A Treatise of Human Nature

David Hume was one of those philosophers I always thought I would read … someday. So I’ve had a copy of his Treatise sitting on the shelf for quite some time. Recently I picked it up just intending to read a few pages while I decided what I really wanted to read next. But somehow Hume’s thought immediately pulled me in because his basic premise was so simple and attractive. We have studied the natural world as a science, but this study is always conducted by human beings. So if we want to put our understanding of this world on a firm footing, we will have to back up and start with an underlying science of human nature. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Hume thought of this as, “An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”. The goal is a sort of introspective empiricism that treats the mind as a collection of natural processes whose laws we can surely uncover if we carefully observe them. Bacon meets the brain.

In a way, this desire to back up and put our knowledge on firmer footing is not at all new to Hume. In fact, one might see almost all of philosophy in this light. Socrates was willing to question everything, and only knew that he knew nothing. Descartes famously resolved to doubt anything that could be doubted. Spinoza tried to demonstrate that all things derive from the concept of God in geometric order. What’s new with Hume is not the quest for a stable foundation of our logic, but the acceptance that this quest is bound to fail. Hume genius lies in the fact that he doesn’t actually provide us with something we can be ultimately certain of. That is, he converts what has always been considered an a priori question into an empirical one. Even the new science of human nature will inevitably be constructed by humans. This admission changes everything.

What Hume begins with as indubitable is merely that fact that there is experience. If there wasn’t some sort of experience, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. But he refuses to immediately betray the wildness of experience by attributing it all to a consistent and stable subject like Descartes’ thinking substance. Instead Hume takes for granted only what we actually discover when we take a moment to settle down and simply observe the mind in action – this place is a dump! All kinds of things float through experience. Sights and sounds, aches and pains, images of other people, ideas about what to have for lunch, sublime philosophical reflections, puerile humor – it’s all in there, jumbled up, constantly changing, seemingly with no particular order, and certainly not in our control. In other words, Hume begins with what happens to you in your first meditation. Mental fucking chaos – the real empirical starting point.

It’s clear that this starting point doesn’t satisfy us as a stable foundation on which to build a philosophy. And that’s the whole point. Hume explicitly tells us that there’s no sense in looking beyond experience for something more fundamental, because in any case this putative thing would have to be experienced to be of any use. Perhaps there’s something more under this experience, but it is senseless to speculate. We simply can’t reach the a priori philosophical certainty we always thought we wanted any more than Newton could understand the inner nature of matter. From an a priori perspective any thought is possible, and each one would count as a real experience. Like Newton, all we can do is observe how the mind behaves and try to notice any empirical patterns.

And that’s precisely what A Treatise of Human Nature attempts to do. Hume begins with patterns he finds in our understanding or reason (Book 1), explores the patterns in our individual passions or emotions (Book 2), and concludes with examining patterns in moral judgement or society (Book 3). ¹ Which is to say that the entire book is simply an empirical description of our various habits of mind. Hume isn’t trying to tell us how we should think, but examining how we do, in fact, think. He is not trying to provide us with the perfect starting point from which we can deduce all of the true thoughts and none of the false ones. He is beginning in the middle, with the observations made by an observer who may himself be fallible, since, after all, we are only capable of observing the mind with the mind.

Despite the clarity and simplicity of Hume’s overall vision, the Treatise can often be a strangely confusing book. First, we contend with the English of 1739.  While the spelling and diction are only a little different, the clause structure seems to have changed pretty substantially. Even though Hume writes informally, without academic jargon and only very infrequently citing the history of philosophy, I found I often had to read sentences several times before getting the gist. There are commas, where you least, expect them and some pretty weird; semicolon use. Second, the Treatise is fairly long, and the principles of its organization are not always obvious. Hume clearly foresaw that his new approach would fail to convince anyone if he didn’t also offer many arguments as to why the a priori metaphysical approach falls short of describing how we actually think. There are many interesting examples, but together they stretch out the main argument and dilute its line. Someone looking for a more digestible version of the same ideas is advised to read the Abstract, a twenty page summary of the main argument that Hume later published as a fictional review of his own book. Third, while Hume elucidates many clear principles to account for the way we think -- simple habits of mind like relating things we see as contiguous or resembling or related by cause and effect -- when he delves into specific empirical examples, the way he applies these principles can often appear a bit ad hoc.  

