Traiger The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise
9/24/07: Traiger, Saul, ed. The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise (Malden: Blackwell, 2006)
The understanding of Hume’s Treatise has advanced on four fronts, according to Traiger (1), of which I think two are important: 1). the influences on Hume’s thoughts, and 2). The scrutiny placed upon Hume’s metaphysics and epistemology. Intense scrutiny has uncovered many influential sources to Hume’s thoughts. Moreover, research conducted in the 20th century has uncovered the naturalistic influences of Hume’s view of causation. New debates have arisen regarding whether Hume’s viewpoint of causation was one of realism, as well regarding the nature and scope of his skepticism.
Hume wrote a letter to his friend, Henry Home, in December1737 and noted that he had spent the better part of three months after having arrived back in London improving the “style and diction” of the first version of his Treatise, and “castrating [the] work, that is, cutting off its nobler parts” [so that] “it shall give as little offence [to religious people] as possible” before submitting it to a publisher ((Hume, in J. Y. T. Greig, The Letters of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932:I:24-25). The Treatise was thereafter first published in 1739.
Hume claimed that the ultimate causal connection of external bodies is not “discoverable by our sense or reason” (T 2.3.1.4, SBN 400).
Later in life, Hume actually began to move away from his dogmatism that one finds within the Treatise. In fact, in a personal letter written to his friend Gilbert Elliot in 1751, Hume advises him not to read the Treatise because he had been forced to publish it too early due to the “the Heat of Youth & Invention” (Hume, in J. Y. T. Greig, the letters of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, I:158). Moreover, Hume said that “repented [of his] Haste a hundred, and a hundred times” (Hume, in J. Y. T. Greig, the letters of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, I:158). In another letter written to his friend, Professor John Stewart, three years later, Hume noted that he was particularly troubled by “the positive Air, which prevails in the [Treatise]… “which may be imputed to the Ardor of Youth” (Hume, in J. Y. T. Greig, the letters of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, I:187). At the end of his life, in the famous Advertisement of 1775 placed on the last printing of the Treatise prior to his death, Hume disowned the Treatise, he objected to the critics who directed their criticisms toward “that juvenile work, which the Author himself never acknowledge [that he wrote]” (as cited by John P. Wright, Composition, Reception, and Response, in Traiger, 2006, 5-25:20). So, for Hume, the Treatise was ultimately nothing more than a juvenile piece of writing. In a letter to a friend, Hume acknowledges Newton, saying specifically that “Sir Isaac Newton (tho’ some of his Followers have taken a different Turn of thinking) plainly rejects [the occassionalist theory], by substituting the Hypothesis of an Aetherial Fluid, not the immediate Volition of the Deity, as the Cause of Attraction [between objects]” (David Hume, A Letter from a Gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh, ed. E. C. Mossner and J. V. Price, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967:28-29). Later, in the ENQ, Hume also implicitly endorses the above view imputed to Newton in that he recognizes there are some real though unknown forces in nature which we can speculate about (EHU 7.5 n. 16, SBN 73-74).
It is apparent that Hume wanted people to read the Treatise through the lenses, so to speak, of the ENQ. As early as 1751, Hume wrote to his friend Gilbert Elliot, and advised him that the Enquiry contains “everything of consequence relating to the Understanding”, and that “by shortening & simplifying the Questions”, in the Enquiry, he was actually making his thoughts “much more complete” (Hume, in J. Y. T. Greig, the letters of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, I:158). It is clear that Hume wanted his philosophical principles based on the ENQ, and merely supplemented by the Treatise if there were no distinct contradiction between the two accounts. So should we completely discard the Treatise, as its author apparently desired for us to do? No, for there are many intriguing discussions within the Treatise which were not subsequently incorporated into the ENQ, so the two still need to be read, but with preference to the ENQ. It could very well be argued that Hume’s disowning of the Treatise in favor of the ENQ was as an answer to Reid’s criticisms (John P. Wright, Composition, Reception, and Response, in Traiger, 2006, 5-25:23). By questioning the causal maxim, Hume essentially attacked the cosmological argument for the existence of God outright.