Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism 9783110327076, 9783110326680

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Fred Wilson Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

Philosophische Analyse Philosophical Analysis Herausgegeben von / Edited by Herbert Hochberg • Rafael Hüntelmann • Christian Kanzian Richard Schantz • Erwin Tegtmeier Band 22 / Volume 22

Fred Wilson

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

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Dedication

To the memory of Richard Popkin, philosopher and Hume scholar

Acknowledgments I should acknowledge my immense debt to Gustav Bergmann, who was a great philosopher and a great teacher. He taught me what philosophy is and how to do it. I want to recognize, too, my debt to Richard Popkin: I never had him as a teacher, but learned much from his work in the history of philosophy; and, while I have disagreed with his reading of Hume, it was nonetheless incredibly stimulating. Let me note also that the work of L. Addis on the philosophy of mind and H. Hochberg on ontology have also contributed. On Hume, there is, as always, Páll Árdal, and also the encouragement of John Davis. Finally, let me note how useful I have found John Bricke’s Hume’s Philosophy of Mind and Julius Weinberg’s Abstraction, Relation, Induction.

I have used material from my contribution to the Bergmann festschrift , “Why I Do Not Experience Your Pains,” in The Ontological Turn: Essays in Honor of Gustav Bergmann, ed. M. Gram and E. D. Klemke (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974), pp. 276-300. Used with permission of the University of Iowa Press..

Note I should perhaps point out that the present essay that develops themes that I have discussed already in my The External World and Our Knowledge of It: Hume’s Critical Realism: An Exposition and a Defence, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. At the same time, many of the themes of the present study, particularly those concerning Hume’s critical realism and our knowledge of the external world, so called, find a more detailed defence in this earlier study. The two studies support one another. And it is worth adding that things in both these studies find their defence in turn in my earlier Hume’s Defence of Causal Inference, also from the University of Toronto Press. Relevant also are my The Logic and Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought (University of Toronto Press) and The Logic and Methodology of Science and Pseudoscience (Canadian Scholars Press). References to other parts of my work which support various parts of the present work, for example arguments concerning the logic of scientific explanation and arguments concerning the logical structure of scientific theories, can be found in the Endnotes to the various chapters.

Table of Contents Introduction: What Is a Person?

1

Endnotes to Introduction

16

Chapter One: Self as Substance

17

(1) The Substance Tradition (2) The Metaphysics of Morals (3) Morality and the Simple Self Untied (4) Human Nature Defended (5) George Grant: Aristotelian Moral Philosophy Made Modern (6) Another Sort of Mind (7) Minds as Bundles

17 26 34 42 69 86 94

Endnotes to Chapter One

96

Chapter Two: Nominalism and Acquaintance

103

(1) Individuation and Nominalism (2) The Principle of Acquaintance in Locke and Hume (a) Locke (b) Hume (3) The Appeal to Acquaintance: Empiricism vs. Descartes (4) Hume’s Nominalism (5) Nominalism and Relations (6) Nominalism, Causation, Substances and Things (7) Resemblance, Abstract Ideas, the Distinction of Reason, and the Simplicity of Things

106 108 108 114 121 124 130 139 151

Endnotes to Chapter Two

182

Chapter Three: From the Substance Tradition through Locke to Hume: Ordinary Things and Critical Realism 191 (1) Up to Locke (2) From Locke to Hume (3) Hume’s Causal Inference to Critical Realism (4) The System of the Vulgar as False, Inevitable and Reasonable (5) The World of the Philosophers (6) Conclusion

191 196 214 224 231 241

Endnotes to Chapter Three

246

Chapter Four: The Disappearance of the Simple Self: Its Problems

251

(1) Substance and Self in Locke (2) The Contents of the Humean Mind ( i ) The Intrinsically Mental ( ii ) Neither Mental nor Material (3) Explaining Consciousness (4) Privacy and Other Minds (i) Parallelism: Hartley, Hume and Something of Its History: Why It Is Believable (ii) Parallelism and Interactionism (iii) Parallelism: Further Exposition (iv) Ownership of Mental States ( v ) Privacy (5) The Problem of the Self in Hume

255 257 258 273 283 312

Endnotes to Chapter Four

361

Chapter Five: Hume’s Positive Account of the Self

375

(1) Mind and Body (2) The Bodily Criterion

375 395

316 322 328 335 348 352

(3) Humean Persons (i) Hume on Norms: His Account of “Ought” (ii) Character and Personal Identity (iii) Knowledge of Oneself Conclusion; or, perhaps not ... (4) Becoming Ourselves (5) Conclusion – The Final One

403 405 424 431 463 471 488

Endnotes to Chapter Five

496

Bibliography

507

Index

535

Introduction What is a Person?

Hume gave a certain answer to the question posed by the title of this Introduction, an answer that has long been controversial, and rejected by many commentators. However, what we will be arguing is that this rejection has often been the result of a failure to read Hume’s Treatise carefully. Moreover, where it has been a reasoned rejection of Hume’s position, it has, unfortunately, often been based for the most part on premises deriving from the substance tradition, even though Hume offered a devastating critique of that tradition. There are certain commonsense things that everyone can agree with concerning persons. In the first place, persons are individuals. And secondly, they are natured individuals: every person is not just a person but has a distinctive character or identity as a moral person, as a Scot, and/or as a librarian, and/or etc. The substance tradition offers a certain account of these facts. Hume criticizes this account and offers an alternative. We must discuss the account, the criticism, and the alternative. We shall discover that the criticisms and the alternative are generally sound, and the substance account, and therefore the criticisms based upon it, unsupportable. This is not to say that Hume’s positions are problem-free: to the contrary, they are not. But other thinkers in the empiricist tradition offered solutions that help to defend Hume’s central claims. For example, John Stuart Mill made significant points about our knowledge of our selves and about the logic of our inferences to other minds, and Russell made points about relations that are absolutely central if Hume’s view of persons is to be defended. The central proposition about persons is that A person is an individual that has a certain character.1 A character is what a person is, that is, it is his or her identity. It is a configuration of capacities, that is, a configuration of passions, abilities, aptitudes, proclivities, powers, habits, virtues, vices, tastes, sentiments and temperaments, all understood as dispositions, that is, as analysable into ‘if...then’ causal connections. Among the important dispositions are the social roles that we play, butcher, baker, stock broker, professor, bank teller, bank depositor, borrower, lender, employer, employee, promisor,

