David Hume, Session 1: How David Hume Can Change Your Life
The gravitational pull of our self-concept is not easily surrendered.
In his book The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, Dennis Rasmussen writes, “David Hume is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language.” Adam Smith said of his dear friend that Hume was “as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”
Neither Hume nor Smith used the term friend casually. “Hume held that ‘friendship is the chief joy of human life,’ and Smith proclaimed that the esteem and affection of one’s friends constitutes ‘the chief part of human happiness.’”
The fact that Scotland produced Smith, Hume, and other great minds came as a surprise.
For most, Adam Smith is better known. Yet, David Hume is equally important. Smith showed us the pathway to human flourishing in markets, and also, as we will see, to a peaceful inner life filled with meaning. Hume’s work on our inner life makes possible an appreciation of Smith’s work on markets.
In this three-part series on Hume, we will see in Part 1 that the voice in our head is not who we are. In Part 2, we will understand why our passions drive our decision-making and what we can do about it. In Part 3, Hume will help us understand the debate between free will and determinism, and the pathway for us to take more responsibility in our lives.
The era in which Hume did his life-changing work should be explored. The era we live in, despite its challenges, is infinitely more amiable to exploring these ideas.
Not too long before Hume, “in 1697, an eighteen-year-old student at Edinburgh University named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for some blasphemous remarks that he had boastingly made to friends.” In 1727, “the last woman to be convicted for witchcraft in Scotland was burned alive.”
Rasmussen explains that the Scotland into which Hume and Smith “were born, in the early eighteenth century, had suffered for untold generations from poverty and disease, ignorance and superstition, incessant religious conflict and occasional military occupation.”
Rasmussen writes, “Hume’s and Smith’s lifetimes saw the arrival of a vibrant new age of economic prosperity and cultural achievement, a transformation that was palpable—indeed, startling—to contemporary observers.”
18th-century Scotland teaches us that humanity can make different choices at any time.
As far as their ideas go, Rasmussen writes, “Smith’s thought circles around Hume’s: there is virtually nothing in either The Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations without some sort of source or anticipation in Hume, although there is also almost no respect in which Smith agrees entirely with Hume.”
David Hume walked his talk. Rasmussen writes that Hume is,
Among the most loved of philosophers, widely cherished for his affable personality, his clearheadedness, and his unflinching yet humane world-view. A recent survey of thousands of academic philosophers around the world found that more identified themselves with Hume than with any other figure in the history of philosophy. During his own time too Hume was adored by virtually everyone who knew him well. He was a favorite among the Edinburgh literati, even the ministers, and the high society of Paris bestowed on him the honorific le bon David.
This week, we are reading from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which Rasmussen argues “is probably the most remarkable philosophical work, both intrinsically and in its effects upon the course of thought, that has ever been written.”
What is striking about the book is the humility with which it was written. Here you find one of the greatest minds in history inviting you to consider these ideas with him. Hume never badgers, even though he is presenting ideas that can stop you dead in your tracks. He asks little of us, yet a serious consideration of his ideas can change your life.
Yes, change your life. Hume was centuries ahead of his time. Please slowly read what I've curated here several times, allowing it to sink in as I explain its meaning.