such impression when our perceptions are always in flux[17].  Furthermore, if we by some miracle managed to find a constant impression upon which to base our idea of the self, what good would it do us if it didn’t resemble the idea which it was meant to generate? If any idea, including the idea of the self, must be derived from an impression, and must furthermore resemble it in the imagination, what impression could we find outside of ourselves which could conceivably generate an image of itself that we could rightly call a ‘self’? Such an impression could not even be conceived, let alone identified.[18]

The implications here are evident: there is no self to speak of – transcendental or otherwise. When I dive into my ‘deepest depths’, I find nothing but an abyss, and when I look to experience, I see nothing but flux. Neither font is capable of affording me the transcendental anchor I crave. Furthermore, my impressions are connected by no more than tenuous relations, and are therefore bound up in no really meaningful way. When I try to weave into a tapestry the multitudinous strands that comprise my ‘self’, I find that they unravel more quickly than I can fix them. My perceptions are separate, bound together in my mind no more intimately than particles of oxygen in an air space[19]. The unity they form can, accordingly, be deemed no more coherent than that enjoyed by these particles, which at any moment, in response to variations in air pressure, may enter and exit a space, without causing any clear gain or loss in identity. This ‘separateness’ of the perceptions is both the cause and effect of Hume’s transcendental skepticism; my perceptions, for their inherent inconstancy and heterogeneity, can never form an unchangeable essence, nor for that matter can they ever indicate an underlying, stable core for the exact same reason. So the empirical self is ruled out by Hume with the same resoluteness as its transcendental counterpart. Where, for Descartes, the cogito serves as the foundation for the empirical structure he builds upon it, for Hume, since there is no such foundation, there can likewise be no solid edifice that can be erected on it. It is perhaps unfortunate, then, that Hume also uses an edificial metaphor to represent the self, for the Humean ‘I’ is not constructed, and is furthermore missing some vital structural elements. It is, however, tellingly a ‘theatre’, a building noted not for its engineering but for its function. It is a house in which an ongoing fiction takes place, one requiring certain actors – our perceptions – to carry out a masquerade, to put on a rollicking farce we then call the ‘ego’.

So then why do we so gleefully buy into this fiction? Why do we follow, enthralled, these actors as they strut upon our mind’s stage, imparting on their disjointed soliloquies and chaotic movements a coherent narrative they don’t naturally present? The answer, for Hume, is an irresistible bias, an error we fall into constantly and unconsciously, one having to do with the relations of ideas we outlined in the previous section. For Hume, the relations of ‘diversity’[20] and ‘identity’ so strongly resemble each other that we routinely confuse them, so that when we are confronted with a situation in which objects are more properly understood as the former, we are instead naturally inclined to assign them to the latter.  Worded more precisely, when we are struck by successive impressions which, though related, are nonetheless distinct and independent, we are compelled by our inner faculties to tie them together in such a way that, in their concatenation, they take on the semblance of a sameness they don’t inherently possess. In the specific case of the ‘self’, we see that this bias prompts our imagination to mistakenly attribute to our perceptions a relation of identity that would better be understood as diversity, or at most relatedness, and it is the fictional unity resulting from this mis-operation which we finally call the ‘self’.