Introduction

promisee, waiter, parent, gangster. These features constitute the self as a bearer of rights and privileges in civil society and in the subgroups that go to form civil society. Beyond this are other features of the person, e.g., his or her being a Scotsman, raised near Edinburgh, a speaker of English, a member of the Hume family, one capable of understanding, and maybe, to an extent, feeling the sentiments of a Calvinist – those features that give his or her self a continuing (though changing) identity, rooted in his or her social and psychological being. Often there are certain dominant traits that organize the others. Thus, the miser is dominated by the passion for money; his various capacities tend to be exercised in a way that helps him systematically to realize his passion. Each person can be identified as a certain unique configuration of dispositional traits. This unique character forms the nature of the individual; a person’s name picks him out not only as an individual but also as having a certain character, self and identity. This linkage of the individuality and the character of a person was noted by Hume when he pointed out that, for socialized persons, “our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance” (T, p. 316).2 In the first instance a person’s character determines his or her response to events and experiences; in the first instance it is one’s character that determines one’s responses to social and environmental conditions, rather than those conditions determining one’s character. To know a person’s character is to know what sort of life is best suited to actualizing his or her real potentialities. But persons can also grow and develop. They can not only respond in character to events in their environment but their characters can themselves change in response to those events. Of course, some capacities are innate; these innate aptitudes, dispositions and instincts form the very core of a person. For it is within the framework of this core that the history of the individual is worked out. But these innate capacities are for the most part capacities to form capacities, capacities to acquire habits; and the history that is worked out includes the acquisition of further capacities and habits. Dispositions are, of course, actualized on the occurrence of certain events; and different events will lead to the acquisition of different habits. On the same core framework of innate dispositions, many different histories are possible, many different sorts of person could be produced, many identities, depending upon external events over which the mind or person often has no control. People thus come to have very different characters, and to be very different individuals, that is, as we said, unique

2

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

identities, unique configurations of dispositions. But dispositions as such can belong to different individuals. All the many samples of sugar are soluble, all bankers tend to do bankerly things; all misers share the disposition to be miserly, and so on. Even configurations that are unique to a person could, in principle at least, be had by more than one. A person not so much is but has a unique character, an individual character if you wish, but besides this is also an individual. What is it, then, that individuates these unique characters into the persons that we are and that we know? What is the principle of individuation of persons? What gives them their identity? Dispositions find their actualization in facts and events. What distinguish the dispositions that constitute one person from those that constitute another person, then, are the events which are their actualization. In other words, what distinguishes persons from each other, what individuates one from another, what gives them their identities, are the sequences of concrete facts and events that constitute their histories. When a disposition is actualized, there is an event which is the occasion of its exercise, and the event which is its actualization. In the case of first order dispositions, the event which is its actualization is a concrete event. This disposition may be physical-mental as when we come to perceive something. The capacity to come to know objects by sense is a capacity. The occasion of its exercise is (usually) a sensible event or object that causally interacts with our sense organs. The disposition is actualized with regard to a particular event or object, which event or object evokes a perceptual awareness of the event or object the object or event occurs at a particular time and place, as does the awareness of the event or object – the awareness is itself a particular event that occurs at a particular time and place, different from, but generally near to, the event or object of which it is an awareness. Or again, the disposition might be mental-physical. Thus, we have the capacity to raise our arms. The occasion for the exercise of this disposition is (often) a volition, and the exercise of this disposition is the arm’s actually going up. And there are also mental-mental dispositions, the occasion and exercise of which are both mental, as, for example, when I set out to solve a problem “in my head,” or strive, and then succeed, in remembering some forgotten date. We also have second-order dispositions, that is, dispositions to acquire dispositions. Some events in the history that constitutes a person

3

Introduction

consist in the acquisition of first-order dispositions. Such an event is the actualization of appropriate second-order dispositions. This may be a momentary process, the occasion a single event; cutting myself with a knife I become disposed to infection by germs. Or the occasion may itself be a long history, as when I acquire the dispositions characteristic of being a skilled typist or a skilled pianist. Among the capacities that a person has is that of rational deliberation. Given a certain end, a person can deliberate about the means to achieve that end, and choose the one that he or she prefers. Given several ends, a person can reason about them, and schedule their pursuit. A person can even choose among the ends which one is to be pursued. Persons can also adopt attitudes towards their own activities and those of others, preferring some, being repelled by others, morally approving some, disapproving others. One can even approve and disapprove of the desires that others have, and, even more importantly, of the desires and attitudes that one has oneself. One deliberates to answer not only question of “How shall I achieve this?” but also “Should I achieve this?” and even “what should I achieve?” and even “What sort of person am I if I decide to do this? Do I want to be that sort of person?” Our critical, reflective and deliberative capacities may thus lead to the revision or rejection of an end that we previously had. It can also lead to the acquisition of ends that we previously lacked. In deciding to become a parent, I come in the end to have a wide variety of ends, passions, sentiments, purposes, goals that I previously lacked. Some of these are acquired involuntarily, as consequences of the history I go through in becoming a parent; others are deliberately cultivated. Thus, “What shall I do?” is connected in the end with “How shall I live?” and, even more deeply with “What sort of person shall I be?” I not only have a character but in addition I can pose the question of my character in a normative way, “What ought I to be?” that is, what sort of person ought I to be. Or at least, some persons, some times, raise that sort of question. To be able to raise the question, deliberate on it, answer it, and act upon that answer is itself a capacity, and as such a feature of character. It is, moreover, a feature that some have to a greater degree than others. A person who is unable to reflect critically upon his or her own ends lacks a measure of depth and seriousness; such a person we think of as shallow. We see, thus, that some persons have the capacity to change their own characters; there can be self-development. Those who can do the latter have a special character trait, that of being able to reflect upon and to self-