It may seem puzzling that this review hasn’t delved into the details of some of the claims Hume is most famous for, such as the idea that correlation is not causation, or that we can never know the external world. Partly, that’s just because it would end up being too long. Partly, it’s because I’ve already started in on some secondary literature which will give me a chance to address these topics elsewhere. But it’s also partly because these particular claims are not what’s really novel and important with Hume. Compared to other philosophers, I’ve read Hume quite casually so far, not necessarily getting concerned with understanding the details of every one of his arguments. Yet I found the book immensely valuable simply for its overall orientation to how we should do philosophy. So I wanted to emphasize this empirical shift as the most important contribution Hume can make to our thinking, without getting bogged down in the flash card details of what he thought of topic X.

1 Kant will attempt to solve Hume’s skepticism as best he can with his transcendental method, but it seems to me that the ding an sich was actually born with Hume, even though he didn’t bother to elaborate this fruitless concept. Also, it strikes me that what I understand of Kant’s three Critiques more or less follows the three books of Hume’s Treatise – Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgement.

Democracy

Though Goodbye To All That felt like an instant classic, I’d never read any more Joan Didion until coming across a used copy of her 1984 novel Democracy. This had been sitting on the shelf for years, and can now return to the limbo of the cat bookstore. It’s not a bad novel. But it certainly isn’t great enough to reread or recommend.

Didion’s writing is sharp, with lots of amusing details and clever dialogue. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to quite know where she wanted to go with this story. It gets off the ground very slowly, with some ungainly postmodern flapping of wings, before settling into the conceit that Didion is a journalist chronicling the downfall of the politically connected Victor family following Harry Victor’s unsuccessful bid for the 1972 Democratic Presidential Nomination. The central character in this implosion is Irene Victor, the politician’s good wife, and a fictional friend of our equally fictional author-narrator. Of course, with a title like “Democracy” you will not be surprised to discover that the novel is also a political allegory for the American evacuation of Saigon. Oh, how naive we and the Victor’s were in assuming that being an American means always coming out on top through the force of sheer individual gumption, etc … It’s a fine realization, and one many Americans could still stand to revisit I suppose, but it’s hardly a message needed today as urgently it was in 1984. It seems like a tall task to write a political novel that ages well.

Skid Road

I thought a friend had recommended Murray Morgan’s “Informal Portrait of Seattle” as an entertaining People’s History of my adopted hometown. Unfortunately, my memory was in error and I am now unable to thank whoever it was that prompted me to pick this up at the cat bookstore.

Morgan covers the history of Seattle from its founding in 1852 up through the 1950’s, with an afterword that says a few words about developments up through 1980. The prose is overly florid for my tastes, but it’s still readable and the book is so packed with interesting anecdotes and information that griping about its style seems churlish. As the subtitle indicates, this is not an academic history of the city. Morgan illustrates the story of each era by focusing on a single main character along with their supporting cast of local personalities.

So, for example, the book opens with the larger than life figure of Doc Maynard – a likable if somewhat dissolute man fleeing his overly domestic life in Ohio – rolling up in an Indian canoe and laying claim to most of what is now Seattle south of Yesler Way. One might imagine this causing some annoyance among the natives, but in fact Doc Maynard was a good friend to many of the local tribes, and, in any event, they couldn’t imagine the party of 5 white guys who wanted to live on Elliot Bay much of a threat. Morgan goes on to tell the history of early Seattle's increasingly fraught relations with the Native Americans, through the lens of the life of Doc.

Later, we get a chapter on the coming of the railroads and the troubles of Chinese immigrants as told through the story of Mary Kenworthy, an unlikely early advocate of populism. This is another particularly interesting bit of history because of all the complex crosscurrents at work at the time. There was the economic exploitation of the railroad monopoly, the local populist agitation against it, the national response to what some saw as creeping socialism, the scapegoating of the Chinese, but also their defense by National forces brought in to protect them from the local mob. This is one of the strengths of history told through personality – it can more easily accommodate all our contradictions.

