The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity, by GalenStrawson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, xii + 165 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960850‐8 hb £25.00

Abstract

In The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity, Galen Strawson gives a short, lively account of Hume's thoughts about the human mind or self and how we come to think of ourselves as one continuously existing thing. The book is written with great energy, and with an evident urge to challenge a felt orthodoxy that is not always identified. Although it is a short book, even moderate critical editing and re-organization would have made it much shorter, and so more sharply focussed and more effective. As it is, it comes in overlapping waves, with what seem to be the same points reappearing again and again, sometimes in different surroundings. The overall effect is diffuse, and episodic, and leaves you philosophically on edge. It is hard to be sure you have identified and understood the ideas Strawson is really most concerned to get across. Many have thought that Hume argues from epistemology to semantics to ontology—from ‘can't know x’ to ‘can't mean x’ to ‘x doesn't (and can't) exist’. He doesn't. Many have thought that it's a good line of argument. It isn't. Some think it's the cornerstone of rigorous empiricism. It isn't. The problem is not merely that it's an invalid form of argument (that's a relatively minor defect, if one's trying to be a radical empiricist). The major defect is that it leads, as I have argued, to gross epistemological immodesty—false certainty—and mad metaphysics. (p. 31) Strawson quotes some of these apparently forthright ‘nothing but’ remarks about the mind, but he does not think they show that Hume believes that all there is to a mind or self, in reality, is a bundle of successive perceptions. Strawson says Hume cannot—‘provably can't’ (p. 47)—hold that view, because that would make him a ‘dogmatic metaphysician’ who claims ‘absolute metaphysical certainty about the ultimate nature of reality’ (p. 13). But ‘Hume is a sceptic’; he thinks ‘the essence of the human mind is unknown to us’. Strawson does not explain why Hume the ‘sceptic’ cannot say what he thinks is so without claiming ‘absolute metaphysical certainty about the ultimate nature of reality’. He wrote many good books doing just that. What Strawson thinks Hume means, what those ‘unqualified ontological statements are shorthand for’ (p. 48), he says, is that only the ‘bundle view of the self’ is ‘the properly warranted, clear and distinct idea of the mind or self … that is available for legitimate use in an empiricist philosophy that seeks to make knowledge-claims’ (p. 34); it is the only ‘information about the self or mind that is given to us in experience … the distinct or philosophically legitimate positively descriptive content of our concept of the self or mind according to his empiricist theory of meaning’ (p. 73). A ‘twentieth-century verificationist positivist’ could agree. This expresses a conception of the limits of philosophy that seems to me too determinate, too austere and too epistemologically-centred to be ascribed to a Scottish eighteenth-century, pre-Kantian Hume intent on what he calls a ‘science of human nature’. When Hume says what he thinks the mind is—‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions’—he seems to be relying on nothing more than what he says he finds, or ‘stumbles on’, when ‘I enter most intimately into what I call myself’ (emphasis in original). He says he finds or ‘observes’ nothing other than perceptions. He never uses the word ‘empiricism’. He gives no indication of restricting his search only to what would be ‘warranted by an empiricist theory of meaning’, or what could serve for ‘legitimate use in an empiricist philosophy that seeks to make knowledge-claims’. He simply reports what he finds. And having found nothing other than perceptions in himself, he ‘ventures to affirm’ that the same is true of the rest of mankind. Strawson takes up at some length the question of what one can find on ‘entering into’ oneself. He thinks that in any such search it is not possible to find an experience or a perception without finding an experiencer or a perceiver of it. That is because ‘the idea that there could be an experience (perception) without an experiencer (perceiver) is like the idea that there could be a square without sides, let alone four sides’ (p. 41); it is an impossibility. From that necessary connection between an experience and an experiencer, Strawson concludes (how, exactly?) that no one could ever find the one without finding the other; ‘in focused present-moment mental self-examination’, no one could encounter or ‘apprehend’ an experience ‘without ipso facto apprehending the subject that is necessarily involved in the experiencing’ (p. 87). So Hume on entering into himself must have found a perceiver every time he found a perception (if what Strawson always calls an ‘experience’ is just what Hume means by ‘perception’). Strawson spends many pages anxiously trying in different ways to convince the reader of this apparently phenomenological point, but it does not really bear on the rest of his account of Hume's treatment of the idea of personal identity. Even if one must encounter a perceiver every time one encounters a perception in one's self-examination, it holds only for each perception encountered on its own; it implies nothing about finding a single subject of more than one of the perceptions, let alone of the