The Point of Hume's Skepticism with Regard to Reason: the Primacy of Facility Affect in the Theory of Human Understanding

Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 235-273 The Point of Hume's Skepticism with Regard to Reason: the Primacy of Facility Affect in the Theory of Human Understanding WAYNE WAXMAN ...relation, and that facility of transition, which is essential to it.... (T 99) With delectable irony, Hume placed feeling at the very core of human understanding. He endeavored to show that the sum total of human intellectual achievement is constructed around a soft core of affection, a kind of pleasure principle of understanding analogous to that reigning in the spheres of passions and morals. In particular, the affections of vivacity, in terms of which our notion of real existence (vs. fiction) has to be understood, and facility in the passage of thought, in terms of which all relations between distinct perceptions have to be understood, are, for Hume, the principal foundations of all our thought and action. Yet most commentators seem loath to admit that these affections are, in any essential way, operative in his account of human understanding, much less that they are its primary determinants. This puzzling gulf between author and interpreters comes to a head in the section of A Treatise of Human Nature titled, "Of scepticism with regard to reason" (I iv 1). There Hume presents an argument which purportedly demonstrates "that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood." The reasoning is divided into two parts, intended to demonstrate, by "all the rules of logic," that "all knowledge degenerates into probability," and probability undergoes Wayne Waxman is at the Department of Philosophy, Campus Box 232, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder CO 80309-0232 USA. email: Wayne.Waxman@Colorado.edu 236 Wayne Waxman "continual diminution, and at last a total extinction of belief and evidence." That no one could possibly be convinced by this reasoning is exactly the result Hume expected. For his design was to put his own and rival conceptions of reasoning and belief to the test of being able to explain this failure to convince. By showing that only his affection-based theory of understanding can pass this test, Hume not only deemed his theory vindicated, but also saw in it proof that nothing save the mercurial nature of affection—"the trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things, are not able to accompany them with so sensible an impression, as we do those, which are more easy and natural" (T 268)1—can break "the force of all sceptical arguments in time," before "they have first subverted all conviction, and have totally destroy'd human reason" (T 187). The conclusion of Hume's examination of human understanding is therefore this: "We have...no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all" (T 268). Hume's analysis of reason in Treatise I iv 1 depends on two things: the soundness of the premises of the skeptical argument and their valid implication of its conclusion. Yet this is precisely what no commentator seems ready to allow. For though diagnoses differ widely, there is a consensus that something is deeply wrong with the argument. If so, then the fact that the argument fails to convince can be explained in the normal manner: faulty premises or a conclusion they fail to imply. Thus, Hume's strategy of utilizing his theory of understanding to explain a supposedly otherwise inexplicable failure to convince becomes a nonstarter, and Treatise I iv 1 is denied its raison d'être. The usual strategy of attempting to boil away the rhetoric and leave only the distillate of Hume's argument has, however, not fared well. When one considers the literature, one cannot fail to be struck by the divergence of views, not only as to where the reasoning goes wrong but even to what is being argued, and what kind of argument it is. This might seem to indicate that Hume's reasoning itself is none too clear. In this paper, therefore, I propose to take a different tack. Rather than plunge directly into the argument, I shall postpone considering it now, and shall focus...