Hume's philosophical quietism
‘According to the epistemic defeatist’, says Richard Pasnau in After Certainty, ‘ if one can aptly speak of beliefs as being rational at all, those beliefs must ultimately take their rationality from the subjective facts about what believers happen to think. In place of objective evidential grounds, the best we can do is make dogmatic assertions of privilege. Just as the moral antirealist despairs of our ability to go from is to ought, so the epistemic defeatist despairs of our ability to go from seems to is.’
With the reference to is ought Pasnau is deliberately invoking Hume, who, he says, was the first great philosopher since the ancient sceptics to systematically defend epistemic defeatism. Quoting Hume; ‘tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses.’ The significance of Hume’s claim here is not that the demands of epistemic certainty per Cartesian scepticism cannot be met - opening up the possibility of a lower standard for knowledge - but that there isn’t even a possible probable justification — we do not have ‘the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.’
In this Hume is following the Pyrrhonists but unlike the Pyrrhonists he cannot bring himself to recommend the suspension of belief. Instead he offers an account of the psychology and incorrigibility of belief alongside his epistemic defeatism.
The problem is that this doesn’t provide a way to reconcile epistemic defeatism and holding so and so belief. There is the option to abandon the underlying evidentialism but Hume doesn’t take it that he was mistaken on his route to it. An alternative is required.
Hume’s way forward is to embrace a kind of quietism: he simply stops striving after such ideals [truth, certainty] and focuses his attention on how in fact nature operates. Abandoning the hope of grounding our beliefs in reason, he thinks that we need to begin by registering the fact that we do form certain sorts of beliefs, and that we cannot do otherwise…He is committed to an ideal that he thinks we cannot achieve, even while he develops a naturalistic methodology that he thinks cannot bear rational scrutiny. His only way out is a kind of philosophical quietism, according to which we just carry on as nature intended, without attempting a theoretical resolution.
Pasnau expands on this in the notes to the lecture on the contested claim that Hume was a sceptic:
My view is that the difficulties in understanding Hume on this point largely dissolve once we mark off the doctrine of epistemic defeatism. That is what Hume thinks. It causes him to despair while inside the epistemology room, but it does not cause him to abandon his larger aim to understand human nature; and thus his project in the remainder of the Treatise and elsewhere is to carry on in whatever way seems most natural, even while recognising that his beliefs are ultimately unsupported by reason. Critical to the story is Hume’s insistence that we are by nature unable to retain these defeating reflections in our minds for very long. For, as long as we do find ourselves enmeshed in a skeptical philosophical perspective, our beliefs are undermined in a way that is inconsistent not just with knowledge but even with any lesser degree of justification. Fortunately we find it easy to set aside such worries, not just insofar as we can forget about them for a time, but furthermore — and critically —insofar as out, outside the epistemology room, the arguments of the skeptics look “cold and strained and ridiculous.” Thus nature defeats the skeptic’s defeaters and replaces them with a propensity to believe that serves as its own kind of justification.’
For many - particularly those interested in philosophy - this is less than satisfying. Our beliefs should be justified by ‘reason’. A theoretical resolution is necessary as well as salutary. Thomas Reid commenting on Hume’s philosophy said it ‘is like a hobby-horse, which a man in bad health may ride in his closet, without hurting his reputation; but if he should take him abroad with him to church, or to the exchange, or to the play house, his heir would immediately call a jury and seize his estate.’
If Reid’s criticism lands it does so because of the status of philosophy as a form of inquiry. Neither Hume nor Reid could claim to be traditionalists yet while Reid’s philosophy of common sense, his methodological commitments to experiment and his magpieish ethics were genuinely innovative, he had the more traditional view of the role of philosophy. An understanding of philosophy that ruled out any kind of quietest compromise with scepticism. If you can’t take your philosophy to church, the exchange, the play house then so much the worse for your philosophy.
But it is this that brings the nature of Hume’s scepticism into view. A quietist strategy is only rationally possible by challenging the status of philosophy itself. ‘Reason’, he wrote, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ Stephen Gaukroger notes in The Failures of Philosophy this was not ‘suggesting an expansion of the resources of philosophy, but making it clear that philosophy has failed to provide a plausible account of morality.’ This deflation of the pretensions of reason in morality becomes a scepticism about philosophical reasoning generally.
When the Treatise failed to find success - fell stillborn from the press as Hume put it - Hume turned to politics, economics and history. Gaukroger elaborates, this turn was not merely seeking success elsewhere but Hume’s historicising philosophy within a wider view of human understanding.
In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he shows how philosophy is subject to the same kind of criticism religion is. In the Enquiry he concludes ‘all the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life.’ As Gaukroger notes:
By tying in his account of religion with an account of philosophy, Hume, in a stroke of genius, makes the critical evaluation of religion feed into a critical evaluation of philosophy conceived no longer simply as the language of criticism from which it itself is immune, but rather as something deeply problematic in its standing, for philosophy must retain an autonomy as the vehicle of criticism of non-philosophical thought, while at the same time taking its place as a form of practice which, like religion, has its roots in human nature and as such develops in various ways which can be opened up to investigation.
The result here is not to dismiss philosophy entirely but to take it off its bench as the arbiter of human inquiry, capable of standing in judgement over other forms of engagement with the world. It becomes, rather, something that ‘puts us in a position to participate critically in our culture. Indispensable as it is in this respect, however, it is not unique.’ With this change in philosophy’s status the Reid criticism doesn’t work. We especially see the fruits of this move in Hume’s political thought and his politics of opinion where there is a practical upshot to his theorising. Hume’s needn’t be the only route to it but political rationalism is best left at home.