Hume as a Social Theorist: Comments on Taylor's Reflecting Subjects

Abstract

Hume as a Social Theorist:Comments on Taylor's Reflecting Subjects Willem Lemmens (bio) Reflecting Subjects (abbreviated "RS") by Jacqueline Taylor is a book of genuine Hume scholarship and a delight to read. Central to this monograph is a reconstructive reading of Hume's moral philosophy, and of Hume's account of the way the indirect passions and sympathy shape the practical and social identities of human subjects. Starting from a meticulous analysis of Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, Taylor integrates into her reading a challenging interpretation of Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals and some of his essays. Taylor presents us a Hume who is at the same time an anatomist and painter of human nature. In Hume's hands, Taylor argues, a naturalist account of the human mind and its reflective capacity transforms into an innovative modern sentiment-based ethics of human dignity. For Taylor, the Second Enquiry forms the pitch of Hume's reformative and emancipatory moral discourse, from which we can still learn, despite its eighteenth-century prejudices and unavoidable blind spots. 1. Hume's Social Theory There is much in this book to admire. Taylor highlights in a first chapter how Hume's Treatise reflects his revolutionary explanatory intentions. Hume, we learn, transcends the half-baked empiricism and naturalism of Locke and Hutcheson, still reminiscent of teleological conceptions of human agency and virtue, by developing his own experience-based, mechanistic moral psychology. Chapter 2 derives from Hume's account of the indirect passions a "social theory," by which Taylor means: "an explanation of the indirect passions in relation to the distribution of wealth and property, and other forms of social power (typically grounded in government and other [End Page 147] social institutions), as well as styles of living, learning, and working, and the commitment to various values" (RS 34). Taylor is original when she shows how for Hume, passions such as pride and humility (but also love and hate) gain significance through a web of culturally formed beliefs and values. Next to the natural hardware of the mind (for example, the double association of impressions and ideas), culturally transmitted beliefs and values determine why and how we feel pride when contemplating our achievements and social status, or why and how the poor feel a mixture of shame and respect for the wealthy to whom they are connected by rules of civil obedience through the institutions of property and government. Taylor stresses, following Duncan Forbes, that for Hume, our social and moral identities are the product of both nature and nurture: the human mind is "socially plastic" (RS 35). Indirect passions, in other words, have (formally) natural causes: an achievement based on the strength of character or the beauty of our body, for example, will universally cause pride in the self that exemplifies this achievement, and this self will be the object of love in the community that identifies with his or her achievement. But this causal relation always depends on social context and education, and thus on values and beliefs that may vary from culture to culture, which determine in which sense and how exactly qualities of body, character, or social status become significant, structure our passions, and shape our behavior. As Taylor further shows, the indirect passions gain this full significance and power through the remarkable mental mechanism of sympathy. For Hume, sympathy appears to be "a key principle that helps to explain the meaning and value of our passionate life" (RS 44). Hume, as Taylor points out, sees sympathy not only as a mirroring capacity of the mind through which emotions of person x reverberate in the psyche of person y: sympathy is also a general tendency for the "sympathetic communication of the interconnected schemes of beliefs and values, especially those related to the causes and the nature of the indirect passions, that reflect a particular sociocultural context" (RS 37). Taylor discerns a strong interdependence between sympathy and culturally transmitted customs and habits, which transform natural causal relations (for example of sex and procreation or first possession), into symbolic relations (such as relations of family and property). Those relations have existential significance and shape our "practical" identities.1 Sympathy...