I thoroughly enjoyed Jay Garfield’s book about not-self. While he mentions Hume’s ideas several times in that book, and again at the end of this interesting interview with Clear Mountain Monastery, it’s only in passing. So when I discovered that he recently devoted an entire book to Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, I was easily sold on the idea of following up my reading of Hume’s slippery system with some secondary literature.
It turned out to be an fortuitous choice. Garfield’s exposition of Hume is everything good secondary literature should be. Clear. Concise. A generous reading1. And a great source of context illuminating Hume’s inspirations and his later influence. Garfield’s thesis is right there in the title – the linchpin of Hume’s thought is the concealed yet immensely powerful influence of custom, taken in the dual sense of individual habits of mind and collective customs of language and behavior. In this reading of Hume, there is no deeper explanatory principle for why we think or do something than the fact that we habitually think or do it this way.
While this explanation may at first appear to beg the question, Garfield provides us with a key piece of context that enables us to see the problem Hume is trying to solve. Hume’s concept of custom is deeply rooted in the English legal theory of his day, with its emphasis on the way the normative power of law derives entirely from customary, or what we would today call “common”, law. This tradition saw laws as perfectly normative, both morally and legally, for members of a given community, despite the fact that they are never written down and may vary from time to time and place to place. Garfield tells us that English legal theory of the late 1600’s in fact regarded custom as the source of all normative legal power. Even the “common law of the realm” written down by the King was merely the formalization of a power that already existed in the practice of custom. Its authority borrowed from and built on this sole true source of authority.
Despite this helpful piece of context, the idea that custom is what explains, rather than what needs to be explained takes some getting used to. Fortunately, Garfield revisits this strategy of “Skeptical Inversion” throughout the book in various contexts, so by the end we feel like we have a solid grasp on it. He argues that this strategy, which is an update of ancient Greek Pyrrhoninan skepticism, is the bedrock of Hume’s philosophy and one he applies uniformly to all the important metaphysical questions that come up in the Treatise.
Take, for example, the question of whether or not the external world exists. Some argue that it does and try to prove that our mental representations must be adequate representations of it. Some argue that since we only have access to our internal mental impressions, the external world is merely a figment of our imaginations. The same sort of split can be applied to the question of causal influence. Some argue that cause and effect is real and objective part of the world. Others suggest that since we can never directly experience cause and effect but only constant conjunction, then cause and effect is just a human convention with no objective reality.
Frequently, Hume is read as supporting the second of these options, as if this is what it would mean to be a skeptic and an empiricist. So he is read as suggesting that cause and effect are ‘just’ human constructions. This is simply a misreading of the Treatise, and Garfield helps us identify precisely what it gets wrong. Hume definitely does argue that we cannot uncritically accept our belief in an external world filled with real causal interactions. But he definitely does not thereby argue that these things don’t exist or are merely illusions or just subjective projections. In fact, as a good Skeptic, Hume doesn’t have any opinion at all about whether the external world really exists. Instead, he sees the whole argument as completely mis-framed. To the question of whether the external world exists or not, indeed, to all ontological questions, he replies, effectively Mu. Which is to suggest that the two possible options the question implies are not exhaustive – there is a middle way approach to these black and white questions. This approach is not an average or shade of grey compromise, but an [[The Extremely Middle Way|extremely middle way]], one that opens a new dimension to the problem. Garfield calls this Hume’s “rejection of grounding biconditionals” (CIC,7) in this case, a rejection of the unstated assumption both sides share that our belief in an external world is justified if, and only if, an external world actually exists. Instead, Hume argues can have no opinion about whether the external world exists or not, and yet still assert that we are justified in our belief in one because of our customs. And indeed, since for Hume these customs are the unique source of justification available to us, the question of what grounds what is inverted here. We don’t believe things because they are “in fact” true; things are “true” because we believe them. Rather than the way the world “really” is grounding our belief (or lack of belief) in it, we find that our habit of belief in an external world, as revealed by our individual habits and social customs, grounds the reality of that world. For Hume, the world is absolutely real. But its reality is not what we usually assume it to be. It is not real in the way we first expect.
At this point we can probably see that Hume’s Pyrrhonian Skepticism is very similar to Buddhist teachings, particularly the Mahayana view of emptiness and the two truths. Given the known similarity between Pyrhho and Buddha this isn’t terribly surprising. Since he is also a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, I was hoping Garfield would provide a much more detailed discussion of these correspondences. In fact, this is part of why I wanted to read this book to begin with. But while he mentions the comparison on a number of occasions, it is mostly in passing or the footnotes. Apparently I’ll have to read his other work if I want to pursue the analogy in more depth.
1 That not incidentally mostly concurs with mine.
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