The book also covers the town’s reinvention as the doorway to the Klondike Goldrush – with all the scams, gambling, and prostitution this role entailed – by narrating the life of John Considine, the most enterprising pimp of the era. The final chapters relate the stories of corrupt Mayor Hiram Gill and the newspaper era, and (also corrupt) Dave Beck and the postwar union time frame. Overall, I feel like I now have a good sense for the various phases of development of the city, and a greater appreciation for some of the names on the streets.

True Grit

I believe I picked up this Charles Portis Western at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Tejas. May his cowboy hats always be filled with ten gallons of whisky! Of course as loyal readers know, I often enjoy long, complex, and cerebral fiction. But sometimes you want for just a good old fashioned story well told. True Grit is a page turning action and adventure novel from beginning to epic climax. I think one of the most important aspects of this type of compulsive readability is the way an author controls the pace. Too many brawls and explosions in a row and the story turns into Batman 14: The Beating of Wings Will Continue Until Morale Improves. But too little or too subtle action and you end up reading Withering Heights. Novelists with a great sense of pacing (eg. Dostoevksky, Tolkien) seem to create a kind of fractal structure, where acceleration and deceleration sit alongside one another at all scales. Portis seems to have acquired this same knack of constructing multiple climaxes spaced so artfully that the story simply carries you along without your even realizing how it works.

What’s really unique to this novel, however, is not the good storytelling, but the peculiar voice of the narrator. There are other novels that use the trope of a child narrator to great effect (eg. The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and The Good Lord Bird). In competent hands, this device can create a distance from the customs of the times that allows the author enough perspective to examine those customs without coming off as overly political or moralistic. Portis partially avails himself of this effect by having his story narrated from the first person perspective of a 14 year old girl. With this, he creates a flat and unsentimental look at some of the savagery of the Reconstruction era South; for young Mattie Ross, this ‘Wild West’ is just normal life. In this case, however, Portis takes the device a step further, because the story is actually narrated by the 40 year old spinster that little Mattie will eventually become (I trust it is not a spoiler to disclose that the first person narrator survives her youthful misadventure). We are not reading the reflections of an untutored girl, but those of a prim and churchgoing old maid. It’s this that accounts for the peculiarity of the voice, which alternately evokes our humor, sympathy, admiration, and boundless annoyance. It also adds another layer of indirection the story, since we more easily form an opinion about the character of an adult narrator, rather than treating them as something of a blank slate. The only comparison that comes to mind is the narrative tension that Percival Everett creates by retelling the adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of James. Though the final effect is completely different here, as it leads us to confuse rather than cleanly separate the two narrative perspectives. But this confusion is a key aspect of why the novel works so well.

Animal Architecture

I have no idea why Karl von Frisch’s survey of animals’ building habits appeared on my shelf, but it was a fascinating read. Frisch won his Nobel Prize for deciphering the bees' waggle dance, but here he surveys the constructions across the entire animal kingdom, from insects, through birds and on down to the mammals. When you read about them in detail, the techniques are simply mind-blowing, and though they are almost all innate or genetically programmed, they evince an evolutionary intelligence that AI can still only dream of. This is one of those books were you constantly disturb your drowsy wife with stuff like, “did you realize that the male Paradise Fish creates a nest for its eggs by blowing tiny bubbles under water that create a foam bed attached to a leaf?” or, “did you realize the protruding part of an Australian compass termite nest can be ten feet high and is always oriented with its axis facing North-South so as to present the lowest profile to the noonday sun?” or, “did you know that the male Brush Turkey incubates its eggs in a meter high pile of rotting compost whose heat it maintains constant to within a degree by adding and removing ventilation holes?” Many of the other construction techniques are as ingenious and as likely to wow a sleeping spouse as this collection suggests. And on top of all this fascinating ethology, Frisch’s writing is incredibly clear and concise, and the pictures and diagrams are wonderful. Get your cure for snoring today!

 

SPQR

I believe I picked up Mary Beard's "A History of Ancient Rome" because Paul Krugman suggested it was a great book. Say what you like about Krugman's politics, but please acknowledge that, especially for an economist, he is remarkably broad-minded, historically literate, and capable of writing in the English language. He also happens to be mostly correct about SPQR; it was a thoughtful and enlightening introduction to the history of Rome. It's only major flaw is that, despite leading "A Don's Life", Beard's English could use some serious red-pen barbering. How is it that someone who has been an academic for decades can still come up with sentences like this one?