4

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

consciously monitor their own selves and change themselves in ways that they self-consciously determine. At least some persons are individuals who are responsible for themselves. They are not merely the subjects of desires, of passions, of mental and physical abilities, and of traits of character. They are also beings who are able to reflectively monitor themselves; they are able to pose the de jure question about whether the self they discover themselves to be is the sort of being they ought to be; and if they are not, they are able to modify their characters to conform to the standard that this moral desire sets for them. In Heidegger’s terms, man is “das Seiende, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht,”3 that is, a person is the sort of individual for whom the question arises about what kind of being he or she is going to realize. Or, as Frankfurt has put it, there is in persons a “capacity for reflective self-evaluation...manifest in the formation of second-order desires,” that is, desires to the effect that we want to be moved by certain desires, and in the formation of “second-order volitions,” volitions determining which first-order desires move one to action.4 As we noted above, the same core of native tendencies can provide the framework for many different histories, and therefore many different individual persons. Each of us can imagine how things would have been different if certain events over which we have no control had been different. What if that accident that almost killed one’s parents had actually proved fatal and that one had as a consequence been orphaned and then raised in a very different family? What if the person you married had after all decided to stay in his or her native city rather than moving away to yours? One can imagine the differences, and perhaps even in one’s day dreams live and enjoy them, the persons one might have been. In this context, one’s actual character may seem quite unessential, almost like one of the various social roles that one takes on and then gives up as the occasion and one’s interests require. Here one might compare Zeno Vendler’s point that I, in this case Zeno Vendler, this man whom I am, could not be the individual that I am if I had been born at any other period or of any other parents than my own. Yet I can imagine living in a different world, at a different time, e.g., as Hannibal watching the battle of Cannae, or as Claudius. But the impossible cannot be imagined, so it must be possible that I, Zeno, be Hannibal or Claudius. But Claudius has one individual essence, Hannibal another, and Zeno still a third. So the ‘I’ that is the subject of such a transference “has no content and no essence; it is a mere frame in which any picture fits; it is the bare form of consciousness.”

5

Introduction

The transcendental ‘I’ is not a thing...The transcendental aspect of my being consists in nothing else but in the realization that I, as a subject of experience, am only contingently tied to the senses of this body,...in one word, it consists in my ability to perform feats of transference.5

What is crucial in all this is the self that determines which role one takes on, which individual character one actually is. But this is not merely the set of innate dispositions with which we are born, but the self with the more or less well developed capacity for determining the self that one is and is to become. And it involves the capacity to imagine being other than one is, imagining as a possibility that one might become or imagining for the sheer joy of fantasizing. The self that one is, is created by oneself (though not solely by oneself) out of a past. This past is accessible to that self through memory – though we should also recognize three things: first, that, through causal factors that we cannot control, much of the past, and even parts of our own past, are inaccessible to us; second, that the past that we know is in part shaped by our present selves, that we are, in other words, very much responsible for how we regard the past, conceptualize it, and assimilate it; and third, that even when we disguise the past, it may nonetheless still influence us. But the self that fashions a self out of the past has a certain aim, a certain, more or less vague, vision of the self that it aims to be, or rather, to create. As Williams has put it, “an individual person has a set of desires, concerns, or as I shall often call them, projects, which help constitute a character,” and a person has a character “in the sense of having projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.”6 In other words, a person can identify with certain ends, often second-order ends, in that he or she regards his or her pursuit of these ends, or pursuit in certain ways, as crucial to his or her life, to defining what he or she is to be as a person. And if the person is successful, then he or she becomes the sort of person defined by the ends with which they have identified. If what one is constitutes one’s identity – and that, after all, is the point of the traditional formula for identity: two things are identical just in case they have all their properties in common x = y : : (f)(fx fy) A – then the character that one identifies with becomes through the self acting out of a certain past the character which constitutes the identity of

i

. ‘– >’ represents the material conditional and ‘’ the material biconditional.

6

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

the self. The self creates itself out of its past and out of the vision that it has of itself. The self with the vision of itself provides the unity that links the past to the self that is created and for which it is responsible. The unity of the self is not simply something that we discover but also something that we create. The agency of self-consciousness, our capacity to reflect upon ourselves and deliberate about the sorts of persons we shall be, extends from the past into the future in the activity of creating the unified self that each of us is. Persons are thus self-determining individuals, changing but unified as one person throughout the process of change, responsible not only for the consequences of their actions but for themselves, shaped by a central core of being, a reflective self-consciousness, capable of determining exactly who it is they are. This concept of a person is, as Amélie Rorty has put it, the idea of “a unified centre of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility.” This concept of a person is central to Christian belief. Again as Rorty puts it, “If judgment summarizes a life, as it does in the Christian drama, then that life must have a unified location.”7 This concept had been wed for the mediaeval philosophers to the doctrine of substance that they inherited from the ancient world. This coupling of the two was effected by Boethius who held that “persona...est naturae rationabilis indiuidua substantia”: a person is the individual substance of a rational nature.8 Hume accepts this picture of the self or person as a natured and unified individual, determined to be the sort of person he or she is by his or her own reflective self-consciousness. But at the same time he rejects the substantialist account of the self that had been inherited by the modern world from the mediaeval world by way of Descartes. However, his own picture of the self leaves him curiously dissatisfied. He is reasonably satisfied with his account of causation. He is reasonably satisfied with his account of body. But when it comes to the self, he is, as he records in the famous “Appendix” to the Treatise, unable to arrive at a conclusion that he regards as fully satisfactory philosophically. The problem, in its basic outline is clear enough. What Hume argues is that the self is a “bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and motion” (T, p. 252). This seems incompatible with the idea that the self is a unity, and that that unity derives from a centre of reflective self-consciousness. Unable wholly to resolve the difficulty he is left dissatisfied.