The skeptical parallels between Hume’s theory of knowledge and his theory of selfhood are evident; so much so that the latter strikes the reader as a mere extension of the former. Just as, in the case of causation, Hume searches for a meaningful connection, a productive ‘power’ binding the objects of reality together, and fails to find one, so too, when he examines the structure of the self, he searches the various perceptions that comprise it for a unifying relation they never reveal. In both the case of causation and of the self, Hume scans reality for an originating impression, and in both cases, he yet again fails in his enterprise; there is no impression capable of generating an idea of necessary connection, nor much less one capable of furnishing an idea of the self. In both scenarios, we are left with mistakes, misattributions and misinterpretations. In causation, we allow custom to lull us into a kind of stupor, one in which our scrutiny is half-suspended. An idea is formed which is given a greater force and liveliness than it merits, and a belief unduly attached to it, one consolidated cumulatively over time but never fully legitimated. The imagination misdirects us, taking one set of weaker relations – contiguity, succession and necessary conjunction – for a mightier one, necessary connection, and a belief emerges which, given the force we misattribute to it, falsely strikes us as certain knowledge. In the self, we are likewise led down the garden path, and in a very similar fashion. One relation is taken for another, and we see as a unity that which is essentially heterogeneous. This comparative analysis yields an obvious conclusion: both our worlds, the external and the internal, would appear to operate according to similar principles, or better, are equally inaccessible to us in their deeper mysteries. Just as objective reality is populated with things which, since they are far more disconnected from each other than we might believe, cannot afford us epistemic certainty, so too is our consciousness filled with perceptions that are so haphazardly assembled over time as to be denied any meaningful unity.

It is, on the other hand, peculiar that the notion of belief, which was so critical to Hume in his discussion on causation, is practically absent from his reflections on selfhood. For it would appear intuitive that, if there is a bias at work in our conception of the self, it will necessarily produce a biased belief, one which, however radically it may misrepresent the basic nature of the ego, we will readily assent to. Yet a literal interpretation of Humean belief seems to preclude this intuition, for if we understand this concept as a “lively idea associated to or related to a present impression”[21], we might question how it is possible for it to be applied to the unity of the self at all, if there is no impression to which such a lively idea can be associated. We generally have no trouble conceiving of ourselves as a unity, and form a belief based on this conception quite readily, and yet if there is no foundation on which this belief can rest, how do we account for its presence? Is the belief in question false? If so, from which ‘false’ impression was it derived? Or perhaps Hume’s definition of belief must be calibrated to encompass an idea that has no corresponding impression. Or perhaps the belief in a ‘self’ is no belief at all. But then what is it? Hume would appear to clarify this question when he says, “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us”[22]. And yet we readily give our assent also to fictitious ideas, that is, to ideas that have no correspondent object in reality, since they derive from initial impressions which are themselves already false or misinterpreted by us: the superstitious beliefs of others, for instance, or an image of an object distorted by perspective – the only difference between these and those, other fictitious ideas which reside in the imagination, being no more than a clear awareness of their falsehood. The self is, similarly, a unity of belief that can never find its correspondent in a unitary impression, while all the same enjoying an unmistakable unity all its own. The contradiction here is evident, and Hume attempts to reconcile it by asserting that, having found no justification for itself in any single impression, the ‘I’ spontaneously forms a notion of itself by an operation of the imagination, and equally spontaneously finds itself represented in an idea – the idea of the unitary and simple self. But this idea is, quite clearly, so forceful and irresistible, that I wager Hume himself would be helpless to confer upon it any other designation than ‘belief’. And since the belief has no grounding in an impression, it can therefore not possibly convey the mind to the forceful and vivacious idea which the self, in fact, enjoys. When we conceive of ourselves, we do so instinctively as a unity. We are a bundle of perceptions, yes, but to see these perceptions as fundamentally free-floating and separate is an unintuitive exercise, one requiring an unnatural effort of the mind. The belief from which we depart, generally, is of the self as a unity. I am Ilario Colli, born in Australia of Italian parents in 1982, I am 6-feet tall, have brown hair and study philosophy. These are discrepant perceptions which, however, I have no trouble at all stringing together into a unity. In fact, this ‘stringing together’ is my default mode of operating, one so entrenched that it would require a very deliberate act of the intellect or the imagination to distract me from it to its opposite, to a dismantling of my ego into disparate parts. The belief in the unitary self is undeniable, and Hume nowhere disavows it. Yet neither does he give it sufficient grounding in the imagination. Or rather, he grounds it in the imagination precisely, but since he negates any notion of the transcendental self, he uses this argument to support the fiction of the self rather than the fact, which it could equally sustain. And this is, I believe, where he falls short. As I will more properly explain in the section that follows, Hume’s refusal to admit to any transcendental structure of the consciousness, when he repeatedly flirts with this very idea is, I submit, the chief reason behind the evident contradiction between, on the one hand, the fiction of the unitary self in fact and, on the other hand, its apparent factual clarity as a fiction.