By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first 'foreign' emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather that 'native', but not all, or even most (SPQR, 522)

And how can any self-respecting editor not fix this sort of thing? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules!?

Examples of such linguistic atrocities abound, and clearly reduce the readability of the book. But I cite this particular one to give you a sense of those fascinating tidbits that redeem it. Because I had no concept of the fact that she points to here. It turns out that the Roman empire didn't work very much like we imagine empires are supposed to work. It certainly attacked and dominated all its neighbors for thousands of kilometers in every direction. And once it gained military control of an area it relentlessly extracted resources from it. But it also incorporated many of these people directly into Roman life, while still mostly allowing them to preserve all of their local uniqueness. Over time, Roman citizenship became increasing widespread, so that even people from Briton, or Egypt, or Greece could consider themselves 'Roman'. This process of absorption is how they ended up, at the height of the empire, with half the senate coming from somewhere other than Rome. So this little fact actually contains of wealth of insight into how Rome became so powerful – it kept expanding its politics to include the people it enslaved. Any resemblance between this strategy and the remarkable success of a certain modern capitalist empire are purely coincidental, surely.

The book is filled with all sorts of other surprising facts, word origin trivia, and eye-opening political analyses. Naturally, since this is the first history of Rome I've read, I can hardly be sure that Beard's account is not somehow biased or one sided. If it is, however, it's not clear on which side that would be; while she gives a necessarily selective overview of 1000 years of history, she had no particular political ax to grind as far as I could detect. Indeed, one of the refreshing things about the book is the frequency with which it admits what we don't know about this history. Beard is often at pains to point out that stories we receive from ancient sources have their own built in biased perspective, and that modern scholars often try build an elaborate theoretical edifice on scanty information. Along the way, almost casually, she does a fair job of outlining for us non-specialist how we came to know what we think we do know about this history – whether through Cicero or Pliny's letters, reveling epitaphs on tombstones, or archaeological explorations of former garbage dumps. Overall then, I'd recommend it as a good place to start if you just want an overview of the upward arc of Empire. The decline and fall are for another day.

Demons

We've read a fair bit of Dostoevsky around here in the past 5 years, and I think Demons is up there with his top flight work (though nothing can compare to The Brothers Karamazov). However, I also found it one of his most difficult works.  The novel is presented almost as a mystery or detective story for the first 400 pages.  It has an enormous number of characters, forming distinct but partly overlapping groups, and many are introduced only in passing long before they become relevant to the plot.  Quite simply, it's very hard to understand where it's all headed for the first two-thirds of the novel.  With Dostoevsky's characteristic patient pacing though, the several different intrigues are finally brought together in Part Three, which becomes a real whirlwind.  Dostoevsky's page turning climaxes are probably the thing I love most about him, and a good part of their power lies in the long slow buildup to the conflagration.

One of the things I found particularly interesting about this novel was the way that it largely skirts Dostoevsky's traditional themes of religion and philosophy to focus on politics.  It does this in a particularly Dostoevskyian way however.  The focus is not on the politics per se, but on the personality types who are 'possessed' (as an alternate translation of the title has it) by political ideas.  There are total cynics and true believers and simple conformists and every combination of these categories, and actual politics is explored as a result of the interaction of ideas with the various types of human.  

So, for example, one of the great political themes of Dostoevsky's era was "nihilism" which the translators helpfully note was a political term in Russia:

The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (nibilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. (pg. 720)

We see this political nihilism filtered through several different characters in the novel, each of which give us a sort of refraction of what it might mean on a human level.  Stepan is a liberal academic who believes we can make up a new world by the dreams of reason alone, which, in a sense, is where nihilism begins -- with a belief in the solitary efficacy of the human being.  While Stepan, as the least efficacious character in the novel, is clearly a parody of this idea, we also see how this thread plays out when it reaches his son Pyotr, who believes in nothing but himself.  And then we also have Nikolai and Kirillov, who are so nihilistic that they don't even believe in that.  This is how Dostoevsky treats the political world -- various conflicting aspects of a single -ism are embodied in different characters. It really bring politics to life, or perhaps vice versa.