7

Introduction

Unlike many of his critics, however, Hume does not take this seemingly unresolvable inconsistency as a reductio of his position; more reasonably than those critics, he takes it instead as a problem that remains to be solved. His attitude is that one does not throw up one’s hands and abandon a well defended position at the least difficulty; rather, one puts it aside and hopes that as oneself or one’s students and successors work on the problem it will in fact prove to be solvable. Or, perhaps, since this is philosophy, dissolvable. In fact, as Hume sets it up, there are several problems. One is the problem of one’s identity in the sense of one’s character, the properties and dispositions that one and others take to define oneself as a person. The problem is that one is not born with these characteristics, most of them at least, though some of them appear naturally as one develops from an infant to an adult: and if one does not have these characteristics as part of one’s biological nature, how does one acquire them? through what sort of learning process do they come to form what one is? Then, second, there is the problem of the nature of the self as a being that is morally responsible for one’s actions. This, too, seems to be, in part at least, a matter of learning: infants are not responsible, we teach them so that they become beings responsible for their actions, and, one hopes, beings that accept responsibility for their actions. Third , there is the problem of the self as a centre of consciousness. What is the nature of this consciousness? and how does it come to be a centre? Fourth, related to this, there is the problem of self-consciousness, in the sense of reflective self-consciousness: how is it that one can reflect upon oneself, and one’s states of consciousness in particular? what is the nature of mind that allows for this? And how, in the light of such reflection, can one allow oneself to do certain things, and not do others, and indeed how can it be that one can shape one’s own character? (This last relates, of course, to problem one, above.) Fifth, there is the problem of continuity: what does one mean when one and others take one to be today the same person that you were yesterday? (This relates to the second problem, above: how can one today be morally responsible for what you, presumably the same person, did yesterday?) All these issues receive a simple solution in the substance tradition On this tradition, the person is a simple substance, an entity that endures through change. This substance is active: through this activity this

8

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

substance brings about for changes that occur in its history, these changes are actions for which it is responsible. The substance has a certain nature or form or essence: this nature determines the sort of changes that can occur in the substance. Its form or nature is its species; this species determines its natural ends, the way towards which it is striving to be, and the direction in which, by virtue of that form, it is striving. The form or essence explains the direction of change which occurs in the substance; the explanation is therefore teleological. The species that a substance has it has of necessity, if (per impossibile) a substance loses its species or form then that substance ceases to be (Socrates is human but if Socrates ceases to be human he ceases to be). The species which a substance has will fall under a genus, which gives those ways of being which it shares with other species under that genus. What distinguishes one species from that other species under a given genus is the specific difference that defines the species. The real definition of the species is given by its genus and its specific difference. The real definition is not only logical but gives the ontological structure of the substance, a structure which it has as a matter of necessity, ontological necessity. Thus, according to Aristotle, the world consists of substances of various sorts or species, and in particular a person is a substance the nature or essence of which is rational animal: the real definition of a person is rational animal, where animal is its genus and rational is its specific difference. A person grows or develops, as a plant grown or develops – that is how it actively moves itself. Just as, by its nature an acorn grows into an oak tree, so the infant through its nature grows into an adult. All animals share this feature of form with plants. But animals can further move themselves about; they are capable of local motion. This is the genus: substances capable of growth and local motion. Persons are animals in this sense. What distinguishes them from other animals is the fact that they are rational; this is their specific difference. To be rational means that such a substance can grasp the reasons for things, that is, the reasons for things being as they are. Since the form or essence of a substance is the reason why it acts as it does, persons as rational can grasp these forms which are the reasons for things behaving as they do. Indeed, this determines its natural end as an animal that aims to know: knowing reasons is its telos. Among substances, however, a person too has a form and this form can itself be grasped by a person. A person is therefore not only conscious insofar as it is a knower of things, it is also self conscious, aware of its own being, grasping the species which is its form, as it grasps the

9

Introduction

species or forms of other things. And thus, knowing its own natural ends, it not only acts to be in those ways determined by it nature, but knowing the reasons for other things, it can choose the means that is best for those ends. But being an imperfect knower it can sometimes so choose that it frustrates its natural ends. Descartes is part of this substance tradition. A person is selfconscious, Descartes discovers in the cogito, when he becomes aware of his own thinking, that which turns out to be the reason for his being, which turns out as it were to be simply thinking: I think, therefore I am. In fact, Descartes argues, thinking is the very form or essence of a person: I am, he discovers, a thinking thing (sum res cogitans), a substance the essence of which is to think, that is, to come to know the reasons for things. Thus, where Aristotle held that a person is a rational animal, Descartes argued that, whatever a person’s relation is to his or her body, the essence of that person is thinking, and thinking alone, pure thought or pure reason. Mind is thus sharply distinguished from body: it is consciousness, pure consciousness, which can also be self-conscious. For both Aristotle and Descartes, the problems that we located above receive a simple solution in terms of the substances which persons are. These philosophers do give different accounts of the essence of human being, but, important as those differences may be, this difference is a mere detail – that is a mere detail compared to what Hume has to say about persons. Hume argues that there are no substances; one does not find them in our ordinary experience of the world and so one cannot admit them into any ontology that can pretend to be reasonable.. There are therefore also no forms or essences, nor are these the reasons for things. Explanation ceases to be teleological. Things happen but there are no substances to make them happen; there are patterns in which things change, but these patterns do not arise from the activities of an underlying substance. There are, clearly, no natural ends, that is, ends determined as a matter of necessity by some form or essence. To be sure, acorns still grow into oak trees but this development is not a matter of the striving of a substance moving itself towards its natural end; it is rather just the way things happen in the world in which we find ourselves. The same holds for persons: there are conscious states, just as there are the sensible appearances of things, but they not to be accounted for by appeal to an underlying substance, Moreover, just as for ordinary things, so for persons, explanation ceases to be teleological: there are simply patterns in the way thing happen. To be

