Hume in the Prussian Academy: Jean Bernard Mérian's "On the Phenomenalism of David Hume"

Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 1, April 1997, pp. 153-191 Hume in the Prussian Academy: Jean Bernard Mérian's 'On the Phenomenalism of David Hume" JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN and RICHARD H. POPKIN, with a Translation from the French by PETER BRISCOE Recent interest in the place of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres in eighteenth-century intellectual life has focused on both the influence of the Academy on German philosophy of the time, and on the influence of the surrounding German intellectual world on the Academy.1 From its refounding by Frederick the Great in the 174Os until the 179Os, the Academy was predominantly francophone, consisting largely of French and Swiss thinkers and scientists, including Huguenot exiles. Some of them played a significant role in making David Hume's texts available to the Frenchspeaking intellectual community throughout Europe. Swiss philosopher and member of the Prussian Academy Jean Bernard Mérian (1723-1807) made two major contributions to the reception of the philosophy of David Hume. He translated Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1758) into French, which gave it wide distribution in Europe.2 Then, thirty-five years later in 1793, he presented a paper entitled "On the Phenomenalism of David Hume" to the Prussian Academy, which was published in 1798 in its Mémoires.3 The rest of this introduction will set the context for the following transcription and translation of Mérian's essay. Interest in Hume at the Prussian Academy Mérian translated Hume at the behest of Pierre Louis Maupertuis (d.1759) and Jean Henri Samuel Formey (d.1797), President and Permanent Secretary John Christian Laursen is at the Department of Political Science, University of California-Riverside, Riverside CA 92321-0118 USA. email: laursen@wizard.ucr.edu Richard H. Popkin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Washington University, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and History, U.C.L.A., 15349 Albright St. #204, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 USA. email:rpopkin@pop9.humnet.ucla.edu 154 John Christian Laursen and Richard H. Popkin of the Prussian Academy, respectively. Formey was probably the chief representative , by reason of industriousness, of a school of anti-skeptics in Berlin and elsewhere whose primary objective was the defense of morality and Christianity. A review of the ideas of this school will help us appreciate the originality of Mérian's response to Hume. Jean-Pierre Crousaz was the spiritual ancestor of the moral anti-skeptics. His Examen du Pyrrhonisme ancien & moderne of 1733 was a massive attempt to refute Pyrrho and Bayle, largely ad hominem. Over and over, he insisted that the determinism, skepticism, cynicism, insincerity, and immorality of the skeptics would undermine society, morality, and Christianity. In the years between 1733 and 1740, Formey drafted an abridgment of Crousaz's work designed to eliminate the many repetitions and confusions, which was eventually published as Le triomphe de l'évidence (1756, 1761). Meanwhile, the Swiss polymath Albrecht von Haller translated Formey's abridgment of Crousaz into German, which was published as Prüfung der Secte die an allem zweifelt (1751). Haller's long German introduction was translated back into French for separate publication (1755, 1760) and for publication as the introduction to Formey's French abridgement. This introduction represents the apogee of the moral argument against skepticism: atheistic skeptics will kill their own fathers, skeptical judges will judge according to their own desires, the poor will rob from the rich, the "philosophical" masses will overthrow princes, and "philosophical" princes will rule according to their whims.4 In other writings, Formey attempted to refute Diderot and other more recent skeptics, arguing from moral consequences.5 In 1756 and 1757 he published a five-part review of the first German translation of Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Rather than engaging with Hume on a philosophical level, he stressed Hume's ambition to say outrageous things.6 Formey's attitude toward Hume came out in his introduction and notes to Mérian's translation of the Enquiry in 1758, where, among other things, he recommends Haller's introduction (ME 2:76). We have gone from an "excess of dogmatism" to an "excess of Pyrrhonism" (ME l:viii); regrettably, "order, beauty...