Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires, Première partie (review)

Hume Studies Volume XXVl, Number 2, November 2000, pp. 347-349 DAVID HUME. Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires, Première partie (Essais et Traites surplusiers Sujets, vol. 1). Translated by Michel Malherbe. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1999. Pp. 320. ISBN 2-7116-1349-6, paper, 160 FF. Michel Malherbe's translation is the first volume of a complete editorial project which intends to present and translate into French the whole 1777 edition of Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Such a project does not only fulfill the need of a unified French translation of the last collection of Hume's philosophical works. If the implications of Malherbe's editorial intention go far beyond the French scholars' expectations, it is because it matches Hume's own editorial intention. Everybody knows that from 1753 on, Hume considered that his whole work should only include the following: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (two parts), 71« Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, A Dissertation on the Passions, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, The Natural History of Religion. Neither the Treatise, which Hume formally rejected, nor the Dialogues, which were published two years after Hume's death, belong to that collection. Malherbe does not claim faithfulness to the author's intention for its own sake. He simply insists—and successfully proves in his foreword—that Hume's editorial intention corresponds to a philosophical intention deserving a proper philosophical response. The original significance of the works that follow the Treatise is not in their contents, but in the new philosophical manner the author adopted to deal with his perpetual object: the elaboration of a science of human nature. Hume's mature works are more positive without being dogmatic, and display a new "art of composition, adjustment and distinction" (8). They constantly aspire to reach perfection in their writing, where argumentative precision is achieved through simplicity and refinement. Malherbe calls this new manner an argumentative art of association . Freer than any systematical approach, it also demands a more active reading. This art is fully displayed in the first part of the Essays. Their editorial history , which Malherbe precisely relates, extensively shows the new concerns of the philosopher-writer. In the introduction which precedes his translation Malherbe shows how Hume has attempted to combine in his Essays the stylistic demands of abstract philosophy, and the merits of a potentially convincing public writing. Constantly correcting his Essays, gradually elaborating a language meant to instruct and please at once, Hume never chose between "the easy and obvious philosophy" and "the accurate and abstract" one. He always tried to overcome their tension. Hume's Essays obviously belong to a literary genre of which Hume proves to be a master. The manner of the Essays is free, so is the relation between the writer and his reader. Every object can be discussed by the writer, provided he remains impartial. As for the reader, he is invited to use his judgment and Volume XXVI, Number 2, November 2000 348 Book Reviews come to an agreement in justness and truth. While the Treatise resorted to the "art of doctrines," the Essays belong to the "art of conversation." Through this social "art of judgment," also an exercise of refined taste, Hume invented a new type of rationality—the practice of "nicety" and "ingenuity" (these terms appear in "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences"). Through the union of taste and reason, the Essays establish a science which does not inquire into the secret and unknown causes operating on a few persons only, but neither does it neglect historical or local peculiarities. Indeed, Hume's Essays precisely correspond to a philosophical intention: a "science intention," as the French commentator calls it. Malherbe's main point is to defend the following thesis: despite the formal independence of each essay, despite the various types of discourse they use, and despite Hume's declaration in the preface to the first edition of the Essays that "the reader must not look for any Connexion among [them]," the Essays are not miscellaneous writings. Green and Grose, E. C. Mossner, and M. A. Box all agree that after the first two editions of the Essays...