10

Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

sure, a person often has a vision of what he or she ought to be, and acts to become and to be as this vision would have he or she be. But that vision of the self is not the same as an end determined by a metaphysical nature, as in the substance tradition. The aiming at such an end is simply an event among events, and the explanation of it as a cause or an effect is simply in terms of a pattern, and certainly is not teleological as in the substance tradition. What, then, accounts for the continuity of a person? What, indeed, is a conscious state? How is it that it can be a state of knowing? What is the connection it has to things it knows? How can it be self-conscious? If there is no substantial continuity, how can a person be held morally responsible, responsible for, say, something done yesterday? Does not moral responsibility disappear along with the substances that Hume so easily eliminates? Is that not an argument against such elimination? If explanation is by patterns, then of course the question is, what are those patterns, what is the learning theory that describes the acquisition of those traits of character that defines the person’s identity? But more deeply, if explanation is by patterns then what actually links the past to the present and the present to the future, links them is such a way that one can be held responsible for what one did in the past and responsible for what one becomes and what one is in the future? And if there is no linkage then why should you be concerned (as you in fact are concerned) with the pain or the pleasure that will be suffered by the being that simply follows but is not really the same as you, that is, the you as you are at present? Though Hume rejected the doctrines of the substance tradition, the answers he gives to questions such as these cannot be understood apart from the substance philosophy which he is rejecting. His approach to the problem of the self and of personal identity was in fact shaped by the long tradition of substance philosophy. In the immediate background are Locke and Malebranche. Beyond them are Hobbes and Descartes, and the Cambridge Platonists who reacted to both of the latter. And beyond all of these are those from whom the substance tradition derived, as well as the Christian tradition concerning the soul that had come down to the early modern period. These sources are, of course, Plato in the first instance, and then Aristotle who perfected the substance tradition, and then Plotinus who added a very important point concerning the self. It is this tradition, the substance tradition, with which we must begin. Many of the problems that we shall encounter as we try to defend Hume’s account of the self are ontological. For example, in the earlier

11

Introduction

tradition, the enduring substance provides the relation that unites the various states of consciousness which a person has into a whole. But if there are no substances what, then, provides the tie or ties that bind together the states of a person so that they are the states of one and the same person? Hume, however, has problems articulating an ontologically tenable account of relations. In defending Hume’s account of the self we shall therefore have to spend considerable time dealing with the ontology of relations. Since there are no substances, one cannot divide the events of the world into patterns according to the species of substance that underlie and account for the patterns among these events. What, then, is the distinction between mind and body? Descartes, in one sense, has no problem with this distinction: there are minds, which are thinking things, and there are bodies, which do not think but are rather simply extended things. But he does have a problem with regard to how one substance effects a change in another substance, and therefore a problem in particular with regard to mind-body interaction: how can mind affect body and body affect mind? Hume does not have the clarity and sharpness of the distinction between mind and body that one finds in Descartes. We shall therefore have to spend considerable time on this issue: what precisely are mental states? Nor can we avoid the other Cartesian problem, how do mind and body interact? – though Hume does avoid the problems about interaction created by the substance doctrine for those who accept that tradition, we shall have to discover how he actually avoids those problems. And there is another problem which the substance tradition never did really address. That is the problem of the privacy of our mental states and, with that problem the problem of how we know the mental states of another person, which are as private to that person as our own mental states are private to us. We shall try to look at this issue from the perspective of the Humean account of mind. As for the patterns that describe and explain human behaviour, these are essentially those of the psychological theory of learning that Hume defended, the theory of associationsim.9 We shall have rather a lot to say about this theory. Suffice it here to say that it explains as any empirical scientific theory explains, by subsumption of the events to be explained under a general pattern; or, in other words, human behaviour and human consciousness is explained in a way that is in effect logically equivalent to the way in which science explains stars or stones or rainbows or oysters, by way of general patterns (and not teleologically).

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Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

Here in outline is how our discussion will go. Chapter One discusses the substance tradition and attempts to separate the concept of a self from the notion of a substance. It is argued in particular, through an examination of some aspects of the thought of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, that the issues are not simply metaphysical, but go well beyond these to connect with some current moral controversies: the differences in these controversies, while apparently moral, are in fact metaphysical, and are not to be settled at the rather superficial level of consequentialist vs. deontic considerations – what would Mill say? what would Kant say? we ask our undergraduates – but rather can only be dealt with seriously at the deeper level of ontological discourse. It makes a real difference then, one with practical relevance, whether one accepts a substantialist or a Humean view of the self. Now, nominalism is an ontological view that the substance tradition passed on to its successors. This includes Hume. But the nominalistic account of relations deriving from the substance tradition is ontologically inadequate, or at least it is not adequate for the philosophy of mind that Hume aims to defend. Chapter Two examines nominalism and the account of relations that it passed on to early modern philosophy. The chapter attempts to show why it is inadequate but also to show that there is an alternative ontology of relations that avoids the problems created by the nominalistic account but is also compatible (as the nominalistic account is not) with the basic empiricist principles on which Hume’s attack on substances, and his account of the self, both depend.10 Chapter Three discusses the development of the empiricist account of ordinary things out of the substance tradition. The line of thought goes from Locke to Hume, and culminates in a critical realism that is defended by Hume. This is, of course, a contested interpretation of Hume, so some time is spent on simply defending that reading of Hume.11 But the main point of the discussion is to give Hume’s account of body, the sort of body to which Hume argues that mind is related. Chapter Four discusses some of the problems that arise for the philosophy of mind and any account of the self once we have the disappearance of the simple, substantial self. What are the contents of our

13

Introduction

minds? how do we account for privacy? how can inferences to other minds be justified? are among the issues discussed. Chapter Five suggests that Hume’s discussion of the self is not merely negative: he also has a positive account. It is the task of this chapter to uncover and defend this positive account of the self and of what it is to be and to become a person. A person is, of course, a body, or so we shall see Hume arguing, but also more than a body: one’s identity as a self or person is in large part a matter of one’s character. This chapter discusses how Hume has the person acquire these structures definitive of his or her identity through the mechanisms of association and through the mechanism of sympathy. The chapter ends with an examination of Hume’s reply to the sceptic, one who in particular calls radically into question the existence of a self.