whole bundle. So Hume's ‘mental self-examination’ would yield nothing more than a bundle of perceptions, each with its own accompanying ‘perceiver’. Of course, the ‘bundle view’ is not the only idea of a mind or person someone has. Hume speaks of entering into ‘what I call myself’ (emphasis in original); he thinks of himself as more than a mere bundle or collection of perceptions. A mind or person is something we think of as continuing to exist through the whole course of a person's life, one and the same thing, distinct from every other. It is a task for Hume's ‘science of human nature’ to explain how we get that ‘richer’ idea and come to ‘suppose ourselves possest [sic] of an invariable and uninterrupted existence thro’ the whole course of our lives’, given that we never receive impressions of any such things in our experience and could form from that source alone no more than an idea of a bundle or collection of perceptions. a hypothesis or ‘fiction’ we naturally come up with and believe in and that goes beyond what is empirically given and warranted. The posit-happy, ‘fiction'-generating Imagination, … receiving as input data nothing more than a series of distinct and separate experiences, reacts in such a way that one comes to believe one has direct experience of a single persisting self or mind. (p. 102) That ‘richer’ idea comes into the mind when it does because of the operation of certain general ‘principles of the imagination’. Similar principles are at work in producing in us the ‘new’ or ‘richer’ idea of causal or necessary connection from nothing more than the repeated reception of resembling pairs of impressions, or the ‘richer’ idea of the continued and distinct existence of an unperceived object from our attending to the differences between uninterrupted series of exactly similar impressions and other series very like them but with some interruption. ‘Principles of the imagination’ were enough to explain to Hume's evident satisfaction the origins of those ideas in minds that never encounter any causal connections or unperceived objects in perceptual experience. An explanation along similar lines of the origin of the idea of a continuous mind or person would therefore seem to have, in Hume's words, ‘a promising aspect’. But Hume famously found his account in that case ‘very defective’; it leaves him with a difficulty he says is simply ‘too hard for my understanding’. To the challenging interpretative question ‘What difficulty does Hume think he has discovered, and why does he despair of ever finding “any theory, which gives me satisfaction on this head”?’ Strawson gives what appear to be several different answers. I don't think they go quite far enough to clear up the obscurity. One surprising thing he says is that Hume ‘doesn't have a problem with’ (p. 142) or ‘can't fault’ (p. 104) ‘his causal psychological account of how it is that we come to believe in a single diachronically persisting mind or self or person in spite of the fact that no such idea of the mind is empirically warranted’ (p. 104). But if that were right, Hume's troubles would be over. A causal psychological explanation of the origin of that idea is precisely what Hume is trying to find, but the kind of explanation he has in mind is just what he says creates the difficulty. His hopes vanish when he tries to ‘explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought and consciousness’. He thinks he cannot explain how the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’ leads us to think of our successive perceptions as constituting one continuous thing (‘to unite our successive perceptions in our thought and consciousness’ [emphasis added]). The interpretative question is why Hume thinks he cannot explain the appearance of that idea in that way. Strawson says Hume's ‘hopes vanish when he realizes that the idea of the mind he is working with isn't sanctioned by his empiricist principles’ (p. 143); his ‘problem is that he has himself assumed in his philosophy … a general substantive metaphysical characterization of what a mind's being more than a bundle consists in’, and ‘his empiricism forbids’ any such idea (p. 120). But Hume is not simply ‘working with’ or ‘assuming’ in his philosophy such a richer idea of a mind or self. Nor is he trying to give what Strawson calls a ‘positive philosophical account of … the content or meaning of the idea mind’ (p. 121; emphasis added), or a ‘philosophically legitimate definition of what the mind is’ (p. 102). That is a more twentieth-century philosophical or semantic concern with ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ or strict definition than I think Hume ever shows. He is trying to explain how human beings get an idea of a single, continuous mind in the first place, given that they are never aware in perceptual experience of anything other than a succession of perceptions. That is what he despairs of being able to explain. Of course it is true that that ‘richer’ idea of a mind that Hume is concerned with is ‘empirically unwarranted’. In the sense Strawson has in mind, only what we get from impressions and ideas in direct perceptual experience is ‘empirically warranted’. It is only because the idea of a single continuous mind goes ‘beyond’ the ‘empirically warranted’ deliverances of immediate experience that ‘principles of the imagination’ must be invoked to explain how we get it. But why or how does that raise any special difficulty for Hume? If an idea's being ‘empirically unwarranted’ were enough in itself to generate a ‘problem’ about the idea of