The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (24 page)

37
‘A’ God – but unique, and the same in all possible worlds. (See further n. 16.)

38
Cf. ‘The Ultimate Origin’, p. 139, where he calls the latter ‘physically necessary’.

39
But see Adams (
1994
),
Ch. 1
, for a thorough discussion of these matters. Leibniz’ response to this concern is less settled than I am suggesting; there are some definite changes of view from one writing to another.

40
Jonathan Bennett, in Bennett (
2003
), pp. 177–178, denies that this is a satisfactory way of meeting the concern. He seems to me to miss the import of the
de dicto
/
de re
distinction. (But note that he, like Robert Adams, cites passages illustrating Leibniz’ changes of view: see the previous note.)

41
This point will be very pertinent again much later in our narrative: see
Ch. 13
, §3 and esp. §4.

42
Usually, they are signalling the notion of necessity which Saul Kripke discusses in Kripke (
1981
) and which he there describes as a metaphysical notion (pp. 35ff.).

43
Cf. Williams (
2006a
), pp. 49–50. (It would be of avail to do this if Leibniz needed only to defend the
truth
of his account. But the issue is not just whether his account is true; the issue is also whether his account is all that it affects to be.)

44
This is an allusion to Williams (
2002
). But see also Kant (
1996d
), 8:267. And cf. the parenthetical comment in the previous note. (Bernard Williams’ own indictment of what I am suggesting is untruthful in Leibniz is characteristically blunt. ‘Like some other … metaphysical geniuses,’ Williams writes, ‘… [Leibniz is] capable of being ethically very crass’ (Williams (
2006b
), p. 184, n. 39).) For further exploration of the idea of confronting the world’s suffering truthfully, see
Ch. 15
, §6.

Chapter 4 Hume Metaphysics Committed to the Flames?

1. Empiricism and Scepticism in Hume

Descartes acknowledged substances of three kinds. These comprised one Divine substance; one extended substance; and many, maybe infinitely many, created thinking substances (
Ch. 1
, §6). Spinoza held that there was just one substance, which he called ‘God’, and he took this substance to be both extended and thinking, though he took it to have countless other attributes as well (
Ch. 2
, §2). Leibniz held that there were infinitely many substances, which included God, and which, despite differing in profound ways, were all of the same basic kind, thinking but not extended (
Ch. 3
, §3).

It takes only a modicum of scepticism about whether they were engaged in a single shared enquiry to wonder whether they meant the same thing by ‘substance’, and only a modicum more to wonder whether they meant anything at all, and perhaps not much more than that to wonder whether there could ever be any real enquiry at this level of abstraction. It is scarcely surprising, then, that within a quarter of a century of Leibniz’ death Hume had published a book in which he not only referred to ‘that unintelligible chimera of substance’ (
Treatise
, p. 222
¹
) and complained that philosophers literally had no idea what they were talking about when they used the word ‘substance’ (ibid., I.i.7), but urged them to disembroil themselves from all such pseudo-disputes (ibid., I.iv, esp. 2 and 4).

David Hume (1711–1776) introduced a kind of self-consciousness into metaphysics which, whether under his direct influence or not, would never thereafter go away.
²
Sense itself, in the most general attempt to make sense
of things, was to become a principal focus of attention. There would be a concern with the scope and limits of sense-making which, by the twentieth century, was to become almost obsessive. But that concern was already there in Hume. And in keeping with what I said in §5 of the Introduction, such self-consciousness brought with it then, and has continued to bring with it ever since, a crisis of self-confidence in the very practice of metaphysics.

Not that this crisis was confined to the practice of metaphysics. It is important to appreciate that Hume was concerned at least as much with mainstream religious thought.
³
Towards some mainstream religious thought he had the straightforwardly sceptical attitude that it lacked any warrant. This was most famously true of the belief in miracles (
Enquiry
, §X). But towards some – including, as I shall urge in §2, theism itself, in one of its most orthodox guises – his attitude was more radical. He doubted whether it concerned matters of genuine belief at all, matters for which the question of a warrant could even arise. That is, he doubted whether it made sense.
⁴

Why? What was his criterion for whether something made sense? Or for whether sense had been made of something?

It was a criterion grounded in empiricism. And what is empiricism? On one standard definition, empiricism is the view that all knowledge derives from sense experience. That strikes me as being, for many purposes, a perfectly acceptable definition, though the devil is obviously in the detail of ‘derives from’.
⁵
For current purposes, however, we do well to adopt a definition that makes the connection with sense-making explicit. Empiricism, I shall say, is the view that all
sense-making
derives from sense experience.
⁶
Here I am still exploiting the latitude of the phrase ‘derives from’, to which I shall need to return. But more significantly, I am exploiting the latitude of
the phrase ‘sense-making’ itself. In particular, I am exploiting the fact that this phrase is ambiguous between something broadly epistemic, indicating an understanding or knowledge of what things are like or, more modestly, a reliable and workable conception of what things are like, and something broadly semantic, indicating the production or expression of meaning. I welcome this ambiguity, for the simple reason that we find both elements in Hume – and not always clearly distinguished.
⁷
This definition therefore amalgamates the two ways in which Hume wanted to check the indiscipline of thought. He denied both that a belief could be warranted, or count as knowledge,
⁸
unless it stood in a suitable relation to sense experience, and that a belief could be present at all – that an apparent expression of belief could be meaningful – unless there was some suitable provision for it in sense experience.

But there is an important asymmetry. If it is true that Hume subscribed to an empiricism that included both these elements, the epistemic and the semantic, then the latter must have been the more fundamental, in that any failure to make semantic sense would mean that the opportunity to make epistemic sense could not so much as arise. (If I do not even express a belief when I say, ‘There are infinitely many substances,’ then
a fortiori
I do not express a belief that is warranted.)

