Kant's Conception of "Hume's Problem"

Kant's Conception of "Hume's Problem" MANFRED KUEHN I _ IN 1783, forty-four years after the appearance of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and thirty-five years after that of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding , a Prussian philosopher named Immanuel Kant found it necessary to "openly confess" that "the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted [his] dogmatic slumber and gave [his] investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction.'" In fact, Kant went so far as to characterize his then very controversial Critique of Pure Reason as "the execution of Hume's problem in its widest extent. ''~ In making this confession, he seems to be responding to Hume, who in the Conclusion of Book I of his Treatise expressed as his "only hope" that he would "contribute a little to the advancement of knowledge, by ' This is a slightly revised version of a paper read at the xoth Hume Conference, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, August 25-28, 1981. I would like to thank Reinhard Brandt, Antony Flew, David Fate Norton and John W. Yolton for their useful criticisms and suggestions. Professor Flew, in the opening session, made an observation that appears to me especially relevant to the matters discussed in this paper, namely that many recent students of Hume seem to be working with a "defective copy" of Hume's Treatise, i.e. a copy that does not include the Conclusion of Book I, and that this may result in a distorted picture of Hume. It is perhaps somewhat ironic that this paper shows that Kant, one of the most important students of Hume, also worked with a "de|i~ctive copy" of the Treatise. However, Kant's copy consisted almost entirely of a translation of the Conclusion that suffers such neglect today. I hope that this paper will contribute to a renewal of philosophical interest in this part of Hume's work and go some way towards showing that Hume was much more of a skeptic than the more recent naturalistic interpretation of Hume suggests. In this I am certainly influenced by my former teacher David Fate Norton, whose David Hume, Common Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982)--which I knew long before its publication--serves to reemphasize the skeptical dimension of Hume. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis , New York: The Bobbs Merrill Co., 195o), p. 8f. I have substituted "suggestion" for Beck's "recollection." For the reasons, see Lewis White Beck, "A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant," in McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton, Nicholas Capaldi, Wade L. Robison (San Diego: A~ustin Hill Inc., 1979), 63-78, 69n. [1751 i76 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY giving in some particulars a different turn to the speculations of philosophers , and pointing out to them more distinctly those subjects, where alone they can expect assurance and conviction. '':~ Kant's confession certainly has had--and just as certainly will have--an important influence upon the way in which philosophers see both Hume and Kant. Moreover, there is no scarcity of papers which deal with Kant's relation to Hume. Most of these papers deal with Kant's supposed "answer to Hume. TM Yet there is hardly any agreement on what was the "question" and what was Kant's "answer." It is indeed a "scandal of philosophical scholarship that after nearly two centuries the question must still be debated: What was Kant's answer to Hume? ''5 But it is perhaps even a greater scandal that the true extent of Hume's "question" for Kant has never been investigated satisfactorily, and that Kant's conception of Hume's problem has never been formulated in its entirety. For, only after it has been decided what the question for Kant was, can we hope to evaluate the answer or solution. Kant's relation to Hume is puzzling indeed. Their positions are intimately related on many issues, but on the whole, they seem quite different from each other. The standard view of the Hume-Kant relation emphasizes the differences. Hume and Kant are located on opposite sides of the...