Hume's Recantation Revisited

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 2, November 2001, pp. 279-300 Hume's Recantation Revisited VIJAY MASCARENHAS In the Appendix to the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume famously recants his position on personal identity. There he confesses: "upon a strict review of the section concurring personal identity I find myself involv'd in such a labyrinth that... I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent."1 By his own admission, then, something has gone wrong in Hume's account of personal identity, something that, at least to his eyes, did not go wrong in his accounts of body and necessary connection. For those accounts were not grossly inconsistent or patently absurd. The case is different, however, with personal identity. There his philosophical enterprise suffers shipwreck, and it is important to understand why. Unfortunately , however, Hume confesses thathe finds his former opinions false as well as inconsistent, but neglects to specify how or why he came to this conclusion . This paper is an attempt to address just that question.2 First we must observe the general philosophical tasks that Hume takes on in the Treatise. These I take to be three. First, he must assess and delineate the landscape of the human mind. In what does consciousness consists? Here his answer is simple: perceptions and perceptions alone, that is, impressions and ideas. To this Hume adds only a handful of associative processes by which the mind navigates from perception to perception: these are contiguity, resemblance , and causation. Having assayed the psychological apparatus available to the human mind, Hume's second task is to determine whether certain beliefs —i.e., those concerning body, causation, and personal identity—are epistemologically justified, that is, well founded and rationally grounded. His answer, of course, is no.3 No matter how irresistible and useful such beVijay Mascarenhas is Lecturer in Philosophy, Yale University, PO Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520 e-mail: vjmasc@mindspring.com 280 Vijay Mascarenhas liefs may be, nothing available to human experience justifies our accepting them. The last task Hume takes upon himself is more properly psychological than philosophical: this is to provide an account of how we are able to form such beliefs given their irrationality and given the rather narrow confines of human experience. Impression, ideas, and the association of ideas are all that Hume can rely upon in constructing an account of the psychological origin of these beliefs. Now, I believe that Hume was able to deal fairly deftly with beliefs in body and necessary connection. Those beliefs were unfounded, but their psychological origin could be explained by "idealizing" them, that is, by attributing their formation to the association of ideas. There is no real necessary connection between perceptions, but we can come to believe in causality, because we associate the ideas of those perceptions. Similarly, perceptions do not enjoy continued existence when unperceived, but we come to believe they do because of the easy transition between the ideas of those perceptions . In short, Hume's tactic seems to be to deny real connections between perceptions and then to resolve them into associations between the ideas of these perceptions. This ploy, however, fails him when it comes to the issue of personal identity. To see exactly why this is so, one must turn first to the "former opinions" that Hume ultimately came to reject. In Book I, he asks how we can form the belief in personal identity despite the absence of any constant and invariable impression of the self. To arrive at an answer, he says "we must take the matter pretty deep, and account for that identity which we attribute to plants and animals; there being a great analogy betwixt it, and the identity of a self or person" (T 253). Here Hume takes a wrong turn in the labyrinth: in positing a "great analogy" between personal identity and the identity of animals, plants, and the like, he adopts an objective view with regard to something essentially subjective, the self. But more on this later. For now, let us follow Hume, even where he strays. Concerning the identity of plants and animals, he mostly just repeats what he said in...