Transcendental critique of Hume’s theory of personal identity

The Treatise of Human Nature abounds in transcendental allusions which, however, are systematically ignored or dismissed by its author. Some of these are present in passages so critical to Hume’s thinking that, had he deigned to integrate them into its broader fabric, they would have transformed his philosophy beyond recognition. To the reader well-versed in Kant, these latent ‘transcendentalisms’ might seem intuitive, even obvious, and yet it is hard to imagine how they might not have appeared so to Hume himself, considering how often in his thought and alongside which of its foundational tenets they surge. The only answer I can devise for this otherwise inexplicable oversight is that Hume was a victim of his own ideology. Having devised a first principle in which he sincerely and passionately believed, one upon which he felt he could build a robust system, he then becomes so attached to it, that all other concepts become its hostage; any threat to its integrity, no matter how speculatively valid, is either willfully silenced or unconsciously repressed. The foundational principle in question is, of course, the primacy of the impression and, by extension, of a posteriori knowledge. If all knowledge derives from our impressions, then there can be no innate ideas, and reason is helpless to form it independently of experience. There is no a priori knowledge in any meaningful sense – Hume, though in not so many words, states this fairly clearly. And yet, from the beginning of the treatise, he betrays himself constantly by referencing a priori structures and activities of the mind which he then resolutely refuses to treat as such. The mind is divided into the ‘soul’ and the ‘understanding’ – that is, the feeling and thinking parts, or, alternatively, the sensible and the cognitive[23]. Impressions are connected to their correspondent ideas by an inescapable causal relationship, for it is otherwise inexplicable how the former could, always and without fail, lead to the latter[24]. Here, there can be no other agency at work than one which is necessary and universal, that is, a priori, since it would be difficult indeed to imagine a person whose mind is structured otherwise than as a sensing and thinking entity, and who can prevent the emergence of an idea from its corresponding impression once the latter has struck their consciousness with ‘force and liveliness’. And we have already seen how, for Hume, belief is, at once, a ‘lively idea associated to a present impression’, but also a feeling which, since it can surge independently from experience, must have a life of its own, free from any single impression. In all these examples, Hume traces back to experience phenomena which would more properly be understood as belonging to reason. And, as we shall now see, nowhere is this misattribution more evident, nowhere are the inconsistencies in Hume’s thought more clearly noted, than in his treatment of the imagination.

From its very first appearance in the Treatise, the imagination is unequivocally designated as a ‘faculty’, that is, as an area of cognitive activity which stands quite clearly apart from the impressions and ideas it acts upon, and therefore presumably predates them. The transcendental implication here is undeniable, and yet, predictably, it is sidestepped by Hume with a resoluteness equal only to the forcefulness with which it would appear to present itself. How a faculty can act on our ideas and not be present in the mind independently of experience, that is, not be transcendental, is difficult indeed to imagine, and yet Hume refuses, time and again, to explore this possibility, preferring instead to insinuate that the two, our perceptions and our faculties, are somehow concomitant – the latter spontaneously coming alive in the consciousness only in response to the surging of the former. Having identified the imagination as a faculty, Hume then doubles down on his pseudo-transcendental position by asserting that, in the imagination, certain ‘universal principles’ must be at work, since its operations would be otherwise “unaccountable”[25]. These principles, of which he initially provides a list of three and then, expanding it, seven, are universal presumably because the human mind can process information in no other way than by means of them, and they determine its activity so completely that barely a single idea can be conceived which is left untouched by them. And yet, as if to briskly withdraw the carrot he has enticingly dangled, he immediately qualifies his statement, rather puzzlingly stating that these so-called ‘universal principles’ are, not necessary connections after all, but mere ‘gentle forces’[26]. The sophistry here is so evident as to barely merit a consideration. How any principle can be, at once, universal and gentle is beyond at least my comprehension, and yet Hume downplays their role in precisely this way, while at the same time proceeding to lay them at the foundation of much of his philosophy, thereby conceding, in deed, the strength and ‘hardness’ he has denied them in word. The explanation for this contradiction is the same: Hume is unable to drive away the transcendental spectre hovering over his shoulder, but at the same time obstinately refuses to acknowledge it, so that it remains there, exerting a ghostly influence he is never able to fully exorcise.

