Hume on Art, Emotion, and Superstition: A Critical Study of the Four Dissertations by Amyas Merivale (review)

Book 1 of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (T) was reshaped into the first Enquiry, while the second Enquiry further develops some themes from Book 3. What became of Book 2, “Of the Passions” (T2)? Did Hume never extend his thinking in that area? Amyas Merivale notes that the standard answer to that question is that Hume did not do much in the way of rethinking T2 beyond selecting a few passages to excerpt, almost verbatim, in his “Dissertation on the Passions.” In this fine, wide-ranging, scrupulously researched and carefully argued book, Merivale offers a more intriguing and satisfying answer: the essays collected in the Four Dissertations (FD), “The Natural History of Religion” (NHR), “Of the Passions” (DP), “Of Tragedy” (TR), and “Of the Standard of Taste” (ST) constitute Hume’s mature philosophy of the passions. The thesis is not that the FD constitutes a thorough reworking of T2 material, rather that it displays some specific further developments in Hume’s thinking about the passions that draw on elements in the Treatise accounts.

The first two chapters of Part I provide the textual and historical context for Hume’s views on the passions. This makes for stimulating reading; it is rich in references to other figures in the period, provides insightful summaries of their positions, and advances many extremely compelling interpretive claims. Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler receive detailed attention. It is worth studying on its own as a freestanding commentary on the particular Treatise passages it discusses, and on the 17th- and 18th-century conversations to which Hume was responding.

Chapters 3 and 4 of Part I describe what Merivale takes to be the single most important change in Hume’s account of the passions. He argues that Hume was a psychological hedonist and egoist, influenced by Hobbes, Locke and Mandeville, when he wrote T2. “Shortly afterwards, however, he read and was persuaded by Butler’s anti-egoist arguments, and consequently became one of the clearest and keenest opponents of his own earlier view” (3). Merivale argues that T 2.3.9.8, which he dubs “the Butler paragraph,” shows Hume blatantly contradicting the account of the passions that had preceded it.

Beside good and evil, or in other words, pain and pleasure, the direct passions frequently arise from a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable. Of this kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies, and of happiness to our friends; hunger, lust, and a few other bodily appetites. These passions, properly speaking, produce good and evil, and proceed not from them, like the other affections.

(T 2.3.9.8; SBN 43)

Merivale suggests that this paragraph might be a late addition to the manuscript of the Treatise that indicates the influence of Butler’s anti-hedonist and anti-egoist arguments in Sermon 11, “Upon the Love of Our Neighbor—Rom. xiii. 9.” This influence is allegedly carried over to the DP, which displays a rejection of the hedonism and egoism of the T, as Hume embraces the motivational pluralism defended by Butler. Each of these claims is certain to be controversial.

Merivale’s discussion introduces important questions about how best to characterize and classify the views on motivation of Hume’s antecedents, Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as Malebranche, Clarke, and Wollaston, and to what degree Hume follows, adapts, or opposes their views.

The “Butler paragraph” introduces a distinction between two kinds of passions, those that proceed from, or arise from, good and evil, and those that arise from a natural impulse or instinct and produce good and evil. The first two paragraphs of the DP gracefully combine them, so it is not clear that Hume felt that this...