personal identity, Hume would face an equally pressing ‘problem’ about the idea of causal connection. The idea of cause is ‘empirically unwarranted’ in the same sense. It too, in Strawson's phrase, is ‘just an Imagination-generated construct or posit or ‘fiction’ (p. 103). But Hume raised no comparable objection to his explanation of the origin of the idea of causal connection. He seems to have found a ‘theory, which gives [him] satisfaction on [that] head’. Strawson also says ‘Hume's problem is to give an account of the principle of connection [that makes us attribute simplicity and identity to our experiences], given his commitment to the view that the bundle view is for philosophical purposes “the true idea of the human mind”. Can't be done’ (p. 138). Here I think he begins to get closer to an answer, but he does not explain why what Hume is trying to do can't be done. What exactly stands in the way? Again Strawson says Hume's problem is to account for the operation of the ‘principles of the imagination’, ‘given the resources of a strictly empiricist account of the mind’ (p. 138). But ‘empiricism’ still seems to me a red herring. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Perhaps it is to be found in the ‘principles of the imagination’ themselves. In yet another place Strawson appears to get even closer to what could have troubled Hume. He says ‘Hume's problem concerns’ the very phenomenon of human minds’ conforming to what Strawson calls ‘I-principles’—‘i.e. the existence of the I-Principles; or rather, it concerns the use of it he makes in his philosophy’ (p. 132). Strawson does not pursue this thought further. He does not explain what it is about the operation of ‘principles of the imagination’, or about the use Hume makes of them in his philosophy, that he thinks leads Hume to despair of ever explaining the origin of the idea of a single, continuous mind in that way. The use Hume makes of ‘principles of the imagination’ to explain the comings and goings of perceptions in the mind shows that the appeal to such principles makes essential use of the ‘richer’ idea of a single, unified mind: something more than simply a collection of perceptions. That ‘richer’ idea is essential to the correct formulation of the ‘principles of the imagination’ Hume appeals to. In the explanation of the idea of causal connection, for instance, the relevant principle does not say, with absolute universality, that whenever there is a series of pairs of A-perceptions followed by B-perceptions there will come to be an idea of a causal connection between As and Bs. The principle says only that such successions of perceptions will take place whenever those perceptions all occur within one and the same mind. An idea of causal connection arises only in the same mind as the earlier A- and B-perceptions occurred in. And that idea of ‘same mind’ goes ‘beyond’ the idea of ‘a collection of perceptions’. Similarly, the ‘principles of the imagination’ responsible for our getting an idea of a single, continuous mind when attending to resemblances and causal connections among successive perceptions encountered in self-examination hold only of perceptions of those kinds that occur in one and the same mind. To understand and express the principles he relies on in explaining the appearance of that ‘richer’ idea of a unified mind Hume must possess and make use of that very idea. That in itself is not problematic. There is nothing problematic or unsatisfactory in making essential use of an idea to explain the appearance of a certain idea without at the same time explaining your possession of the very idea you are then making use of in the explanation. Hume found his explanation of the origin of the idea of causal connection acceptable without then also explaining the origin of the idea of ‘a mind’ involved in the ‘principles of the imagination’ he appealed to. But the goal of Hume's general ‘science of human nature’ is to explain through ‘principles of the imagination’ the presence in the mind of every idea that is ‘richer’ or goes ‘beyond’ what is received in the impressions and ideas of immediate perceptual experience. If the idea of a single, continuous mind were not an idea of that ‘richer’ kind, it would not be subject to that explanatory demand. But the demand arises because ‘all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and … the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences’ (emphasis added). So any idea of a mind ‘richer’ than an idea of a bundle of perceptions must be produced by ‘the imagination’ operating on the distinct perceptions we receive. If that were not so; if distinct perceptions inhered in something ‘simple and individual’ that we could encounter in perception, or if we could perceive real connections among distinct perceptions (rather than simply coming to think of and believe in them), ‘there wou'd [sic] be no difficulty in the case’. But neither of those options is available. It is only because the idea of a single continuous mind goes ‘beyond’ what we ever receive in the distinct perceptions of immediate experience that the problem arises. The appearance of that idea therefore must be explained, if at all, by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. And to understand and deploy such ‘principles’ one must already possess that idea of a single mind. If an account along these lines of the source of Hume's hopeless plight is what lies behind Strawson's expression of doubt about the use of ‘principles of the imagination’, I think we have here a very promising idea.