Work · Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature
1739 · Three books
The boldest empiricism: on the self, cause and effect, and why reason is the slave of the passions.
3
Books
1739–40
Published
“Dead-born”
How Hume rated its reception
One demolition, three floors
The three Books are one argument run three times. Each demands the experiential receipt for something everyone assumes is solid, necessary connection, the self, the move from fact to value, and each time reports, in a tone of perfect calm, that the receipt never appears.
The shape of the argument
Book I — Of the Understanding
The meaning-detector traces every idea to an impression, and finds none behind necessary connection or behind the self, which dissolves into a bundle of passing perceptions.
Book II — Of the Passions
The passions mapped, and the deliberately shocking claim that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions: it finds means, it never sets the ends.
Book III — Of Morals
Moral distinctions are felt through sympathy, not reasoned out; natural versus artificial virtues; and the observation that an "ought" never simply follows from an "is".
The cast
Hume — publishes the whole system before thirty, then watches it "fall dead-born from the press"
Sympathy — the natural capacity to catch others’ feelings, on which Hume rests all of morality
The bundle — what the self turns out to be once you look for it: a heap of perceptions, no owner found
Kant — reads the argument on causation and is "woken from his dogmatic slumber"
The famous bits
Impressions and ideasBook I
Every idea is a faded copy of some prior impression; no impression, no genuine idea behind the word.
Cause and effect as habitBook I
We never observe the necessity-glue between events, only one following another, until habit makes us expect it.
The self as a bundleBook I
Look inward for the self and you only ever catch a particular perception, never the owner of them all.
Reason, slave of the passionsBook II
Reason alone moves nobody; it serves desires it cannot itself set or correct.
Sympathy and moral sentimentBook III
Approval and blame are feelings caught from others, not conclusions drawn by argument.
The is–ought gapBook III
Writers slide from what is to what ought to be without ever showing how the bridge is crossed.