And the spectre doesn’t leave Hume’s side even as he turns his attention to personal identity. Au contraire, much – if not most – of what has been said thus far can be applied to Hume’s philosophy of the self also. For, how a self can be rootless and disparate when, at its basis, it has at least two overarching layers structuring it – the first being the division between the soul and the understanding, and the second, the imagination and the memory – is as hard a problem to solve as every other one thus far stated. Hume’s central thesis – that the self is a bundle of perceptions, disparate and disenfranchised – runs aground when the a priori activities and faculties that organise it are taken as its universal and necessary structuring principles, as its transcendental glue. The imagination, in which much of the construction work on the self is done, is a faculty governed by universal principles without which none of its operations would be accountable. These are Hume’s thoughts, not mine – nor Kant’s, for that matter. And yet, somehow, amid all this pseudo-transcendentalism, a fictional self counter-intuitively emerges, one which fails to find its grounding in the very operations of the mind of which it is posited as the direct result. It is hard to imagine how Hume would respond to such a challenge. Perhaps he would argue that the self is fictional, not because it lacks an underlying structure, which he may admit to, but because the structure is faulty, and foolishly pretends to a greater relation, identity, when it should content itself with a lesser. However, this proposition itself becomes illogical when a transcendental premise is conceded. If there is a transcendental basis for the self, one which bundles together all its perceptions, no idea needs to be identical to any other in order to be slotted into a framework, since the framework is provided, not by any perception, but already by the mind. Furthermore, there can be no justification for the existence of a bias whose purpose is to give the illusion of identity where it is absent, if a transcendental core is in place which performs this very operation on an ongoing basis. Unknowingly, Hume has put a director in the stalls of his own theatre of the mind, and however unacknowledged it may be by its author, it appears to be, at least partly, imparting order on chaos, and directing its players and their actions in a semblance of a coherent narrative.

Bibliography

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton. The

            Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007

[1] P. 7

[2] P. 9

[3] P. 12. Resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect

[4] Pp. 14-15. Resemblance, identity, space and time, quantity or number, degrees of quality, contrariety, cause and effect

[5] P. 15.

[6] “An object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other…” (116)

[7] P. 53

[8] P. 61

[9] P. 59

[10] P. 64

[11] Pp. 53-8

[12] P. 62

[13] “Now ’tis evident, that this gradual encrease of assurance is nothing but the addition of new probabilities, and is deriv’d from the constant union of causes and effects, according to past experience and observation.” (121)

[14] Pp. 71-2

[15] This is a paraphrase of: “… nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d. For from what impression cou’d this idea be deriv’d? This question ’tis impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity…” (164)

[16] Ibid.

[17] P. 164

[18] P. 153

[19] P. 164

[20] This is the relation I mentioned earlier which is not included in Hume’s original list of seven (165), even though, admittedly, later, he appears to reword it a ‘succession or related objects’ (166)

[21] P. 67

[22] P. 64

[23] P. 7

[24] P. 9

[25] P. 12

[26] P. 13. It should also be noted that, further on in the Treatise, Hume ‘takes the plunge’, and describes the universality and necessity of certain principles in no uncertain terms: “In order to justify myself, I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal; such as the customary transition from causes to effects, and from effects to causes: And the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular; such as those I have just now taken notice of.” (148)