This will no doubt leave undiscussed many issues both in Hume and in the philosophy of mind But I do think that it will emerge that Hume’s view of the self, what is commonly referred to as the “bundle” view, can be given a reasonable defence. It is to be hoped that at the very least the usually dismissive allusions to Hume and the “bundle” view such as the following will become a thing of the past. Hume, like Locke, is an empiricist. He observes that we have a concept of a person and spends his efforts trying to explain how we could come to have this fiction through ideas produced ultimately from sensory input. That’s right; he does not think there are persons in Locke’s sense. For Hume, there is just a powerful fiction that persons exist. He reduces the metaphysical problem about persons and personal identity ... to psychological problems about how we could possibly be so deceived as to think persons exist and endure through time. It is hard to beat Hume for iconoclasm... 12

As we shall see, Hume does not deny that there are persons nor that these persons endure through time. What he denies is that persons are simple substances. He denies the views of such philosophers as Plato and Descartes, but not the commonsense that there are persons and selves, that these have certain identities, and that they can be said to endure through time. It is one thing to deny an ontological account of the self, another to deny the commonsense that there are selves; Hume does the former, not

14

Introduction

the latter. The denial of the ontological claim that the self is a simple substance is based on his argument that we have no simple idea of such a substance, which we would have to have if the notion of mind as a simple entity were to make sense. (All our ideas are derived from impressions, he tells us, and uses this principle as a guide to ontology: we have no impression of the self as a simple substance so we have no idea of such a self.) But to deny that we have no simple idea of the mind or of the person is not to hold that we have no idea. To the contrary, though we have no simple idea we nonetheless still have an idea of the self; it is just that it is a complex idea. But, having a rough notion of what philosophers are like, I expect there will continue to be those who hold that Hume denies that there are persons, that privacy is a real problem, that it is reasonable to be sceptical of other minds, that we can’t say what are the experiences of a bat, and so on. I do hope, however, that in what follows I have made it a bit harder to defend those views.

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Introduction

Endnotes to Introduction

1.On a number of the points in the next few paragraphs, see C. J. Ducasse, Nature, Mind and Death, Ch. 17. I cite Ducasse on this topic because his views are contrary to Hume’s. If one can handle Ducasse’s notions about a person within a Humean framework, then the defence of the Humean concept of a person will be that much stronger. 2.References are to David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised P. H. Nidditch.. They will be given in parentheses in the text, by “T” and page number or Book, part and section. 3.M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in his Gesamteausgabe, Band 2, Sec. 9, p. 57. 4.H. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” p. 7. 5.Zeno Vendler, “A Note to the Paralogisms,” pp. 117-118. 6.B. Williams, “Persons, Character and Morality.” 7.A. Rorty, “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals,” p. 309. 8.Boethius, The Theological Tractates, p. 92. 9.For this theory, see F. Wilson, Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill; also “Some Controversies about Method in Nineteenth-Century Psychology,” and “Mill and Comte on the Method of Introspection.” 10.More on these ontological points, about empiricism and about relations, is explored in greater detail in F. Wilson, Acquaintance, Ontology and Knowledge. 11.In fact, the interpretation has been given an extended defence in F. Wilson, The External World and Our Knowledge of It: Hume’s Critical Realism, an Exposition and a Defence. 12.Warren Bourgeois, Persons: What Philosophers Say about You, Second Edition, p. 145.

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Chapter One Self as Substance (1) The Substance Tradition1 The substance metaphysics, as Vlastos2 and Turnbull3 have argued, can be found in outline in the “natural philosophy” that Socrates (Plato) outlines in the Phaedo. In this dialogue, Socrates expresses dissatisfaction with the natural philosophy of the physicists. In its place he proposes an alternative scheme for explaining changes in the sensible world. The problem is that sensible events, so far as sense can tell, are distinct and separable. Within themselves, so far as sense can tell, there is no reason why one sensible event should follow another; because they are distinct, that one event should be followed by such and such rather than so and so is apparently a matter of accident, apparently reasonless and irrational. But as Socrates argues, there is a reason why his being imprisoned is being followed by his drinking hemlock rather than by his running off to Thebes: it is because he is striving to be just, that is, striving to imitate in his outward life the ideal form of justice; it is his striving to be just that necessitates that his being imprisoned will be followed by his drinking the hemlock. The striving to imitate the form provides the connection between the sensible events that is not apparent in the events themselves. Moreover, to the extent that Socrates’ actions really do resemble the form, they constitute an instance of justice; they resemble justice and are therefore named after it. There are, then, three sorts of entity in this metaphysics of explanation. There are, first, the sensible characteristics. There are, second, the forms. And there are, third, souls. Sensible characteristics are in souls; souls strive after forms; and finally, sensible characteristics resemble or participate in the forms. Souls are individual or particular; and sensible characteristics are as particular as the souls they are in. (Sensible characteristics are thus what some have called “tropes.”4) Forms, in contrast, are such that several souls can strive after any one given form, and such that the sensible characteristics in several souls can all resemble the same form. In this respect the forms are universal, rather than particular. Sensible