This is a good cue for me to signal a fierce debate that has dominated recent exegesis of Hume. In attributing a fundamentally semantic empiricism to him, I am adopting a more or less traditional interpretation. But a new interpretation has recently gained prominence. According to this new interpretation, the semantic element in Hume’s empiricism has been seriously exaggerated, if indeed it is there at all; his interests were fundamentally epistemic, and much of what would count as meaningless by the lights of any remotely powerful semantic empiricism he did not regard as meaningless at all.
⁹

Unfortunately, I cannot hope to make a serious contribution to this debate in these confines.
¹⁰
Having stated my own allegiance, I must, reluctantly,
proceed as though it were uncontroversial. There is however one brief point that I shall make in this connection. It concerns the relation between Hume’s
Treatise
and his
Enquiry
. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the latter he famously described the former, ‘which [he] had projected before he left College, and which he wrote and published not long after,’ as ‘that juvenile work.’ And he went on to say, ‘Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’ (p. 2). It is only fair for me to
concede, therefore, that any attributions to him in what follows that are based on the
Treatise
should be treated with due circumspection. I mention this point here because some defenders of the new interpretation triumphantly appropriate the
Enquiry
as the work that is more conducive to their view. And they insist that we take that as our authoritative source.
¹¹
(Mind you, so do some defenders of a more traditional interpretation!
¹²
)

2. The Semantic Element in Hume’s Empiricism and the Epistemic Element in Hume’s Empiricism

Hume distinguishes between ideas and impressions. These exhaust what he calls ‘perceptions of the mind’, and they ‘are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity’ (Enquiry, p. 18). Impressions are the more forceful and the more vivacious. They are what we ordinarily count as items of sense experience, such as a glimpse of a rabbit scurrying by or a stomach ache. Ideas are what we ordinarily count as memories of such items of sense experience, imaginative anticipations of them, and suchlike. Hume draws the distinction in terms of force and vivacity because he wants to appeal to the intrinsic properties and powers of perceptions; he does not want to beg questions about their origin (cf.
Treatise
, p. 84). We might worry that this makes a quantitative distinction out of what should be a qualitative one, so that, for example, it inappropriately likens imagining a vindaloo to tasting a korma.
¹³
However that may be, these are the terms in which Hume expresses his empiricism.

The critical statement of that empiricism, or at least of its core, is as follows: ‘
Every idea … is copied from a similar impression
’ (
Enquiry
, p. 19,
emphasis added).
¹⁴
We should note straight away, however, that there is an implicit restriction here, which Hume makes explicit in the passage immediately preceding this quotation. It is a restriction to ‘simple’ ideas. Thus I have an idea of a mermaid even though I have never had any such impression. This is possible because I have had an impression of the upper part of a woman’s body and I have had an impression of a fish’s tail: I thereby have two ideas that I have joined in my imagination. And even if I had not had those two impressions, it would still have been possible for me to have an idea of a mermaid. For I have had yet simpler impressions with corresponding simpler ideas that I could have combined to form an idea of a mermaid. More generally, the human mind has a faculty for ‘compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded [it] by the senses and experience’ (
Enquiry
, p. 19). The fundamental point, then, is that ‘our thoughts or ideas, however compounded or sublime, … always … resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent [impression]’ (ibid.).

Let us not pause to ask the thousands of questions that naturally arise about this doctrine.
¹⁵
What matters for our purposes is that it captures the semantic element in Hume’s empiricism. This is because Hume thinks of the meaning of a term, roughly, as its capacity to excite an idea of a certain kind in the mind of whoever understands the term. (‘Of a certain kind’ needs to be interpreted broadly enough to accommodate the fact, learnt by Hume from Berkeley, that all ideas are particular. Thus the word ‘triangle’ may excite an idea of an isosceles triangle in one person’s mind and an idea of a scalene triangle in another’s, or one of these ideas in one person’s mind on one occasion, the other on another (cf.
Treatise
, I.i.7). However, since Hume also thinks that particular ideas can, through their annexation to terms, be ‘general in their representation’ (
Treatise
, p. 22), he will sometimes allow himself to talk loosely and construe the meaning of a term as a single corresponding idea.
¹⁶
) Hume is now able to say the following: ‘When we entertain … any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea …, we need but enquire,
from what impression is that supposed idea derived?
And if it be impossible to assign any, this will
serve to confirm our suspicion’ (
Enquiry
, p. 22, emphasis in original; cf. ‘Abstract’, pp. 648–649 and 656–657).

One immediate casualty is the term ‘substance’ – unless it is understood in a sufficiently modest way to allow for the idea of a substance to be ‘nothing but a collection of simple ideas, that are united by the imagination’ (
Treatise
, p. 16). Another casualty is the term ‘infinity’ in some of its mathematical applications (
Treatise
, I.ii, esp. 1, and
Enquiry
, pp. 155ff.). And a third,
¹⁷
which is particularly striking, is the term ‘God’, as understood, for instance and most notably, by Descartes. True, Hume does allow in the
Enquiry
that ‘the idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom’ (p. 19). Nevertheless, even if he is being ingenuous when he says this, it does not salvage the Cartesian conception of our idea of God. The very point of the Cartesian conception is that, according to it, our idea of God is an idea that cannot be arrived at by any such means, which is why Descartes thinks that God Himself must have placed the idea in us (see
Ch. 1
, §3; and cf. Descartes (
1984a
), AT VII: 46ff.).
No
idea that we could form by ‘compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience’ – to repeat that Humean formula – could be adequate to our idea of God, as Descartes understands it.
¹⁸