Essays by David Hume
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
David Hume was one of those late bloomers. His mum thought him daft until he started to become famous because of his writing. In reading this collection, you can see how plodding he is in his thinking. Perhaps he seemed daft because of how he questioned. While this collection is just a loose set of essays, you can detect in him a critical ruthlessness in examining what the basis for anything is. Hume seems to have found, even before Foucault, a human assumption that what works for us should also serve as justification for our behavior and reasoning… that is to say, how things appear based on what we want determines the conventions of what we assume to be factual in the world. That is, we see not only what we want to see, but we also see what we look for. In particular his examination of civil liberties, his examination of political parties… finds at its root the particular interests of each of the players. From that interest, Hume is able to draw a line to developing the conceptual boundaries of where each actor resides, and how those boundaries always-already serve the interests of that actor in a self-justification that isn’t seemingly gradual but rather, spontaneous.
What Hume lacks in these essays is a coherent system of analysis. Perhaps he is able to draw that up later on, but I am reminded very heavily of how Foucault examines discourse diachronically in order to show how our current divisions were created through the discourse via power or its corollary, resistance. Hume doesn’t seem to have this same kind of genealogical examination of discourse at his disposal, but he does involve in a diachronic tracing of trends and party lines as they evolve into groups that spontaneously self-justify just as they separate from each other in fierce opposition.
One of the reasons Hume might have taken so long to bloom is that he was too busy learning and confronting the assumptions that others have of the world. If you question too much and don’t understand what’s going on, I suppose you would appear daft to anyone else. Most likely, to come onto his own in his analysis, Hume needed to defer answering what he was looking at, until he finally came to the understanding that there is no universal. If he believed in a kind of universal ground to base everything from, he certainly didn’t rely on it in any of these essays.
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