One: Self as Substance

characteristics are in time, and come to be and pass away. All these entities are simple; in themselves they do not change. Change is understood in terms of the relations amongst these simple entities. Change is constituted by the coming to be and the passing away of sensible characteristics in souls; souls are thus simple entities which are continuants. As simple and therefore unchanging in themselves, souls are permanent; they endure through change. Forms, in contrast to sensible characteristics, are not in time; they are eternal, timeless, unchanging beings. And souls, while they are, like sensible characteristics, particular, are like forms in that they are outside the sensible world of time and change; like forms, they are unchanging and eternal, that is, while in their extrinsic sensible appearances they are in motion or change, nonetheless in their intrinsic nature as the souls that move things they are unchanging and eternal. They are simple unchanging centres of eternal activity, eternal motionless activity, that accounts for the motion and change that we observe by means of our senses in the temporal world of ceaseless flux in which we carry on our ordinary existence. That souls must be simple and unchanging is clear, given the pattern of explanation. Complexity implies separability, and separability requires explanation. Explanation is in terms of a soul striving to imitate a form. If, then, the activity of a soul were separable from part of itself, the union of the two would have to be explained by appeal to the activity of another, deeper soul. Since the activity of a soul is, upon the supposition, separable from the soul, this deeper soul would be separable from its activity, requiring an explanation in terms of a still deeper soul. And so on. Thus, allowing that the soul is separable from its activity leads to an infinite regress in which nothing ever gets connected to anything else. That is, it would be a regress in which nothing was ever explained. Thus, if the metaphysics of explanation is to succeed as a scheme upon which something actually is explained, then the soul cannot be separable from its activity. Plato recognized this much; it is, in effect, the basis of the argument for immortality in the Phaedo. But a similar argument from a regress of unsuccessful explanation attempts results from the separation of the form from the soul. These are separate, according to Plato, and are therefore separable. But then that separation requires explanation. There are two men, the sensible Socrates and the ideal form man. The sensible man is explained by the soul Socrates striving after the ideal form. But that form is separate from the soul. Why, then, is it that Socrates strives after the ideal form of humanity rather than

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the ideal form of doggieness? If this is to be explained, then one must introduce a further form, a third man; the soul Socrates striving after the third man explains why Socrates strives after the ideal of humanity. And so on. Again one has a regress in which nothing is ever explained, unless, that is, one ends the separation of the forms from souls. This was seen by Aristotle, who made the soul inseparable from the form; the telos or goal of an activity is always an intrinsic part of that activity. Socrates apart from his humanity simply does not exist. In fact, in Plato the forms have a dual role. As Aristotle puts it,5 “the Forms are causes both of being and of becoming” (Metaphysics, 991b3). Sensible things resemble each other because they resemble the forms. This solves the ontological problem of sameness: sensible things are called by the same name because they both resemble one and the same form. But forms also contribute to solving the causal problem of order: sensible events occur together or in the sequence they do because the soul in which they exist is striving after a certain form. Aristotle rejects forms as the solution to both problems. The causal role of the separate forms is replaced by the causal role of the inseparable natures or forms of intrinsically active substances. The ontological role of forms in the problem of sameness is replaced by the assumption that the resemblances among sensible characteristics are simply primitive. The likeness and unlikeness of substances is a matter of the qualities that are predicated of them (Categories, 11a15-19), and qualities may resemble each other in various degrees (Cat, 10b25-28). On this scheme, sensible characteristics are intrinsically individual, that is, they are, as for Plato, tropes, and two of them, say the white in Phaedo and the white in Socrates, are called by the same name because there is a simple relation of resemblance, either exact or inexact, between them. For Aristotle, the soul, or, as he calls it in his modified ontology, the substance, that is, the simple continuant, and its categorial feature of being an informed or natured activity, are not given in sensible experience. Their introduction is justified by Aristotle by what has subsequently come to be called a transcendental argument. Such arguments have as their conclusion that such and such non-presented entities exist; the argument for this is to the effect that if these entities did not exist certain things that we all know to be true could not be true. Substance as a simple continuant must exist because otherwise we could not speak of change: ...if change proceeds from opposites or from intermediaries, and not from all opposites (for the voice is not-white [but it does not therefore change to white]), but from the contrary, there must be something underlying which changes into

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One: Self as Substance

the contrary state; for the contraries do not change. Further, something persists, but the contrary does not persist; there is, then, some third thing besides the contraries, viz., the matter (Met, 1069b3-8).

Genuine change also requires that the substance have an active potentiality for change. This Aristotle argues against the Megarian school. “There are some who say, as the Megaric school does, that a thing ‘can’ act only when it is acting, and when it is not acting it ‘cannot’ act, e.g. that he who is not building cannot build, but only he who is building, when he is building” (Met, 1046b28-31). But, ...if that which is deprived of potency is incapable, that which is not happening will be incapable of happening; but he who says of that which is incapable of happening either that it is or that it will be will say what is untrue; for this is what incapacity meant. Therefore these views do away with both movement and becoming. For that which stands will always stand, and that which sits will always sit, since if it is sitting it will not get up; for that which, as we are told, cannot get up will be incapable of getting up. But we cannot say this, so that evidently potency and actuality are different (but these views make potency and actuality the same, and so it is no small thing they are seeking to annihilate)...(Met, 1047a 1020).

The form or nature is not present in a substance, as the sensible characteristics are, but rather it is predicated of the substance. The nature or form is therefore similar categorially to qualities, except that it is not separable from the substance nor is it known by sense. It is known, rather, by a kind of non-sensory intuition: it is intuition which is “the originative source of scientific knowledge” (Posterior Analytics, 100b15). Now, if reason is the faculty that enables us to understand, then it is clear that reason must be the faculty that grasps the form or nature of the thing whose motion we understand, since to understand is to be able to explain. Reason must therefore grasp the reasons for things, that is, upon the Aristotelian scheme, the natures of the changing substances. Thus, If thinking is like perceiving,...[t]he thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible (De Anima, 429a13-18).

The Aristotelian metaphysics of explanation, defended a priori by transcendental arguments, in this way imposes upon philosophy a certain

