Donald Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy

Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 355-366 Critical Study Donald Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy PETER S. FOSL DONALD W. LIVINGSTON. Philosophical Madness and Melancholy: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xviii + 433 pages. ISBN 0-226-48716-4 US $68.00, cloth; ISBN 0-226-48717-2 US $24.95, paper. It is, perhaps, our hermeneutical fate that we are able to illuminate the thought of others only in terms of our own thought. Hume, like other important philosophers, has been interpreted in different ways at different times and by different groups during the same period. During his own time, his rationalistic opponents took him to be a terrible nihilist. Conservative clergymen thought he was a dangerous atheist. He was an inspirational fellow philosophe, an agent of progress, and an ally in the war against ignorance and superstition to many from France. James Beattie and his Scottish Common Sense followers claimed that Hume was an insidious skeptic. Jefferson and many early American patriots saw Hume as a royalist reactionary and scorned him. During the nineteenth century, Hume was largely ignored until Green and Grose published The Philosophical Works of David Hume in 1874-75. Green's lengthy introduction portrayed Hume as a crude if clever empiricist whose progress and mistakes would illuminate radical idealism. In the hands of John Herman Randall, Hume became a pragmatist, an image that is still sustained today in some of Richard Rorty's work. The positivists of the early Peter S. Fosl is at the Department of Philosophy, Transylvania University, 300 North Broadway, Lexington KY 40508-1797 USA. email: pfosl@transy.edu 356 Book Reviews twentieth century enlisted Hume as a phenomenalistic ally in their rejection of idealism and metaphysical nonsense. Norman Kemp Smith's influential 1905 article, "The Naturalism of David Hume," interpreted Hume as a thoroughgoing naturalist in his subversion of skepticism, his understanding of cognition, reason, and perception, and his grounding of mnorality. Kemp Smith's Hume found precedent in the readings of Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and J. S. Mill. Another Hume has, however, emerged in our own time—Hume the humanist, if you'll pardon the pun. Like Hume's French contemporaries who were inspired by his ability to write critical history, to produce secular essays of literary and cultural criticism, and to extend Newtonian rationality into social science, a rising group of commentators have sought a more comprehensive picture of Hume. They have done so by teasing, gleaning, and culling insight from his Essays, his History, and his letters—as well as from his philosophical treatises. Their Hume is concerned not just with epistemology but also with the subtleties of language, culture, moral edification, eloquence, and social dynamics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Yves Michaud, Nicholas Capaldi, Donald T. Siebert, Annette Baier, and Adam Potkay may be counted among this company. So may Donald W. Livingston. However, while Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (PMD) sits comfortably among the recent humanistic interpretations of Hume, its highly provocative and challenging claims this text make this book a watershed in Hume studies. The book presents, at least to my mind, the most radical reassessment of Hume since Kemp Smith's naturalistic interpretation. Livingston ranges over all of Hume's output, drawing broad and profound lessons from it. It is a grand and sweeping evaluation of modernity, of civilization, of politics, and of the best way to engage contemporary human life. Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium is visionary, and it should stand as a touchstone for future interpretations of Hume's philosophy. As a visionary text, however, I wonder if it has not, in its enthusiasm, strayed too far from Hume's own texts—texts from which Livingston's views not only claim their origin but also their ground and justification. Indeed, I wonder if Livingston has not strayed too much from Hume's own projects, for a great deal of the book reads like a jeremiad. I am concerned that Livingston's brilliant interpretive insight may be obscured by objections to the contemporary political applications he makes of it and in fact, perhaps also to...