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corresponding account of reason, an account in which reason at its most basic consists in the intuitive grasp of the natures of things. With one further twist, it was this view of the world and mind that came down to the early modern period. It was, for example, the view of Descartes. The difference between Aristotle and Descartes did not lie in whether there were substances or not. Nor did it lie in whether substances had forms or natures or essences. Here the difference was the philosophically minor one of how many forms there were – a great many as Aristotle said, or but two (or three, if you include God) as Descartes said. Nor was the disagreement over whether reason consisted in the rational intuition of the forms or natures of things. Rather, the disagreement was over the process which had such intuitions as its product: was it one of abstraction, as the Aristotelians held, or were the intuitions innate, to be called to consciousness when the appropriate stimuli were present, as Descartes held? These differences were, as it were, “within the ring” as compared to the later critics like Locke and Hume who challenged the whole substance tradition. The crucial twist to this tradition to which I referred was given by Plotinus.6 The materialists argued that the world consists of matter in motion. The soul is the origin of the motion of the body, but it too is material. Plotinus argued that this was impossible. Matter, as lifeless, cannot move itself; in fact it could not even stay together in a particular configuration: “...body in itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not; body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in a twinkling is all were body.” Indeed, “Matter itself could not exist [without soul]: the totality of things in the sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of ‘soul’, remains air, fleeting breath..., whose very unity is not drawn from itself” (Enneads, IV, 7, 3). Soul, as cause, contains within itself the forms or reasons of the things the temporally ordered diversity of which it produces. This produced order reflects in time the timeless order implicit in the cause: “If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future which it is of itself to produce, it cannot produce with knowledge or to purpose; it will produce just what happens to come, that is to say by haphazard. As this cannot be, it must create by some stable principle; its creations, therefore, will be shaped in the model stored up in itself; there can be no varying...” (Enn, IV, 4, 12). Moreover, our consciousness is in the first instance, as indeed the materialists hold, a series of events in time. However, each of these events is related to the others in the series; and they are

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related moreover to each other as modifications of a single consciousness, a consciousness which is a consciousness of each of them and all of them. “There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity enables it to grasp an object in its entirety” (Enn, IV, 7, 6). The conscious self of which the events are the modifications cannot be the series as a whole, since within the series the events are successive; but at any moment the consciousness of those events does not involve a succession: “...prior and past are in the things it [soul] produces; in itself nothing is past; all...is one simultaneous grouping of Reason-Principles” (Enn, IV, 4, 16). That is, while the consciousness of the series is a consciousness of a before and after, within that self-consciousness there is no before and after; within the consciousness there is no such relation between the components as there is between the events of which it is the consciousness. The consciousness which a self has of itself must lie outside the temporal sequence of events of which it is conscious. Self-consciousness must therefore be an entity outside the temporal changes of the self, an eternal entity to which the events in the temporal sequence are related as modifications. There were already more than hints of this in the Phaedo: the soul which accounts for changes is Socrates, that is, the self that is conscious of its own self, and which is, in the light of that consciousness and in the light of its knowledge of the forms, is determining the changes which take place within it. There were also more than hints of it in Aristotle. A substance is a continuant but never simply that: it is also a continuant of a certain sort, i.e., it has a certain nature or form. This form has implicit within it, so far as the substance determines its own history, what has happened to it and what will happen to it: the form or nature is “the source from which the primary movement in each natural object is present in it in virtue of its own essence” (Met, 1014b19-20). Thus, the form as the active potentiality of the substance is the whole of the substance as eternally present to its various parts, the events the sequence of which constitute its history. In particular, the soul must be a substance. Some hold that the soul is divisible, and that one part thinks, another desires. If, then, its nature admits of its being divided, what can it be that holds the parts together? Surely not the body; on the contrary it seems rather to be the soul that holds the body together; at any rate when the soul departs the body disintegrates and decays. If, then, there is something else which makes the soul one, this unifying agency would have the best right to the name of soul, and we shall have to repeat for it the question: Is it one or multipartite? If it is one, why not at once admit that ‘the soul’ is one? If it has parts, once more the question has to be put:

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Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism

What holds its parts together, and so on ad infinitum (De Anima, 411b5-14).

And so the soul, in this respect like any substance, is the atemporal source of, and eternally present to, those events that constitute its history: “...the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it” (De An, 412a20-1). Aristotle’s soul, as a simple active potentiality or form, thus contains within it in an atemporal way the series of events that constitute its history in time, as least insofar as it is self-determining; so also self-consciousness contains this history within itself. Not surprisingly, Plotinus, and the substance tradition that followed, identified the centre of self-consciousness with the atemporal active substance which causes the temporal series of events unified in that self-consciousness. These patterns remain appealing. They can be found, for example, in a study by Albert Shalom.7 He points out that when one tries to think of the relation of mind and body, one has not only the two relata, mind and body, but also a third entity, to wit, the consciousness that is thinking the two. It is the ignoring the latter that creates the insolvable problem of the self. In thinking of the mind and body as two but related entities, “...I have failed to realize...that in the very act of setting out the problem in this way, it is I, the subject, who am formulating it in these terms, and that this has implications of its own. The implications are that when I, the subject formulate the problem in this way, I have projected myself into the referents of the terms which I have used in that formulation – and I mistakenly assume that I, who am doing this, am absorbed within the framework of those referents themselves” (p. 411). There is a point to this remark, as we shall argue below (Chapters 4 and 5): when one is conscious of x, the centre of consciousness is not among the contents of that conscious state. In that sense, as Shalom also insists, the I, the centre of consciousness, is not “an observable entity, element, or process in the flow of material or psychological processes” (p. 414). At the same, time, however, what Shalom does not see, it does not follow from this that the centre of consciousness, that which makes x the content of a conscious state cannot become itself the content of a further conscious state, and to be, in that sense, observable. But Shalom makes a different inference, that of Plotinus, that the problem of multiplicity, that is, as he sees it, the duality in appearance of mind and body, cannot be solved without the appeal to a unitary subject: “...the compound called ‘body and mind’ can only itself exist as a theoretical derivation of the continued intellectual activity of that ‘I’ which does not merely think itself as ‘I’ but which constantly expresses itself as ‘I,’ thereby indi-

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cating its own priority relatively to the construct ‘body and mind’” (p. 412); or, as he puts it later, “...there is a basic unitary reality – called, indifferently, ‘I,’ ‘person,’ or ‘human entity’ – and that terms like body and mind are derivations from the basic reality and by that basic reality” (p. 419). As we shall argue, following Locke, Hume, and Mill, this Plotinian inference does not follow: there is no reason why the unity of consciousness cannot be due to a part of the whole. Nonetheless, for all that, Shalom makes the Plotinian inference that this is not possible: “...the constant ability of an ‘I’ to be aware of ‘itself’ throughout all bodily changes and throughout all th